Vulgar Tongues Page 15

  People have been engaging in what is sometimes known as fist cuisine ever since human beings first learned to walk, yet the self-appointed guardians of public morals in each generation have tended to claim that only in their era has a new low been reached. For instance, in 1970s Britain, the tabloids were greatly preoccupied with the activities of boot boys, who were said to be much given to causing aggro – a shortening of the word aggravation. This slang term was sometimes (mis)spelt out on the terraces in a football chant, as follows:

  A – G,

  A – G – R,

  A – G – R – O,

  AGGRO!

  The teenage heroine of Richard Allen’s novel Knuckle Girls (1977) notes disdainfully that some of the boys she knows were only ‘all right when it came to having a bit of aggro, or going into Woolworths on a nicking spree’. Another popular seventies term for such people was bovver boys, yet the term itself belonged to an older generation. Frank Norman, working as a doorman at a Soho strip-joint, wrote in 1959 of someone threatening the owner with the words, ‘If you ain’t paid up by the end of the week you are in dead bovva!’

  Similarly, anyone under the impression that life was quieter at that time in the provinces could find in the 1960 Anthony Burgess novel The Right to an Answer a comment from a pub landlord about one of his customers who hit someone ‘quick as a flash, right in the goolies’, thereby also employing in passing a pre-war slang word for the testicles, which has become less common since the 1970s. There are, of course, many other ways of expressing this, not least the more esoteric terms masterfully deployed by Rambling Syd Rumpo (Kenneth Williams) in his 1967 sea shanty ‘What Shall We Do with the Drunken Nurker?’, as various nautical punishments are devised for the aforesaid matelot. These mostly involved whacking the said gentleman variously in the nadgers, over the grummit or in the moulies – the results of which would apparently leave his bogles in a visibly altered condition. Of course, no further explanation was offered to the listener as to the exact meaning of such terms, but most people probably formed their own conclusions. . .

  Newspapers have always enjoyed giving descriptions of violence, and in his 1909 dictionary Passing English of the Victorian Era, James Redding Ware quoted a choice late 19th-century English report of an attack upon a member of the police illustrating the slang London term for stomach, bread basket:

  Miss Selina Slops was invited before his Worship, on the charge of smearing the face of B.O. 44 with a flatiron, while hot, and also with jumping upon his bread-basket, while in the execution of his duty.

  The expression was at least a century old, even then. Francis Grose listed it in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue as a term much used by boxers, giving as an example ‘I took him a punch in his bread basket; i.e. I gave him a blow in the stomach’. He also recorded bruiser as a term for a boxer, which later became a more general slang word for a violent ruffian. In a fist-fight, Grose noted, the attacker might plump someone’s peepers (‘give him a blow in the eyes’). Alternatively, the assailant could also be said to have given someone ‘a peg [punch] in the daylight [eye]’, a ‘click [blow] in the muns [face]’ – which was also known as a ‘wipe on the chops’. However, despite the many slang terms for individual acts of violence listed by Grose, some phrases encountered in 18th-century Covent Garden were not exactly what they seemed. If you overheard in a pub conversation that someone had ‘suffered by a blow over the snout with a French faggot stick’, the first assumption might be that they had been beaten in the face with a stout club. In fact, this was a way of observing that the man was suffering from the French disease or French gout (the pox, said to have been originally imported from our friends across the Channel), which had eaten away his nose.

  As for the language used by street robbers at the time, when most items of clothing had a useful resale value, Grose gives the following example:

  The cull has rum rigging, let’s ding him and mill him, and pike; the fellow has good clothes, let’s knock him down, rob him, and scour off, i.e. run away.

  To mill someone in this instance meant to rob them, but usually it was a long-established slang word for kill. In the Canting Crew dictionary of 1699, a miller is simply a killer.

