jock123:
presumably it was one Michael Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper knew; Alan Ahlberg used a similar version in his book, called Each Peach, Pear, Plum, which combines characters from several rhymes.
Yes, the Ahlbergs' book (illustrated by Alan's wife and working partner Janet, of course) was published in 1978, so I guess that may have put it particularly to the front of the Tintin translators' minds when they were translating the Blue Lotus in the early 1980s. Or it may simply have been very familiar from their childhoods.
I wonder what the rhyme is in Hergé's original French version. (I don't have that book in French.)
If you're interested in old skipping rope rhymes and other street game rhymes, check out this 1950s short documentary film,
The Singing Streets, filmed in my adopted home city of Edinburgh. The last time I watched it, at a public screening in a community centre here in Edinburgh, the old ladies sitting behind me revealed that two of the young girls in the film were them!
I believe this was an era when there was some interest in studying and preserving the folklore of children's rhymes and other oral traditions, with
Iona and Peter Opie perhaps being the most well-known collectors here in Britain.