Time Out magazine. James FitzGerald. Donate now. Popular on Time Out [image]. Discover the best of the city, first. We already have this email. The lengthening of the vowel sound in for example grass from gras to gra:s was a cockney innovation which spread and is now used by many southern English accents. Jump to: navigation , search. Main Article Discussion Related Articles [? Hidden categories: Linguistics tag Anthropology tag. Navigation menu Personal tools Log in.
Namespaces Page Discussion. Views Read View source View history. Finance Financial Report Donate. What is a Cockney?
One who has been born within the sound of Bow bells, a reference not, as often believed, to the eastern suburb of Bow, but to the church of Saint Mary le Bow, Cheapside, in the City of London.
Further to a study carried out in to see how far the Bow Bells could be heard, it was estimated that they would have been audible six miles to the east, five to the north, three to the south, and four to the west, an area that covers Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Stepney, Wapping, Limehouse, Poplar, Millwall, Hackney, Hoxton, Shoreditch, Bow, and Mile End, as well as Bermondsey, south of the River Thames. Given the post-war emigration of many Cockneys to Essex, that area can now be seen as substantially larger.
Nor were the original Cockneys invariably working class. But it has been suggested that a Cockney style of speech is much older, with Matthews offering examples from the sixteenth century onwards William Matthews, Cockney Past and Present , Shakespeare is among those he quotes, although his Cockneyisms are far from East Enders.
Indeed, early Cockney is primarily a matter of pronunciation, as reverse-engineered from the recorded spelling of words such as frust thrust , farding farthing , anoder another , and so on. The nineteenth century saw the first wholesale attempt to record Cockney as it was spoken. The pioneering sociologist Henry Mayhew recorded his impoverished or criminal interviewees in much the same style. While the creation myths of that lexis differ, it was certainly popular among the early nineteenth-century Cockney costermongers.
Cockney survives, but not without change. Her accent is unquestionably cockney: warm, down to earth, effortlessly dipping in and out of rhyming slang. Born into a family of costermongers and raised in Phoenix Road, Somers Town, Gould's pearly roots span six generations. Beginning with the humble title of Pearly Princess, Gould went on to assume her current regal title upon her mother's passing.
I ask her if there are many pearly families left? Gould reminisces about a colourful childhood; a lot of her time was spent helping on her family's market stalls at Islington's Chapel Market. The Thames brought people from all over the globe — Italian, Chinese, French — we mixed with everyone. We didn't have a racist bone in our bodies.
We didn't have two bob but it was all about respect. This strong sense of community seems to have driven the pearlies in their life's work, to which a large part is devoted to charity. Though Diane relocated to East Sussex some years ago, she claims she has by no means abandoned her pearly values. It was, she says, her cockney holidays to the hop fields of Kent every year until the s — where the family would always enjoy "a sing song around the piano and pint of beer" — that inspired her to leave London with her four children for a more rural lifestyle.
In the countryside, Gould runs her own brewery, Furnace Brook Brewery. And, in true cockney style, she delivers her homemade beverages — including Pearly Pale Ale — to locals by cart, pulled by her beloved 'pearly pony' Alfie. Gould laments that a lot of people have had to move out of the capital due lack of affordability, and scorns the destruction of streets of houses which forced many to move into blocks of flats on large estates. This, says Gould, "shattered the 'backbone of community'.
I'm part of the last of a dying breed," she says. But what about those Cockneys who are still based in London? I head to Repton Boxing Club. Stracey, Audley Harrison and Maurice Hope. It was even a regular haunt of the infamous Kray twins. Mark Newman, is the former club president, and now manager of the club's PR. The club was a regular hangout of his in the mid-sixties and he counts Ray Winstone, also an ex-Repton boy, among his friends.
It wasn't always solely a boxing club.
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