Sorry to keep pestering you with questions, CF - I'm like a dog with a bone on this one: Usually classes of kids had a songbook of some type that they used (I went to primary school in the 50s too, but in central California so my own memories aren't going to be any help). Was there a class songbook, and if so do you have any idea at all what it might have been called?

I taught school in London briefly in the 70s and we used an excellent little series of books published by the BBC called "Singing Together" (there's a Mudcat thread about it) that contained wonderful songs from all over the world - which ties in with your association of the Polish origins. I learned as many things from those books as the kids did! I have two or three of them somewhere, languishing in the same purdah as Go Thy Ways. Is there ANY chance you might have used these books? If so there might be some way of tracing their contents... ? (Yeh, I know, there are only 736,859 volumes of them...)

Anyway, thanks for putting up such an interesting post. If the song IS Polish, the first thing I will be interested to know is whether there is any similar symbology underlying those words? It reminds me SO much of that Cornish song (at least what I can recall of it). Which I cannot find, arrrggghhhh.