London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  Yet it is still a remarkable record of continuity; native London speech has survived all the incursions of intellectual fashion, educational practice or social disapproval and has managed to retain its vitality after many centuries of growth. Its success reflects, and indeed may even be said to embody, the success of the city itself. Cockney grew, like London, by assimilation; it borrowed other forms of speech, and made them its own. It has taken words from Dutch and Spanish, Arabic and Italian, French and German; it has borrowed the cant of thieves and the argot of prison. Since the city itself has on many occasions been described as a prison, it is fitting that the language of the Cockney should in part be the language of the convict, from “nark” to “copper.” Given the general and persistent violence of London life, also, it is not altogether surprising that the London dialect has taken many words and phrases from the boxing ring including “kisser,” “conk,” “scrap” and “hammer.” Other terms have come from the army and navy, where Cockneys served, and in recent decades Americanisms have also been assimilated. Thus the language thrives.

  Cockney has other characteristics which also serve to define the life of the city. It benefits from an extraordinary theatricality; it is filled with a magniloquence and intensity not unconnected to braggadocio. In Machyn’s diaries of the sixteenth century we encounter the same bravura which, with some modifications, can still be heard on the streets of London: “the goodlyest scollers as ever you saw … the greth pykkepus as ever was … ther was syche a cry and showtt as has not byne.” This is also related to the Cockney tendency to mix up, or misunderstand, apparently impressive words in an effort to convince the hearer. A bathroom wall may be “covered in condescension” or an elderly person may suffer from “Alka-seltzer disease.” Other observers have noted such phrases as “Yer a septic … collector of internal residue … jumbo sale … give ’im a momentum when he retires.” The list is endless.

  There is a certain cheerfulness and perkiness, too, which is as much a characteristic of the city as of the language. Londoners are fond of proverbs and of catchphrases, and of very harsh oaths which are a combination of comedy, aggression and cynicism. Their tongue has therefore been described as generally “crude and materialistic” but with precisely those characteristics it resembles and reflects the city in which it was fashioned.

  Slang and catchphrases are as old as the language itself. The streets of London have always been filled with slogans and catcalls. We can date some as far back as the fifteenth century. “Who put a turd in the boy’s mouth?,” “As bare as a bird’s arse” and “God save you from the rain” are typical examples of street language. There were other expressions which had a specific urban origin. A famous performing horse, Morocco, for example, when asked by its owner to pick out the biggest fool in the audience, chose the comedian and jester Richard Tarleton, whose response, “God a mercy, horse,” ran through London at the end of the sixteenth century. It could be used as a token of any kind of annoyance, but it had a comic touch because of its associations. “Oh good, Sir Robert, knock!” became in the seventeenth century a general cry of reproach among Londoners at some naughty deed; its derivation was the knock of a hammer to stop flagellation in Bridewell.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, too, street slang appears and disappears for no particular reason. The word “quoz” was a great favourite, for example, and was capable of almost any meaning. According to Charles Mackay, in his Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, it was a mark of incredulity, or hilarity, or condescension. “When a mischievous urchin wished to annoy a passenger, and create mirth for his chums, he looked him in the face and cried out ‘Quoz!’ … Every alehouse resounded with Quoz; every street corner was noisy with it, and every wall for miles around was chalked with it.” It was followed by another favourite phrase of street life, “What a shocking bad hat!,” which was directed at almost anyone of distinctive appearance. This in turn was followed by the single word “Walker!,” which was designed to cause maximum offence and “was uttered with a peculiar drawl upon the first syllable, and a sharp turn upon the last.” It was used by young women to deter an admirer, by young boys mocking a drunk, or to anyone impeding the way. It lasted three or four months only, and was replaced by another piece of London slang which lasted an equally short period, “There he goes with his eye out.” This was rivalled in its unfathomability by another popular phrase, “Has your mother sold her mangle?,” which became a customary term of abuse among the Cockney population. Brevity and incomprehensibility are the two marks of popular favour. In the 1830s another phrase, “flare up,” became literally the talk of the town. “It answered all questions and settled all disputes,” Charles Mackay wrote, “… and suddenly became the most comprehensive phrase in the English language.” A man who had spoken out of turn, or who had drunk too much, or had been involved in a quarrel, had consequently “flared up.” Its popularity lasted, again, for a short time, to be followed by “Does your mother know you’re out?,” addressed to anyone who looked a little too pompous or self-satisfied-as in the retort by the cab driver to the peer who resisted the attempt to be charged double.

