Vulgar Tongues Page 9

  The other part of Garfield’s Wandring Whore, consisting of dialogues between various fictitious members of the profession, provides a glimpse into the rough life and language of Restoration brothels. There are the everyday transactions:

  . . . common Jades (such as Mal. Savory, Honor Brooks and Nan. Jones,) are numerous enough, and will sit with their leggs spread over the sides of a chair with their petticoates and smocks in their mouths, whilst their Comrades run a tilt at their touch holes in that posture, paying twelve pence a time for holing.

  Then there are those who demand specialist services:

  . . . she’s hard put to please a young merchant in L----street, who will not be contented with doing the business, but will have half a dozen Girles stand stark naked round about a Table whilst he lyes snarling underneath as if he would bite off their whibb-bobs [breasts], and eat them for his pains; . . . another who has brought rods in his pockets for that purpose, will needs be whip’t to raise lechery and cause a standing P---- which has no understanding at all, and would quickly cool my courage.

  The legal profession of that time had their own words for the activities taking place in brothels. When a suspected madam named Isabel Barker was tried at the Old Bailey in 1683, she was ‘indicted, for that she did convert her dwelling house in More-Lane into a common Baudy house, suffering Lude Licentious people to commit carnal wickedness in a debauched way’, which rather raises the question as to whether it is also possible to commit such wickedness in a refined, undebauched manner. This lady was acquitted, but ten years later Alice Randall was found guilty of a similar charge, after the court heard of her enticing a gentleman visitor and bringing him ‘a brisk young Girl, who presently had the Impudence to pull up her Coats, and laying her hand upon her Belly said, Here’s that that will do you good, a Commodity for you, if you’ll pay for it you shall have enough of it’.

  As the latter account demonstrates, such testimonies preserved in trial transcripts of proceedings at the Old Bailey down through the centuries record something of the everyday speech of the population, with an immediacy often missing in the literature and journalism of those times. Consider also this verbatim list of insults drawn from the trial of Mary Bolton in 1722, accused of killing her husband: ‘[He] called the prisoner poor beggarly Bitch, nasty draggle tail’d toad, ugly Puss, and stinking Punk’.

  Fighting talk indeed.

  The Linnen-lifting Tribe

  THE IDEA OF A SEX-ORIENTED FORERUNNER of the telephone directory such as the Wandring Whore, for men-about-town seeking ladies of the town, proved popular. For instance, in 1691 a London printer based near Smithfield named R.W. published a two-page broadside pamphlet giving details of various local ladies, whose title says it all: A Catalogue of Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, She-friends, Kind Women, and Others of the Linnen-lifting Tribe, who are to be Seen Every Night in the Cloysters in Smithfield, from the Hours of Eight to Eleven, during the Time of the Fair.

  This, however, was but a flimsy thing, when compared to that landmark of 18th-century London publishing, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, which appeared annually from 1757 to 1795. Credited to one Jack Harris, ‘Pimp General of All England’ (a pseudonym for John Harrison of the Shakespear’s Head Tavern in Covent Garden), it has been suggested that it was in fact the work of the poet Samuel Derrick, although the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not credit him with authorship. Whatever the truth of the matter, Derrick certainly had the distinction of being dismissed by former acquaintance James Boswell in his London Journal, 1762–63, as a‘little blackguard pimping dog’.

  Crucially, Harris’s List did not just give the names of various London prostitutes, in the manner of the Wandring Whore, but also included a paragraph or two describing the appearance and likely specialities of the ladies in question. This involved the use of a wider variety of euphemisms and slang words, such as this entry from the 1789 edition concerning ‘Miss W-ll-ms, No. 2, York Street, Queen Ann Street’:

  She is now of the pleasing age of nineteen, and has not hunted the Cyprian forest [cyprian – a whore] quite six months. . . we would advise the hero to lose no time, but immediately plunge the carnal sword into its favourite scabbard, and you will soon be convinced she has not lost the art of pleasing.

  The same volume has this to say of ‘Miss M-k-y, at Mrs. W-lp-ls, No. 1, Poland Street’:

  Her hands which were before employed as guards to that enticing spot, are now busy in making a member fit to stand in the House of Commons.

