by Max Décharné
‘Bloody arctic,’ said Setters.
‘Like I may make the scene after a meal,’ Gently said.
In post-war black America, a common name for a police officer was simply the Man. For instance, in the Harlem depicted in the novels of Chester Himes, it was enough for his two detectives, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones, to utter just three words by way of an introduction, as here in The Big Gold Dream (1960):
‘We’re the men,’ Grave Digger said, flashing his shield.
‘You don’t have to tell me, boss,’ the doorman said.
They were fictional, but plenty of serving and retired US police officers later spoke to Mark Baker for his superb oral history Cops – Their Lives in Their Own Words (1985), and again, this sense of having to speak the slang of the street is reinforced:
These young kids [police recruits] want to be a bunch of PR people. I told them, ‘If you’re going in there and talk, you got to talk their language.’ When I go into a bar in a black area where the fights are going on, I just climb up on the bar, walk down it and kick everybody’s drink off the bar. Then I says, ‘Okay, motherfuckers, the Man’s here. Let’s take care of business.’
This somewhat hands-on approach would also have been the inspiration behind a fine post-war Australian name for the police, the wallopers.
Here comes the b— coppers
PERHAPS THE MOST WIDESPREAD and venerable slang name for a police officer, originally English, but also in common use in Australia and America for the best part of two hundred years, is copper. It has sometimes been speculated that this word derives from the shiny buttons down the front of 19th-century Metropolitan Police uniforms, since London’s initial complement of 895 constables, who first patrolled the capital on 30 September 1829, wore blue swallowtail coats with a line of eight buttons. However, when seeking out criminals, their job was obviously to apprehend them, which, fifty years earlier, would have had them labelled a nabber, or nabbing-cull, as in Ralph Tomlinson’s satirical poem, ‘A Slang Pastoral’ (1780):
Will no blood-hunting foot-pad, that hears me complain,
Stop the wind of that nabbing-cull, constable Payne?
If he does, he’ll to Tyburn next sessions be dragg’d,
And what kiddy’s so rum as to get himself scragged.
Tomlinson, incidentally, was a member of the Anacreontic Society – named after the Greek poet Anacreon, who extolled the properties of alcohol in his work – which met in a pub on the Strand called the Crown and Anchor, and he wrote the words to their drinking anthem, the ‘Anacreontic Song’, first published in 1778. Fellow club member John Stafford Smith composed the tune, to which in the 19th century was added a different set of lyrics taken from Francis Scott Key’s 1813 poem ‘The Defence of Fort McHenry’, and that combination became known as a song called ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. So, just as large amounts of 18th-century underworld slang recorded by Francis Grose in Covent Garden – such as fly, pad and crib – eventually made the journey across the Atlantic and are still in use there today, a melody from that same London neighbourhood designed to spur on a convivial group of gentlemen imbibers, such as Dr Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds, has lived on to be regularly sung each year to the crowd at the Super Bowl in America by the likes of Janet Jackson, although whether the original members of the Anacreontic Society ever indulged in supposedly accidental flashing during their own performances is sadly not recorded.
From nabbers, it is a short step to coppers, whose most accepted derivation, including that of the OED, is from the verb cop, meaning ‘to capture, catch, lay hold of’; thus, a copper is someone who cops you for a crime. By the 1840s, this word was certainly current in London, and was recorded in witness testimony during a trial at the Old Bailey on 11 May 1846, when Police Sergeant G9 (Edmund White) was giving evidence about having been assaulted when attempting to arrest a counterfeiting gang:
When I first entered. . . a woman screamed very loud, ‘Jim, Jim, here comes the b— coppers,’ and at that moment the money was thrown out – I have heard the police called coppers before.
Although already a slang word, eventually copper was itself adapted further into cockney rhyming slang, giving rise in the 1890s to grasshopper, copper (which led in turn to a police informer being known as a grass, by association), and also further rhyming names such as bottle & stopper, and clodhopper.