  Down through the centuries, this air of laconic understatement when describing casual violence in slang terms has persisted. In commenting on someone’s beaten-up appearance (‘they lifted his face, huh?’ – Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (1934), or ‘who knitted your face and dropped a stitch?’ – Laurence Payne, Birds in the Belfry (1966)) there have long been numerous ways of describing what cockneys would term a bunch of fives, right up the bracket. It is tempting to imagine George IV pausing over breakfast in 1825 when encountering some poetically inclined slang in The Times. It appeared in a report of the trial of three somewhat battered military men, accused of assaulting police officers while resisting arrest at Vauxhall Pleasure Garden in London. One told the magistrate that:

  . . . the party, had they been inclined to contend with the police, were too far gone in wine to be able to make any resistance as had been stated; and as a proof that they (the defendants) had got the worst of it, one of them took a handkerchief from his face and exhibited his eyes, both of which, in the slang phrase, were in mourning.

  An ill Knot or Gang

  THERE ARE AMATEUR TROUBLE-MAKERS, and then there are professional criminals. For the former category, the word yob has long been deployed – a logical, if charmless, expression with an obvious origin, as the Daily Express informed readers of its children’s page in 1932:

  A ‘yob’ is generally understood to be a slang term for an ill-mannered loafer. Actually, it is no more than the back-to-front of ‘boy’.

  Another favourite all-purpose word, dating back to late 19th-century London, is hooligan, said to be derived from the thuggish activities of a particular family gang from South London called O’Hoolihan or O’Hooligan. These were both reasonably common Irish surnames – indeed, in an unrelated case in Manchester, an Elisabeth Hooligan was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in 1880 for the theft of a jacket – but by the following decade, the word had passed into newspaper reports as a shorthand for a certain type of violent anti-social behaviour.

  If there is one type of slang above all others that 18th-century England made a thorough job of exporting, it was criminal slang, by the very efficient process of transporting thousands of convicts to the American colonies, and then – after the revolution of 1776 put a spanner in the works – to Australia. This makes perfect sense. If you are a London house-breaker of Dr Johnson’s era, and in the habit of referring to the basic act of burglary as cracking a crib, you are hardly likely to stop calling it that and invent a new term just because you have been unwillingly sent on a one-way pleasure cruise to a new land across the sea. Ever since the 17th century, people like you and your associates, when gathered together for criminal purposes, would be known as a crew – defined as ‘an ill Knot or Gang’, according to A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew (1699), whose very title illustrates that use. Hence when the American rappers of today speak of hanging out with their crew, back at their crib, they are using slang phrases from London – the first of which dates back to the mid-19th century, the other two examples at least three hundred years – which mostly crossed the ocean as part of the vocabulary of criminals lucky enough to have escaped the noose at Tyburn or Newgate.

  Ever since the dawn of newspapers in the late 17th century, and the concurrent appearance of eagerly devoured pamphlets and broadsides relating the exploits and final confessions of notorious recently executed prisoners, the lives and language of criminals have been publicised and discussed among the general population. Some 200,000 people are said to have turned out for the hanging of highwayman and serial jail-escaper Jack Sheppard at Tyburn in 1724. A huge figure, given that the population of London stood only at around three times that number. The story of Sheppard’s life and death prompted an outpouring of public
ations, and directly inspired the character of Macheath in John Gay’s enormously successful hit of the London stage, The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Two centuries later, this figure emerged under the same name, but nicknamed Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife), in Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) by Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann and Bertolt Brecht.

  Tip us your daddle

  IN LIFE, AND POSTHUMOUSLY, Jack Sheppard was a classic example of the criminal as popular hero – at the time, unquestionably the most famous highwayman of the 18th century. Yet a strange thing happened over a hundred years after his death, when William Harrison Ainsworth published the novel Rook-wood (1834), which provided a lurid reimagining of the life of a lesser highwayman and sometime sheep-stealer of Epping Forest, Dick Turpin, hanged at York for horse theft in 1739. The book sold in prodigious quantities, and came complete with plenty of ‘flash’ language. Criminal speech patterns were a prime ingredient, and the Spectator remarked, when reviewing the fourth edition in 1836, that ‘the present edition contains an Introduction, in which the author discourses learnedly on “flash songs” and slang phraseology’.

