1976: COCKNEY accents | Word of Mouth | Voice of the People | BBC Archive

[Music] [Applause] [Music] musicians who regularly entertain in traditional style and setting they write all their own material but freely acknowledge a debt to the music hall that once voiced and fostered the cockney dialect and i can remember occasionally i was mulled up in the desert all getting on the other side of the brook somewhere and i was a young i've been out there in four years then it was a young lad you know and i heard him speaking so i said where'd you come from so he said london i said i know you'd do austin but whereabouts in that he said bethnal green i said i knew that i mean better no green was with the yes i mean which way years ago today they're much more modern than i am they say bethnal queen i've got grandchildren today i'm afraid to talk to them because they're so posh here like hello grandfather how are you so i said what up how are you getting under all right and this is it today really it's everyday talk now it didn't be sort of um where you stay at was your stairs it's everyday things little little catchphrases at the end of sentences and things like that i mean they use the word you see or all right on the end of every sentence it's all right or you see you know always unstuck on the end of a thing hang on a minute you know it's all little catchphrases now instead of saying that wasn't stairs you know it's dying out now so you take your overcoat off and you put it up on the rack in a pub and you say look after my smother for me fred where's your overcoat no i mean you might have your twirls in your pocket what's that a bunch of kids and that's the screws when they go outside where's me glenn where's my glimmer that's his torch you still use those not so very often these days they're all inside doing bird now i know well if i turn around everybody i see a lot of gold this light gets hammered by saying i want to knock this out a bit shot you know what i mean i that's a you had it off yeah about something off the back of the lot we talked like now i mean all the time in the public they're coming and saying i want to knock this out but like nobody wants to buy it you know and uh all things like when we know well i shouldn't say it i mean now we're all straight we're all cruxy east end cockney is still above all language used in the streets here catchphrases are swapped and slang evolves with a constant invention inspiration coming from every walk of life and all forms of popular culture my east end job and i was born with it my thieves german i picked up basically once i joined the police force you could walk into a place you were pub one night see someone say to him um sing charlie about just say uh now i've gotten a bit of aggravation and you say oh yeah what happened then he said he was at the whisper down the wick whitney's got a carpet now that is the sort of the phraseology that people expect us to use what are you saying um he was at the westbound order whiz the whisper is a racing trick where you go around whispering to people there's six horses in the race and you whisper number four number four don't forget the number two and you tip every every dog in the race to six different people one of them must be the winner and then when you go back afterwards you find the one and you've tipped the winner too and you go back you must say water what about me drinking you know and you're on an earner every race you must be it's one of those things well he was at the whisper all at the whiz dip in the pockets down the wick which is hackney wick he's got um he's got himself a carpet which means he got arrested as they say nicked official and he got three months in the east end of london the establishment speaks the same language as the underworld to the uninitiated it's understandably confusing but the sweeney and the tea leaf meet on common ground i wanted to put this man on identification parade and i went down to his house and i found him and he knew me he was no i didn't have to go in and tell him i announced myself to who i was he knew exactly who i was and he knew exactly why i was there but um he came out with the usual protest you know nothing to do with me what's it all about government the usual bits and pieces and i assist him well such and such a job you know as far as i'm aware down to you he said oh yeah marvelous in it he said i suppose someone's been on a trumpet no i'm a dot on the card which to me i knew what he was talking about was when he said someone's been on the trumpet it meant someone had informed on him someone had phoned me up told me who he was and he said no he was a dot on the card which is a racing balance you know this phraseology gets card marked you know that comes from the racing you know put a cross down beside the ones well a dot on the card and he was first favorite for the job and uh i know exactly what he meant as far if he was saying to me that someone's giving you information that i had done it and you haven't got that information i must certainly to go down for this one stranger completely guilty eventually but uh i knew what he was talking about every trade has its jargon with such a large proportion of the east and once employed in the docks and dockland it's hardly surprising that a specific cockney working slang has grown up here too well in my trade uh in my english the ports industry it's well it the terminology there at times you'd it's very difficult to under understand your data working industry a long long time for instance a common usage of a word in doctrine and i would i would like to gamble that is only about one percent of the