  There are other examples of this continual invention of new words or phrases which seem mysteriously to resound in the streets of London immediately after they have been coined by-who knows whom? It is almost as if they were invented by the city itself, and sent echoing down the alleys and thoroughfares in the litany of London generations: “I can come it slap … Would you be surprised to hear? … Go it! … Immensikoff! … It’s naughty but it’s nice … Whatcher me old brown son … Chase me … Whoa, Emma! … Have a banana … Twiggey-voo! … Archibald, certainly not … There’s a lot of it about it … He’s a splendid performer, I don’t think … Can I do you now, sir … It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going … See you later alligator … Shut that door.” The most recent examples come respectively from music hall, radio and television-television, together with cinema and popular music, now being the most fruitful source of street slang.

  The tradition continues, principally because it is an aspect of Cockney humour once known as “chaff.” We hear in the eighteenth century of Londoners being sent into “convulsions” of laughter by prints of a couple yawning after sexual intercourse. The humour could also be of a more personal kind. Steele, in the Spectator of 11 August 1712, tells the story of an eighteenth-century gentleman who was approached by a beggar and politely asked for sixpence so that he might visit a tavern. “He urged, with a melancholy Face, that all his Family had died of Thirst. All the Mob have Humour, and two or three began to take the Jest.” The “Humour” of “the Mob” here consists in the beggar implicitly mocking the gentleman, a form of burlesque which is the most common form of Cockney humour. Chimney-sweeps were dressed up as clergymen; shoe-blacks, “with their footstools on their heads,” were driven around the “ring” of Hyde Park at the precise moment when the fashionable were about to parade. They were levelling distinctions, and parodying wealth or rank. William Hazlitt divined in The Plain Speaker of 1826 that “Your true Cockney is your only true leveller.” He concluded that “Everything is vulgarised in his mind. Nothing dwells long enough on it to produce an interest; nothing is contemplated sufficiently at a distance to excite curiosity or wonder … He has no respect for himself, and still less (if possible) for you. He cares little about his own advantage, if he can only make a jest out of yours. Every feeling comes to him through a medium of levity and impertinence.” This may represent too jaundiced an attitude, however, since the levelling humour is also related to the spirit of “fair play” which was said to be prevalent among the London crowd; one of the great Cockney expressions was “Fair play’s a jewel.” In this spirit the street urchins of the nineteenth century might innocently ask a gentleman, “Is the missus quite well?” Swift remembered a child declaring, “Go and teach your grandmother to suck eggs.”

  When street scavengers were confronted by the new “street-sweeping machines,” �
�a brisk interchange of street wit took place, the populace often enough encouraging both sides.” In similar fashion street fights, however spontaneous, took place according to rules well known to the London crowd. The same equalising spirit of London burlesque may also lie behind the permanent affection for cross-dressing among Cockneys. Theatrical transvestism has been prominent in London entertainments for centuries-from Mrs. Noah of the medieval pageants to the latest act in a London “drag” club. When in 1782 the actor Bannister played the character of Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera-itself a great emblem of London-one member of the audience “was thrown into hysterics which continued without intermission until Friday morning when she expired.”

  CHAPTER 15. Theatrical City

  Evidence for a Roman theatre, south-west of St. Paul’s, is now very clear; it was located little more than 150 feet east of the Mermaid Theatre, which is situated by Puddle Dock. Further evidence can be found for a theatre at Whitechapel in 1567; it was just beyond Aldgate, with a stage some five feet high and a series of galleries.