  As a character, the romanticised Turpin of Ainsworth’s book swiftly buried the grubbier reality of the historical original. Spurred on in the public mind by his fictitious horse Black Bess and his non-existent overnight ride to York, Turpin’s transformation foreshadowed a similar case a century later, when the hit film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) took the story of two small-time 1930s thrill-killers and turned them into plastic folk heroes, brutally cut down in their photogenic prime. In popular culture, the myth generally trumps the facts: Clyde Barrow posthumously acquired movie-star good looks and morphed into Warren Beatty, while the pox-marked visage of the real Dick Turpin has been similarly airbrushed, and his name is now the first one people reach for when they think of highwaymen.

  Ainsworth himself admitted soon after publication that ‘Turpin, so far as he goes, is a pure invention of my own’. He was responding in particular to complaints published in the Weekly Dispatch that his book was ‘of a mischievous tendency, as it invests a ruffianly murderer and robber with a chivalrous character, utterly undeserved, and in fact, entirely false’. The newspaper had also complained that it was degrading for anyone enlarging on the apocryphal exploits of a brutal wretch like this and to write flash songs too, full of cant phrases and vulgar slang, which thieves have invented for the purpose of concocting their schemes of depredation without being understood by any casual listener’.

  Certainly, the reader was led to believe that the novel offered an insight into the way such highway robbers might talk among themselves. ‘You pledge your word that all shall be on the square,’ asks Turpin at one point. ‘You will not mention to one of that canting crew who I have told you?’ A little later, he says, ‘Tip us your daddle, Sir Luke, and I am satisfied,’ meaning, in this instance, give me your hand to seal the bargain. The latter expression had been listed, among many others advertised as ‘Words not in Johnson – no fudge!’, in a thoroughly entertaining volume by John Bee issued nine years before Ainsworth’s novel, entitled Sportsman’s Slang; A New Dictionary of Terms Used in the Affairs of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, and the Cock-Pit; With Those of Bon-Ton, and the Varieties of Life, etc. (1825). Bee lists a nice variant of this expression which includes a suitably cynical euphemism for the hands, tip us your thieving irons, in an entry dealing with the word tip, some usages of which survive to this day. To tip was to give, and also to pay, and he also lists ‘tip the wink, to hint’. Turning to criminal matters, he offers the following: ‘“Come, come, tip the bustle,” said by a highwayman when he would rob the traveller’. Bustle was a slang term for money.

  Clouting heaps and busting into a can

  JUST AS THE EXPLOITS OF HIGHWAYMEN and then of 19th-century outlaws such as Butch Cassidy in the US or Ned Kelly in Australia were documented and deplored, yet simultaneously romanticised, so it was with the internationally famous mobsters, bank robbers and gunmen who sprang up in Prohibition-era America. Gang life in Al Capone’s Chicago was already being fictionalised in books and motion pictures just as his iron grip on the city was beginning to disintegrate, in films such as Scarface (1932), and books like Little Caesar (1929), which was itself adapted for the screen in 1931. W. R. Burnett, who wrote the latter novel while living in Chicago, deliberately chose to use a great deal of contemporary criminal slang in his book, prompting his later wry comment, ‘It has been translated into twelve languages, including English, as a witty friend of mine says.’

  The mob world of those days mined a very rich seam of slang – some of it surviving unchanged from earlier centuries, with other words and sayings freshly minted – mostly shot through with bone-dry gallows humour and the deadpan shrug of those who, to borrow a title from a William P. McGivern crime novel, might reasonably offer Odds Against Tomorrow (1957).

  While the exploits of mafia gunmen understandably merited a sizeable proportion of the headlines, a great deal of crime was of a lower level, carried out by shoplifters (boosters), pickpockets (lifters, dippers), muggers (Jack-rollers), burglars (porch-climbers, till-tappers), car thieves (heap-clouters) or fake-cheque-passers (paper-hangers, queer-shovers). Those a little higher up the scale who handled major robberies from institutions were said to be in the wholesale banking business, and there were a variety of names for any valuable specialist who could open safes. The latter was known as a peter man, or box worker, adept at busting into a can.