port workers in london who know it's origin and yet everybody uses it and it's the word green acre is that when you made a if you make a set of cargo either for import for export or import bringing it in and it spilled it meant that you'd had a green acre it you green ached it and i used to think there's something to do with upturned soil until i started to do a bit of digging and i only learned five years ago the origin of it and the origin comes from a stevedore whose name was green acre this is the alleged origin and he had committee it killed his wife because her infidelity was somebody else and he killed his wife and he dismembered her body and they found pieces of the body across the east end of london and so you can imagine some way the very next morning after reading about it and as the set spilled said oh he's had a green acre and from that day onwards to this very day that word is common usage in dot land if they spill a set of cargo it's a green acre jack dash has watched the end changing face over the years but though the rows of back-to-back houses have now given way to huge new concrete blocks he sees no demolition squad at work in either the speech or the spirit of the cockney you know when people say oh the east end's losing its character i think they're talking a lot of nonsense because buildings don't make people's character because if buildings made people's character then the copies of the past generation would be so deformed and twisted and so ugly but they weren't characters formed in industry and that's why we are today and it would never be lost but of course the um and when you see the kids coming out from school you listen to them the cockney is there the the dropping of the h's and the and the t's and the rolling of words into one perhaps not so pronounced as me but it's still there it could be a cockney in certain ways but not in others i mean you could could be a company in general but the whole district you can't not be a cognate if you're foreign you come into an area like this where you can only consider yourself as a half a cockney not truly as a cognate what's new here what are you a company yeah i believe i'm here right because i've grown up in the area and everyone i speak to is cockney so i believed himself as a company it's one of them what is he well to me he's a cockney but to himself he might not be a carter do you think you're a cockney no why not because i can't get the right sound you know so what language do you speak with your family bengali what about your family what language should they speak in greek what do you speak with them greek always so what do they think of you speaking cockney the way you are now to me well they can't understand because i my mom can't understand english she can just about go walk through the market you know i think that's about get through the market speaking english so it's really all do you act as interpreter for her yeah if i want to relax when i'm talking to person i just speak cockney because it's come naturally because i brought up in the area but otherwise he's just the same as anybody else and a matter of fact i'd rather live in this type area than live with a posh person why they're more themselves they're more outspoken but as a posh person he's never he's always something what he isn't he always puts it on always as these new cockneys settle into life and language re-housing has uprooted many eastenders from their traditional home and deposited them in the essex commuter belt the suburbs of gantz hill and chigwell are a far cry from bethnal green or bow so we spoke to two families to find out how cockney was faring in this new environment with cockney it's an accent that over the you know the years and say rich people or posh people they tend to think it's common it's not an accent now if you come say from the north country with a north country accent it's not a common accent is it but cockney has always been thought of as common you know common people from the east end the marks and spencers they laugh at me the managers and that because i talk anywhere they just said that they think it's funny it's always funny to tell you can speak properly it's very funny but they like it they all say to me say something and i say it and they all know they think yes yeah but no i'm saying you won't end up on the board of directors will you voice like that no well none of them have got voices like this but i like my coxswain i don't mind the cockney accent but it doesn't it doesn't put me out because my job doesn't interfere with it in that way but i think if i was younger like susan i think i'd prefer to speak a lot better anyway i don't think cotton is an andy cat but i'd like to talk better than i do why well i'll just get a reception this job for start when she leaves oh a telephonist and i don't think i could do very well with talking really company or anything she's been thinking about a career in the wren's master told you you might as well forget that if she talks like that you

Channel: BBC Archive

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Keywords: bbc, archive bbc, classic tv, british tv nostalgia, bbc archive, archive, the bbc archive, nostalgia, legendary television, retro tv, vintage, accents of the uk, speech patterns in english, english accents comparison, cockney accent, cockney rhyming slang, cockneys, london accent, working class london accent, london 1970s footage, essex accent, london docklands 1970s, cockney dialect, cockney dialect history, sociolinguistics, word of mouth bbc documentary, melvyn bragg

Id: mjNiTIVNyoM

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 10 2022