  This was in turn followed by the erection of the Theatre in the fields of Shoreditch. It was constructed of wood and thatch, well enough designed to merit the description of this “gorgeous playing-place erected in the Fields.” Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Hamlet were performed here. Certainly it must have proved popular because, a year later, another theatre was built two hundred yards away; it was known as “The Curtain” or, latterly, “The Green Curtain” in deference to the colourful sign painted on its exterior. Theatres, like taverns and shops, were well illustrated to catch the attention of the citizens.

  These two early theatres set the standard for those more famous playhouses which play so large a part in Elizabethan cultural history. These playhouses were always outside the walls of the city (unlike the “private” theatre of Blackfriars), and the two theatres in the northern fields were constructed upon land once belonging to Holywell Priory; as the name suggests, there was a “holy well” in the immediate vicinity. It may be that they were deliberately sited close to the location where sacred plays had once been staged. This might also account for the presence of a theatre in the old priory of the Blackfriars. Londoners have always been aware of the topography of their city and its environs, so that on many occasions and in many contexts the same activity can be observed taking place in the same location. The situation of the twelfth-century “theatrum” is not known, but it is at least reasonable to suggest that it lay where the Rose, the Swan and the Globe eventually emerged in the 1580s and 1590s.

  There has been speculation about the origins of early theatre architecture, and some have supposed that it was established upon the pattern of the yards of galleried inns where itinerant groups of minstrels or actors would perform. They were known as “inn-playhouses”; there were two in Gracechurch Street, the Bell and the Cross Keys, while another stood on Ludgate Hill. The latter was known as the Belle Sauvage or the Bell Savage and, like the others, soon acquired a distinctly unsavoury reputation. In 1580 an edict from the Privy Council commanded the officers of London “to thrust out the Players from the City” and to “pull down the playing and dicing houses within the Liberties” where the presence of actors encouraged “immorality, gambling, intemperance … Apprentices and Factions.” The theatre, then, may provoke that unrest which seems always to have been present beneath the surface of the city’s life. It also provided occasion for the spread of those terrors of London, fire and disease.

  Other theatrical historians have concluded that the true model of the Elizabethan theatre was not the inn-yard but the bear-baiting ring or the cockpit. Certainly these activities were not incompatible with serious drama. Some theatres became bear-rings or boxing rings, while some cockpits and bull-rings became theatres. There was no necessary distinction between these activities, and historians have suggested that acrobats, fencers and rope-dancers could also perform at the Globe or the Swan. Edward Alleyn, the great actor-manager of the early seventeenth century, was also Master of the King’s Bears. The public arena was truly heterogeneous.

  The popularity of Elizabethan drama characterises Londoners who attended it, both in their affection for colourful ritual and in their admiration of magniloquence. The taste of the crowd for intermittent violence was amply satisfied by the plays themselves, while the Londoners’ natural pride in the history of their city was recognised in those dramatic historical pageants which were part of the diet of the playhouses. When Shakespeare places Falstaff and his company in East Cheap, he is invoking the life of the city which existed two centuries before. Spectacle and violence, civic pride and national honour, all found their natural home in the theatres of London.

  There were, of course, familiar complaints. When Burbage attempted to reopen the theatre of Blackfriars in 1596, the “noblemen and gentlemen” who lodged in the old monastery buildings complained about the “vagrant and lewd persons” who would congregate there; they also declared that “the noise of the drums and trumpets” would hinder church services in the vicinity. When the Blackfriars was eventually reopened, visitors attending plays by Shakespeare or by Chapman were obliged to leave their coaches by the west end of St. Paul’s or by the Fleet conduit, and proceed the rest of the way on foot; this was designed to prevent further tumult.

