I was interested to read the Opie quote, it ties in with my memories. I left junior school in 1954 and we didn't play it. My sister learnt it sometime between '56 & '61, it was played with linked elastic bands (the last one must have been tied but they weren't cut). Of course you had to find and collect the bands first but collecting was another craze (in our day it was silver paper or bits of coloured fluff picked from peoples cardigans and pressed into a mat).We lived in Middlesex (W. London) and it was called American Skipping then. By the time my daughters went to school in Cheshire in the 1980s it was called Elastics and done with a length of elastic knicker (which you had to buy). Cloth covered elastic takes this to a further stage of affluence, is this American?
Has the teacher who started all this seen the English Folk Dance & Song Society book John Kanakaka about using childrens traditional rhymes as a teaching resource? In fact has anyone and what do they think of it?