  This humorous distortion of terms associated with politicians was then taken to extremes in the entry describing ‘Mrs. Bu-e, No. 16, Union Street, Middlesex Hospital’:

  This spirited nymph. . . has shewn her patriotism, and liberality of sentiment, in opening her port, and exercising a free trade with all who chooses to bring their commodities to her market; when she, without reserve, unlocks her grand reservoir of natural productions, and pours out all her stores in exchange. She understands loss and gain exceedingly well, and the more her imports are, and the nearer they answer her exports, the greater her satisfaction.

  This is a world in which the customer will go in search of ‘the sable coloured grot below with its coral lipt janitor’, seeking to place ‘the tree of life into the garden of Eden’, hoping afterwards that he has not ‘proved himself a bad horseman’. As for the skill of the woman in question, it is said of one that ‘she understands the up-and-down art of her posteriors as well as any lady of her profession’, while another is ‘always ready to obey standing orders’ and has a ‘charitable disposition. . . ready to relieve the naked and needy’. As for the ever-present threat of venereal disease, the 1793 edition employs nautical terms to remark of ‘Mrs. Will-ms, No. 17, Pit-street’ that this ‘fine tall lady. . . has been in dock to have her bottom cleaned and fresh coppered, where she has washed away all the impurities of prostitution, and risen almost immaculate, like Venus, from the waves’.

  Giving the ferret a run

  OF COURSE, THE NAVY, not to mention the other branches of the armed services, have long had a wide selection of terms for prostitutes and their activities. During the 20th century, the Royal Navy on shore leave would traditionally be on the lookout for a bag shanty (brothel), in order to have a pump up (sexual intercourse) and give the ferret a run (ditto), thereby distributing some population paste (sperm). Foreign and home ports alike would be unofficially graded by sailors in terms of their facilities for drinking and whoring during a run-ashore. Portsmouth, the dockyard city on the south coast, has been a home for the navy since as far back as the 16th century, with a vast number of pubs and hostelries which even the heavy bombing during the Second World War failed to completely diminish. Yet its centuries-old reputation for catering to the demands of sailors clearly did not impress a British soldier interviewed during the Iraq war in 2003, in response to a comment by the Labour government’s Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon that the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr was ‘like the city of Southampton’:

  He has either never been to Umm Qasr or he’s never been to Southampton, There’s no beer, no prostitutes and people are shooting at us. It’s more like Portsmouth.

  Spike Milligan recalled that, sixty years earlier, stationed further along the coast in the Royal Artillery, he had served alongside another gunner named Octavian Neat, who – aside from a fondness for stunts such as appearing in the barrack room stark naked and asking, ‘Does anybody know a good tailor?’ – would periodically disappear AWOL in search of seaside whores, telling his friends, ‘I’m off sand-ratting.’ The equivalent search in the RAF at that time, for any kind of female company, was known as going on skirt patrol, and the lady in question was also known as one’s target for tonight.

  Sometimes army slang derived from specific locations, such as the Second World War British troops’ name berker, meaning brothel, derived from the red light district around Sharia el Berker Street in Cairo. A similar reputation clung to the entire Belgian city o
f Brussels in those days as far as British troops were concerned – they informally changed its name to Brothels.

  Pimp my ride – ride my pimp

  WHILE THE WORD PIMP itself dates back to the London of Shakespeare’s time, perhaps the abiding image it conjures up today is of an early 1970s Blaxploitation character from Harlem in a long coat, velvet fedora, three tons of jewellery and a Cadillac Eldorado only slightly shorter than the George Washington Bridge. It is a testimony to the staying power of this particular word that it has managed to remain in current use while other terms for the same occupation have fallen by the wayside. For example, while John Camden Hotten’s excellent mid-Victorian publication A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant & Vulgar Words (1859) lists the familiar on the batter as a term for someone walking the streets, few people these days when hearing the seemingly innocuous word pensioner would expect Hotten’s definition – ‘a man of the lowest morals who lives off the miserable earnings of prostitutes’.

