HAD1898-044 - secondary catalog
Balham, London S.W. (boy maker unnamed)
United Kingdom - Balham, Surrey (now London) - Europe - British Isles
Play / practical
Source term: bull-roarer
Its maker was a South London boy. At Balham - then still counted to Surrey - he cut a slat seven and three-eighths inches long, squared both ends, sawed jagged teeth down both sides, and strung it on a cord through a hole at one end. Alfred Haddon kept the toy, measured it, and engraved it as no. 9 in his plate of British bull-roarers, setting a suburban schoolboy's handiwork beside the sacred whirlers of Australia and New Guinea that fill the rest of his chapter.
I have one specimen made by a boy at Balham in Surrey (London, S.W.); it is 7 3/8 inches in length and 1 1/4 inches in breadth, 187 mm. by 30 mm. The ends are square, and it is serrated along each side.
A. C. Haddon, The Study of Man (1898), pp. 277-278
- Object
- Boy-made wooden bullroarer from Balham: a narrow slat 187 x 30 mm (7 3/8 x 1 1/4 in) with square ends, serrated along each side, whirled on a single cord through a terminal hole; figured by Haddon as Fig. 38 no. 9.
- Function
- A boy's toy: a wooden slat whirled on a long string for its noise.
- Map confidence
- high - Balham locality centre, south-west London; Haddon's 'Balham in Surrey (London, S.W.)'.
- Source location
- pp. 277-278; Fig. 38 no. 9
- Toy / secular survival