A cockney burglar character, in Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors (1934), when describing another criminal literally lying low in the countryside, opts not for rhyming slang but for a different term, which dates to the end of the 1890s:
He said the stupidity of the police was almost incredible. Walked right over him twice, he said. One time they trod on him. Said he’d never realised so vividly before why a policeman was called a flattie. Nearly broke his fingers standing on them.
Flattie, or flat-foot, conjures up images of the constable walking his beat for mile after mile, while another cockney character in a 1934 crime novel, Murder Underground by Mavis Doriel Hay, opts for an equally widespread slang name, saying, ‘I don’t want those busies around my place.’ This word is suggestive of the term busybody – which dates back to the reign of Henry VIII – with the implication that the police are prying into someone’s affairs. Just a few of the many other variants through the years have included truncheonist (1854), rozzer (1888), bull (1893, largely US), bogy (1924), fuzz (1929) and PC Plod (1971). One of the most famous UK slang names owes a great deal of its popularity to a TV series, The Sweeney (1975–8), in which much criminal argot is bandied about by police and criminals alike, and whose title derives from rhyming slang: Sweeney Todd, Flying Squad. In its debut episode, Detective Inspector Jack Regan introduces himself and his no-nonsense law enforcement methods to a young thief as follows:
We’re the Sweeney, son, and we haven’t had any dinner. You’ve kept us waiting, so unless you want a kicking, you tell us where those photographs are.
As might be expected, the spin-off novels produced in the wake of the series also played their part in spreading criminal slang across the nation, such as book number six, Joe Balham’s The Snout Who Cried Wolf (1977), which focused on a police informer. Edgar Wallace had written a crime novel about the same organisation in 1928, simply entitled The Flying Squad, in which their rhyming slang nickname did not feature (although it did make its first recorded appearance ten years later in another fine London novel, The Gilt Kid by James Curtis). However, the Wallace book contained some interesting contemporary slang, such as when a character named Ann, describing another woman’s hair, comments, ‘You may have seen her – she is a suicide blonde.’ On being asked what this means, she then replies, ‘She dyes by her own hand.’ This phrase and its punning meaning duly survived the years and made the journey to Australia, prompting INXS to write the song ‘Suicide Blonde’ (1990), apparently inspired by singer Michael Hutchence’s girlfriend Kylie Minogue using the same expression about her choice of hair colour.
There’s an Old Bill by the stream
AT THE CLOSE OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR, many young British soldiers who had somehow managed to avoid being slaughtered in the trenches opted to join the police – a steady job, with a chain of command, a uniform and discipline, much as they were used to, but hopefully not quite as dangerous. A popular slang name for any ex-serviceman from the army at that time was an Old Bill, inspired by the character in the weekly magazine The Bystander, ‘Old Bill’ Busby. He was created in 1915 by the very popular trench artist Bruce Bairnsfather – a machine-gun captain with the Royal First Warwickshires, who began drawing and publishing ironic scenes of front-line life near Armentières at the start of that year, under the title Fragments from France, before being sent home injured after the second battle of Ypres. Old Bill had a pipe, a walrus moustache, balaclava helmet and a laconic attitude to the scenes of chaos around him.
After the war, the name adhered generally to ex-army personnel, and proved a lasting one, perpetuated by the formation of veterans’ associations whic
h used the name, as, for instance, in this item about the Prince of Wales from the Manchester Guardian in 1933:
During a visit to the exhibition of work by disabled ex-servicemen held at the Imperial Institute, South Kensington, he was impressed by the idea under which members of the Old Bill Fraternity promised to purchase not less than five shillings’ worth of goods made by war-blinded men. He immediately asked for an enrolment form and there and then paid his sixpence as the initial membership fee and responded to the invitation on the form of the cheerful figure of Old Bill, drawn by Bruce Bairnsfather, to ‘put it there, mate,’ by placing his signature ‘along the dotted line.’
