Lost London (26 page)
Authors: Richard Guard
L
ONDONERS HAVE ALWAYS HAD A WAY WITH WORDS
. We owe a great debt for some wonderful phrases and words that are no longer in common use, and which also
tell us much of the habits, street life and prejudices of the times.
Academy
A brothel
Acorn
The Gallows, from ‘riding the horse sired from an acorn’
Apple dumpling shop
A woman’s breasts
Beggar’s bullets
Stones, for throwing at the wealthy
Blindman’s holiday
Night or darkness
Blue skin
Mixed race
Botch
A tailor
To box a Jesuit
To masturbate
Catch Fart
A footman, catching his master’s farts
Dead Chelsea By God!
A soldier would shout this after receiving a wound in battle, a reference to the military hospital there
.
Chummage
Paid by rich prisoners to make their roommates sleep elsewhere, for example, on the stairs
City college
Newgate Prison
Clapham
A sexually transmitted disease, ‘he went out by Had’em, and came round by Clapham home’
Corinthians
Those who visit brothels
Covent Garden Ague
Sexually Transmitted Disease
Covent Garden Nun
A prostitute
Deadly Nevergreen
The gallows, bearing grisly fruit all year round
Derrick
The hangman, sometime thought to have given his name to modern-day derricks, lifting mechanisms used at ports etc
Dick
During the reign of Queen Dick, that is never
Doll
A Bartholomew doll – a slutty over-dressed woman, like the toys sold at Bartholomew Fair
Drury Lane Vestal
A prostitute, after the area, formally a major location of the sex trade
Earth Bath
The grave
English Burgundy
Porter – a stout invented in London
Execution day
The day you do the washing
Farting Crackers
Trousers
Feague
To feague a horse was to stick ginger, or a live eel, up its rectum to make it appear frisky before selling it
Friday face
During Cromwell’s time it was compulsory to fast on Fridays, a habit that continued after the reformation – hence Friday face
St Giles’ Greek
The language of thieves and gypsies, who were mainly said to live in the St Giles area of London
Greenwich barbers
The men who dig sand in Greenwich, from their habit of shaving off the sandbanks
Hasty pudding
A poor road ‘The way through Wandsworth is quite a hasty pudding’
Holborn Hill
Riding backwards up Holborn Hill, to go to the gallows, on the way to Tyburn
Hopping Giles
Being disabled, St Giles was the patron saint of the disabled
Irish beauty
A woman with two black eyes
Job’s Dock
The ward for venereal disease at St Barts
Laystall
Dunghills of human waste
Lily White
Chimney sweeps
Lion
Sending lads to see the lions washed at Tower ditch was a longstanding April fools joke for city dwellers. Sticking two fingers up someone’s
nose and pulling was said to make a lion of them
Little Barbary
The village of Wapping
Little ease
An ancient prison cell in the Guildhall, being so low that a lad could not stand in it, hence little ease
Long Meg
After the famous tall woman of Westminster, Long Meg became a sarcastic term for any female of height
Maccaroni
A fop or dandy. Returning from the Grand Tour with a taste for all thing Italian – food, clothing and hair – maccaroni’s strutted around the
city
Milk the pigeon
To attempt the impossible
Monkey
Using a long straw or tube to illicitly drink wine or other booze from a cask was said to be ‘sucking the monkey’
Mooncurser
Link boys, who used to provide light to walk citizens home before the advent of street lighting, were said to be mooncursers, as the moon did them out of
work
Nappy house
A brothel
Neck verse
A convict could escape execution by claiming Benefit of the Clergy, which meant in practice reading in Latin the first verse of Psalm 51
Nit squeezer
A hairdresser
Noll
Oliver Cromwell, Old Noll
Nutcrackers
The pillory
Nypper
Someone who cut purses, which used to be worn on a string from the clothing
Oliver’s skull
A chamber pot
Paddington fair day
A hanging day, Tyburn being in the parish of Paddington
Paviour’s workshop
The street
Picture frame
The sheriff’s picture frame – the gallows or the pillory
Piss pot hall
A house in Clapton, Hackney, built by a maker of chamber pots
Polish the king’s iron