  Centuries before this, such a person would have been called a pander (c. 1450), a bed-broker (1594), a fleskmonger (1616) or a mutton-broker (1694). As ever, the good Captain Grose provides several expressive 18th-century terms for those following that particular profession, such as brother of the gusset, she-napper and buttock-broker. Over time, though, pimp, like whore, has become almost the default word. Iceberg Slim’s 1967 book Pimp helped to crystallise the modern conception of how a pimp looks and behaves, and was followed by other books from the black perspective, such as A. S. Jackson’s autobiography Gentleman Pimp (1973). Written in the slang of the street, it used plenty of remembered dialogue in order to tell the story of the author’s early life running whores in the 1940s:

  I learned, during my time spent with the old pimps, that it was boag [unwise, bad news] for a cat to hang out where his rib [girl] did her gig [plied her trade], so I was about to split when my brother Willie walked up and said, ‘Stoney, man, I’m hot [people are looking for me], I gotta blow town, and I gotta blow quick, daddy. . .’

  This is a rough world, full of money, drugs and casual violence:

  Chuck had two girls kicking mud [mudkicker – streetwalker, prostitute] around the city of Detroit. He was teethed on the street of broken dreams the same as I was. Me and Chuck sat around rapping and smoking and kicking whores in the ass all over Detroit.

  Compare this to the sanitised view of up-market prostitution among the rich white areas of Manhattan in Bruce Manning’s soft-core novel Cafe Society Sinner (1960) – ‘A keyhole view of the call-girl business’, according to the cover blurb – in which a madam gives the following advice to her male friend:

  We aren’t monsters. We don’t enslave the girls. They’re in it because they like the money. They come from all over the country, from all sorts of jobs. Most of them are working girls during the day, stenographers, sales girls, bit part actresses on TV. Clean, lovely girls, most of them.

  Perhaps, but others writers tell a different story. In Stanley Jackson’s non-fiction book An Indiscreet Guide to Soho (1946), when speaking of what he terms ‘pimps, those heralds of the horizontal’, he reports the following conversation with a local Italian wine waiter called Gabby:

  I got a room in Frith Street. Fifteen bob a week. It’s in a flat run by a pal of mine, He’s a waiter, like me, but lucky. Got a girl who goes out ‘on the bash’ for him. . . . The poor cow thinks he’s going to marry er when they’ve got enough dough!

  Then, of course, there are the seen-it-all, done-it-all types like the short-order cook behind the counter of an American local diner in John Hersey’s 1966 novel Too Far to Walk, responding to a local student who has asked for advice about where to find a prostitute:

  They got two kinds. . . You want a fi-buck or twenny-buck poontang? You fancy Shel bastids lookin for big-time hunnerd-buck stuff, you can’t get it roun here. They only got homemade hair pie roun here. You know which one you want, Shel, five or twenny?

  Who said romance was dead?

  THREE

  THIS BAG OF BONES

  A separate television channel for cockneys?

  IF YOU TELL PEOPLE that you are writing a history of English slang, my experience suggests that many of them will conclude that you are primarily exploring the cockney variety: north and south, mouth, Gregory Peck, neck, and so on. Would you Adam and Eve it?

  Much quoted, and much misunderstood, cockney rhyming slang and its associated accent has had an international influence far greater than its traditional boundaries within the scope of the Bow Bells. Winston Churchill said in a 1944 speech to Parliament, ‘I am still old-fashioned enough to consider Cockney London the heart of the Empire,’ and there have been times over the years when members of both the Commons and the Lords have attempted to introduce cockney slang into debates, with varying degrees of success. In 1976, the Labour MP for Newham North West, Arthur Lewis, addressing a Scottish Nationalist colleague, commented, ‘Perhaps I may put it in the Cockney vernacular and tell the honourable lady that if she will take a ball of chalk [walk] down the frog and toad [road] to have a butcher’s hook [look], everyone will be happier. If she wants that translated I shall do so later.’ Similarly, in a 1989 parliamentary debate which also straddled the English/Scottish border, Harry Greenaway (Conservative, Ealing North) responded to the proposal for a Gaelic TV channel by asking:

  Am I right in estimating mathematically, from what my honourable friend has said, that there are about 150,000 Gaelic speakers? That compares with several million Cockney speakers. What will he do to arrange for a separate television channel for Cockneys?