Similarly, in 1951, the Daily Express was happy to describe the nth Earl of Egmont as ‘the stocky little man with the “Old Bill” moustache’, safe in the knowledge that their readers would understand the reference. It is hard to say exactly how the Old Bill moustache and attributes of the former soldiers were then somehow transferred in the public mind to the figure of the ordinary policeman on the beat. As for when exactly this transition took place, the earliest citation found in the OED is from the great Frank Norman’s 1958 prison memoir Bang to Rights – a book rich in working-class London slang of the time, using the author’s own distinctive spelling and punctuation:
Anyway I was out haveing a booz up one night when two old Bill’s came up to me and told me they had a warrent for my arrest. Naturally I went potty and asked them what it was all about. One of the coszers [policeman, usually spelt cozzer, a blend of copper and rozzer] told me I was nicked for conning the old bag out of fifteen hundred quide. . .
This was something of an isolated instance, and the word then only really became widespread during the 1970s, although train robber Ronnie Biggs used the term in a 1979 tabloid interview from Rio, and he hadn’t been in circulation in the UK since escaping from prison in 1965. Yet when a nineteen-year-old Teddy boy involved in skirmishes with punk rockers down the King’s Road in 1977 used the word as he was talking to reporter Andrew Stephen from the Observer, the paper still felt the need to include a translation in brackets for the benefit of their readers: ‘If you have a bottle the Old Bill [police] can nick you for having an offensive weapon, see.’
That it was still a relatively novel expression is also suggested by Robert Barltrop and Jim Wolveridge’s study of London vernacular, The Muvver Tongue (1980), in which the two East End authors asserted that ‘no Cockney would use the cuddly-sounding “bobby” or even “bluebottle” for a policeman. “Copper” remains the universal word, and sometimes “flat” (short for flat-foot). “Rozzer” is mostly said by children, and the American “fuzz” has never got going among Cockneys. Recently “old Bill” has come into use, and seems to be growing in popularity.’
Pig’s ear and a coffin nail
BACK IN THE MUD OF FLANDERS during the First World War, the original Old Bills devised a very rich selection of slang to help them cope with a world that had fast descended into a nightmare. This was a way of describing things, making fun of them, and mostly disguising the horror with a deadpan irony, because the reality was all too stark. The attitude itself was far from new – for instance, an 1873 edition of The Standard newspaper informed its readers that any regiment known for being in the forefront of any action was said, in army speech, to have the largest butcher’s bill.
This slang came from the ordinary foot soldiers thrown into the middle of the chaos, rather than the self-important statesmen on all sides who had decided that a five-year bloodbath killing nineteen million people and maiming countless more was a sensible idea, and probably good for business.
Eric Partridge, the giant figure of 20th-century English slang scholarship, knew the argot of the First World War soldier at first hand, because he had been one himself. He was born in New Zealand in 1894, but his family had relocated to Australia by the time of the conflict, so he enlisted in the Australian army, and first saw service in Egypt, then Gallipoli and lastly on the Western Front, where he was wounded. He was on observation duty in the infantry at Sailly-le-Sec, near Amiens, on 21 April 1918, and saw the ‘Red Baron’, Manfred von Richthofen, shot down and killed just over half a mile away.
Having then moved to England after the war, initially to study at Oxford University, Partridge eventually founded a publishing company in 1927, which issued Songs and Slang of the British Soldier (1930), written by himself and fellow trench-warfare veteran John Brophy. The basic attitude of the enlisted man – very different from the sort of thing that MPs back home were making patriotic speeches about – is summed up pretty well in a song they sang, which appeared in the book in the following mildly bowdlerised form:
I don’t want to be a soldier,
I don’t want to go to war,
I’d rather stay at home,
Around the streets to roam,
And live on the earnings of a well-paid whore.
I don’t want a bayonet up my arse-hole,
I don’t want my ballocks shot away.
I’d rather stay in England,
In merry, merry England,
And – my bloody life away.