To be imprisoned was said to be polishing the king’s iron, to be in fetters
Porridge island
An area inhabited by cooks in the alleyway leading from St Martin’s churchyard
Queer plungers
People who threw themselves in the Thames to be rescued by a friend and taken to the Humane Society, who paid for the rescue of the destitute
Riding St George
Having sex with the lady on top, riding on the dragon as it were, said to be a good way of conceiving a bishop
Romeville
London
Rushers
A class of thieves who knocked on the doors of the wealthy, knowing them to be away, and when the door was opened, rushing in and taking the valuables
On St Geoffrey’s day
Never, there is no St Geoffrey
Salesman’s dog
Someone employed to bark out the wares of a shopkeeper
Schism shop
A meeting house of dissenters
Scotch warming pan
A fart, or a woman
Sharks
The very highest rank of pickpockets
Sidepocket
Wanting something unnecessary – ‘he needs it like a dog needs a sidepocket’
Silver laced
Replete with lice
Smithfield bargain
A marriage undertaken purely for the profit of one of the party, Smithfield was where women were reputedly sold like cattle
Tangerines
Debtors at Newgate, so called because they were
housed in a room called Tangier Thames
The impossible
He’ll find no way to set the Thames on fire
Three penny upright
A prostitute who charges three pence, and has sex while standing up
Tom turdman
The man who collects night soil
Tom of bedlam
A lunatic, Shakespeare’s Poor Tom from
King Lear
Touch bone and whistle
Anyone who has farted may be pinched and punched, until he has touched bone (the teeth) and whistled
Tower hill play
A kick in the bum and a slap in the face
Vice admiral of the narrow seas
A man who, when drunk, pisses under the table in his neighbour’s shoes
Vowel
To vowel is to pay one’s gambling debts with an I.O.U.
Walking up against the wall
To run up a tab in a boozer, where one’s tally was often chalked up on the wall
Wasp
A prostitute with a venereal disease, so called because of the sting in her tail
Westminster wedding
When a rogue marries a whore
Windward Passage
Homosexual, one who navigates by the Windward Passage
Zed
A crocked or deformed person, shaped like the letter
Cannon Street
D
EMOLISHED IN
1865
TO MAKE WAY FOR
Cannon Street Railway Station, the Steelyard was an autonomous enclave of German merchants
who controlled much of London’s trade with the Hanseatic League, a group of German ports that banded together in mutual self-protection against Baltic Sea piracy.
First recorded in the city in 1157, the German traders were granted freedom from taxation under a charter of Richard
I
in 1197. They expanded their
property over the next 200 years and in 1598 John Stow described their premises and trade in his
Survey of London
:
The hall is large, built of stone, with three arched gates towards the street, the middlemost whereof is far bigger than the others, and is seldom opened; the other two be secured up. The
same is now called the old hall. The merchants of Almaine used to bring hither as well wheat, rye, and other grain, as cables, ropes, masts, pitch, tar, flax, hemp, linen cloth, wainscots, wax,
steel, and other profitable merchandise
.
The German merchants kept themselves to themselves, drinking their own Rhenish wine, enforcing a self-imposed curfew and forbidding their women to mix with the locals. But this independence and
separation aroused suspicion and jealousy. Furthermore, their control of much of the lucrative English wool trade angered rival London merchants who petitioned the crown to take action.
In 1551 Edward
VI
attempted to restrict their trade, and they were banished by Elizabeth
I
in 1598 but returned under James
I
with much reduced privileges. The Steelyard was completely destroyed in 1666 by the Great Fire but was rebuilt afterwards, a German trading presence remaining in the city until the
1850s. The name Steelyard arose from one of two possible sources – either the measuring scales used to weigh goods coming into the port, or directly from the German word
Stalhof
.