  Should such a thing have ever materialised, there would presumably have to be a blanket ban on screenings of Mary Poppins (1964), featuring Dick Van Dyke’s much-mocked accent as chirpy London geezer Bert. ‘If someone from the UK sees me, they’re on me like a pack of wolves,’ Van Dyke told American chat-show host Conan O’Brien in 2012. ‘I mean, it was the worst Cockney accent ever done. The guy who taught me was an Irishman’.

  It is said that these days you are more likely to encounter genuine cockneys in Essex than in the East End of London, yet there is something about this particular slang that has survived through the changing years, despite many of its original reference points having faded into relative obscurity. Any talk of going for a Ruby Murray (curry) would still be intelligible to many these days, yet the number who remember her as a 1950s easy listening singer from Belfast would certainly be fewer.

  In the death, i came to a kayf

  NUMEROUS COCKNEY RHYMING SLANG DICTIONARIES have been published over the years. Ronnie Barker, after starring as hardened criminal Norman Stanley Fletcher in the television comedy series Porridge (1974–7), wrote a slim volume entitled Fletcher’s Book of Rhyming Slang (1979), in which he offered the following tongue-in-cheek etymology:

  ‘Hello, me old cock!’ Cock: cocksparrow = barrow: barrow of soil = boil: boil and bake = cake: cake and jam = ham: ham and pickle = tickle: tickle and touch = Dutch: Dutch plate = mate. Simple, isn’t it?

  Barker was playing a fictional prisoner, yet a cockney who was genuinely behind bars in Parkhurst Prison for murder also eventually weighed in with Reg Kray’s Book of Slang (1984), which he compiled while banged up (incarcerated) doing bird lime (time). Some other works employing a fair slice of the cockney vernacular came complete with a handy glossary of phrases for the reader, such as Robin Cook’s The Crust on Its Uppers (1962). Dougal Butler’s memoirs of his time with the drummer from the Who (Moon the Loon, 1981), or that gem among Soho nightlife books, Frank Norman’s Stand on Me (1959), which consists almost entirely of passages such as In the death [eventually] I came to a kayf [café]. Feeling in my bin [pocket] I found that I had a tanner [sixpence].’ The first of these expressions clearly had an influence on young Londoner David Jones, who later, as David Bowie, opened his 1974 LP Diamond Dogs with a spoken-word section beginning. ‘And in the death. . .’

  These books would undoubtedly have been of use to anyone applying for political
refuge in the UK, had the government taken heed of a suggestion from Lord Campbell of Croy during a House of Lords debate about language testing for asylum seekers in 2002:

  My Lords, as foreigners often speak more correctly in English than we British do, might a relevant test be one of rhyming slang? For example, people could be asked how much of their journey had been made on their ‘plates of meat’.

  Indeed, as the Daily Express informed readers of its children’s page back in 1932:

  A common expression for the feet is ‘plates o’meat’ and for the teeth, ‘Hampstead Heath’. It is easy to see how obscure the slang becomes when only half the expression is retained and these become simply ‘plates’ for feet and ‘Hampsteads’ for teeth.

  Individual parts of the body have always been well represented in cockney rhyming slang, some having multiple names. The head, for example, can be a gingerbread, an uncle ned, an alive or dead, a lump of lead, or a crust or loaf of bread. The last expression is probably the most common, usually shortened to loaf, as in ‘use your loaf ’. Back in the year 1900, the same newspaper had explained to its readers how this language could effectively conceal its meaning from outsiders:

  The professors of rhyming slang, which is now tolerably well known, have added a new terror to its study. Nowadays the adept subtly deletes the last and rhyming word of the phrase, to the confusion and despair of the novice. Below we print an abridged dictionary, the key phrase containing the rhyming word being given in brackets.