The world described in Partridge and Brophy’s book is one of sudden death, vermin and disease, in which soldiers might be struck down by silent susan (‘a German high-velocity shell’), a five nine (ditto), asiatic annie (‘a Turkish big gun at Gallipoli’) or a hutt notcher (‘sniper’, who kept score by notches on the butt of his rifle). They might well be feeling crummy (‘itchy because of louse bites’), and thinking about the desirability – or the annoying absence of – coffin nails (cigarettes), scran (food), pig’s ear (beer), a bird (‘a young woman, especially in an amorous context’) or a piece (ditto), which might well prompt them to go on the razzle (‘make an expedition in search of entertainment’) and maybe find a kip-shop (brothel) behind the lines. If they succeed, they will probably be called jammy (‘Lucky; e.g, “he’s a jammy bugger!”’), but on many occasions they would generally wind up with nix (‘nothing. From the German nichts’) – a situation which could also be summed up in one of the most ubiquitous slang words of those times, napoo (‘finished; empty; gone; non-existent. Corrupted from the French Il n’y en a plus = there is no more’).
A wound that didn’t wind up killing you could be your ticket to Blighty, which the authors defined as ‘England, in the sense of home’. This might be something very visible, such as the loss of a limb, but it could also be what the authorities came to call shell shock. The latter term was not, apparently, one much favoured by the troops themselves, as the longest-living British survivor of those days, Harry Patch, told the writer Max Arthur in the oral history The Last Post (2005):
‘A bit rocky’ was an expression you heard, but nobody ever used the phrase ‘shell shock’. Somebody was wounded – but never ‘shell shocked’.
Tom Thumb in yer i-diddle-dee
A GENERATION LATER, soldiers were once again coining slang on battlefields across several continents during the 1939–45 war. Anthony Burgess, who commented so astutely on language throughout his literary career, served in the British Army in the Second World War, and later, in a tribute volume to Eric Partridge, had this to say about military life in relation to speech:
It was in the army that I learned to appreciate the great humorous stoicism of ordinary men and the way in which they expressed it in language. He [Eric Partridge], like myself, was fascinated by the slow folk development from trope to trope in the direction of greater sardonic truth. In 1939 soldiers were saying: ‘The army can do anything to you but fuck you.’ This, in 1941, had become ‘The army can fuck you but it can’t make you have a kid.’ At the end of the war the army could give you a kid but it couldn’t make you love it. I don’t know what the latest embellishment is.
This sense of slang being passed on from one unit to another – and from one war to another – is very strong. Troops from New Zealand and Australia fought alongside British regiments in the First and Second World Wars, and each country’s soldie
rs picked up expressions from the others, and indeed, all of them also inherited other slang terms which the 19th-century British Army had employed in its various overseas campaigns. Once American troops first arrived on European battlefields in November 1917, that cross-pollination of language spread further, and a similar pattern followed after their November 1942 debut appearance on European territory in the Second World War. Just to enrich the mix, words in use by one branch of the services would sometimes be adopted by another, so that, for instance, in the 1914–18 war, the Royal Flying Corps’ habit of referring to aircraft as crates also passed into use among the Tommies in the trenches. British Army foot soldiers had been known as lobsters in the 18th and early 19th centuries, on account of their red coats, but from around the 1850s, the name Tommy Atkins supplanted it, eventually shortened to just Tommy. In the 1890s, the fictionalised adventures of Trooper Tommy Atkins were serialised in the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, which also helped spread military argot among the general public. In an 1895 episode entitled ‘Trooper Tommy’s “First War”’ he adopts a stray dog that is fond of eating stray scraps of loaf, and Tommy explains that ‘as all my room chums noticed his partiality for the bread, they named him “Rooty,” that being the Army slang word for it’.
As with most other types of slang – except for the defiantly X-rated – newspapers and magazines have long enjoyed printing choice selections of military speech. In 1921, The Times encouraged its readers to contribute British Army words and phrases from the recent war, which were then published. One entrant, from November that year, came up with a fair list of ‘typical expressions of general Army slang as he heard it’, including buckshee (surplus, free), lash-up (fiasco), wangle (later defined by Partridge and Brophy as ‘to procure goods or an advantage of some kind illicitly but without punishment’), talking wet (stupid utterances), cushy (comfortable, safe, easy) and muck in (to share items with your immediate comrades).