  The Fortune Theatre in Golding Lane, now Golden Lane, was famous for its “inflamations” with “squibs … thunder … artificial lightning.” The costs were a penny for standing room only, twopence for a chair and threepence for “the most comfortable seats which are cushioned.” During the performance, according to Thomas Platter’s Travels in England, “food and drink are carried around the audience.”

  During the Puritan Commonwealth the theatres were closed; it was said that the people had seen enough public tragedy and no longer required any dramatic version; instead theatrical entertainments were performed clandestinely or under cover of some other activity. The Red Bull Playhouse in Clerkenwell-only a few hundred yards to the north of Smithfield-remained open for rope-acts and the like, but also managed to make room for “drolleries” and “pieces of plays.” So great was the appetite for these spectacles among ordinary Londoners that one contemporary wrote: “I have seen the Red Bull playhouse, which was a large one, so full, that as many went back for want of room as had entered.” There were continual complaints about plays and actors, even after various inhibitory proclamations of 1642 and 1648, so we may assume that the more spirited Londoners continued to find at least “pieces” of drama.

  It might be thought then that the citizens would agree with one of their number, Samuel Pepys, who declared after the Restoration that the theatre was “a thousand times better and more glorious than ever before.” He was referring to the newly licensed theatres of Dorset Gardens and Drury Lane, but the new theatres were nothing like the old; as Pepys went on to remark, “now all things civil, no rudeness anywhere.” The drama had been refined, in other words, in order that it would appeal to the king, the court and those Londoners who shared the same values. Just as the “Cockney” dialect was now being denigrated, so the popular theatre of previous decades was dissolved.

  And yet the more “Cockney” Londoners did also manage to attend the new plays; they were not necessarily welcomed in the boxes or the pit with the more prosperous citizens, but they took over the gallery from where they could shout insults or pelt fruit upon both stage and respectable audience. Cockney theatre-goers were only one aspect, however, of the generally partisan and inflammatory aspect of the urban audience. “Claques” would attend in order to cry up, or drown out, the latest production; fights would break out among the gentlemen “of quality,” while there were often riots which effectively concluded all theatrical proceedings. Indeed the riots themselves were somewhat theatrical in appearance. When in the mid-eighteenth century David Garrick proposed to abolish “half-price” seats, for those who entered after the third of five acts (the whole performance beginning at six o’clock in t
he evening), the day appointed for that innovation found the Drury Lane Playhouse filled with a silent crowd. P.J. Grosley composed A Tour of London in 1772, and set the scene. As soon as the play commenced there was a “general outcry” with “fisty-cuffs and cudgels,” which led to further violence when the audience “tore up the benches of the pit and galleries” and “demolished the boxes.” The lion, which had decorated the king’s box, was thrown upon the stage among the actors, and the unicorn fell into the orchestra “where it broke the great harpsichord to pieces.” In his London Journal of 19 January 1763, Boswell remarks that “we sallied into the house, planted ourselves in the middle of the pit, and with oaken cudgels in our hands and shrill-sounding cat calls in our pockets, sat ready prepared.”

  Such behaviour in the capital’s theatres continued well into the nineteenth century. A German traveller of 1827, Prince Pückler Muskau, later caricatured by Charles Dickens as Count Smorltork in The Pickwick Papers, reported that “The most striking thing to a foreigner in English theatres is the unheard-of coarseness and brutality of the audiences.” The “Old Price” riots of 1807 lasted for seventy nights, and the private life of Edmund Kean-accused of being both a drunk and an adulterer-led to four nights of violent rioting in the playhouse of Drury Lane. What was termed “party spirit” did on more than one occasion prompt fights both among the spectators and the players. The presence of foreigners upon the stage was another cause of uproar; when the “Theatre Historique” arrived at Drury Lane from Paris, there was a general rush for the stage. Mobs surrounded the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket, in 1805, when a comedy entitled The Tailors caused offence among the fraternity. Professional boxers were brought into the auditorium by rival groups, as early as 1743, in order to slug it out. This was city drama, in every sense. And yet, in the city itself, the real drama was still performed upon the streets.