  On a general level, the kind of sharp operator who lived on their wits by a variety of illegal, but non-violent, means was known as a grifter – a term most famous as the title of Jim Thompson’s masterful novel of the scuffling life, The Grifters (1963). As for the various kinds of con games engaged in by such people when attempting to separate the suckers from their money, enough slang terms developed surrounding them to fill a book – a very fine one, as it turns out. Published in 1940, David W. Maurer’s The Big Con – The Story of the Confidence Man and the Confidence Trick, laid bare the mysteries of the three classic large-scale con games, the wire, the pay-off and the rag, together with numerous smaller scams (short cons) like the big mitt (a crooked poker game), the wipe (a con with money supposedly concealed in a handkerchief) or the slick box (a fixed dice game). It came complete with a valuable glossary of terms – some of which, unsurprisingly, were old enough to have been familiar to Captain Francis Grose – and gave details of some of the contemporary masters of the trade, such as Yellow Kid Weil and Slobbering Bob.

  This tradition of people engaged in life on the dubious side was perhaps best summed up in its English context by Robin Cook (later known as Derek Raymond) in his slang-rich landmark debut novel The Crust on Its Uppers (1962), whose narrator works very hard indeed at not having a job:

  I wasn’t a layabout, I was a morrie [defined in Cook’s glossary as ‘reverse of slag’, slags in this case being ‘young, third class grafters, male or female, unwashed, useless’], and many was the time over our long association when I’d had a touch [acquired some money] and been handy to have around when it came to paying the duke [‘duke of Kent, rent’] with my beehives [‘beehive – five pounds’] down to a bit of archbishop [‘Archbishop Laud, fraud’].

  Considering that Archbishop Laud was around in the time of Charles I, it shows that rhyming slang can sometimes have a long memory (although to be fair, the fact that as Archbishop of Canterbury Laud was executed for treason in 1645 might have helped him remain in the public mind).

  Urban gorillas

  THIEVES AND GRIFTERS WERE ONE THING, whereas the guntoting members of organised crime organisations were usually quite another. The much-mythologised figure of the gangster came to wide public attention during the Prohibition era in America, when the Volstead Act (1920–33) outlawing ‘intoxicating beverages’ inadvertently provided lucrative, albeit dangerous, business opportunities for a wide variety of underworld chancers. The term itself was of US origin, first recorded in the 1880s, but its usa
ge then spread over to Britain, with a helping hand from the media. For instance, readers of the Manchester Guardian were treated to the following slice of life and death in the Big Apple:

  New York gunmen on the East Side yesterday killed their fifth man within four days. The name of the victim was Antonio Scamarino. The assassin used a shot gun, firing from the shadow of a doorway, and escaped. The four other recent murders include that of David Winzer, who was shot on Tuesday night by three gangsters on the Williamsburg Bridge over the East River.

  While this story may appear to have all the hallmarks of the late-1920s heyday of mob violence, it actually dates from May 1913. After the First World War was over, the word appeared in The Times, in a favourable review of the motion picture Skin Deep (1923), whose star Milton Sills was described as ‘a repulsively ugly New York criminal “gangster”.

  In the language of such men, and the people who wrote about them, the gangster and his associates became known as wise guys, yeggs, hoodlums or hoods. At the bottom of the mafia food chain, a common-or-garden thug was simply a gorilla, of the kind perhaps best summed up in this description from Carter Brown’s novel The Wayward Wahine (1960):

  He was shorter than I, around five-eight, but with wide shoulders out of proportion to his height. Except for a faint fuzz on the crown of his head, he was bald. His complexion was dark, swarthy – the kind of guy the razor ads dream about – and one eye turned slightly inward. If you showed him to little children, you’d do it gradually, a piece at a time.

  Moving up a level in the skills department, a specialist gunman was called a torpedo, a trigger-man, rod-merchant or hatchet-man. He might also be known as a plumber, on call when someone had talked too freely, as W. R. Burnett explained in a later novel, Little Men, Big World (1951):