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Jonathon Green reveals the original character behind the myth of the chirpy cockney sparrer…

Once upon a time there was a rat. My rat. I mourn her still and sometimes I told her story: such as here. She was called Mord Em’ly (above, left). Once upon a time there was a silent movie. Released in 1922 it starred Betty Balfour (above, centre) who appeared on the billboards as ‘Britain’s Queen of happiness’ and ‘The British Mary Pickford’. It was called Maud Emily, though the re-release preferred Me and My Gal.

And once upon a time, well before either of them, was an author. William Pett Ridge (above, right). In 1898 he wrote a book: it was called Mord Em’ly.

Mord Em’ly was his fifth novel and his first best-seller. Like Arthur Morrison Pett Ridge (1859–1930) was bracketed with the ‘Cockney novelists’. But where his contemporary made you reach for the carving knife (assuming you had yet to pawn it or hadn’t already left it buried between the drink-sodden shoulder-blades of some other wretched sociopath), Pett Ridge went for laughs. A humourist. The photo hardly suggests it, but that was his reputation. The Times obit regretted his ‘kindly presence and never-failing humour’; he bantered with a visiting Mark Twain, he was clubbable (J.M. Barrie nominated him for the Garrick), he did after-dinner speeches to the joy of all. He wrote sixty-plus books and two memoirs. It was all a long way from his beginnings: a guinea-a-week clerk for the railways.

Back on the mean streets the laughs were rare and probably malicious, but not in Pett Ridge’s fantasies. If anyone created the myth of the chirpy cockney sparrer it was he. And none chirpier than Mord Em’ly. The word feisty had been coined a few years earlier; it was just in time. It comes from the obsolete English fist, a small dog, bounding with energy, with an underpinning of dialect feist, to strut about, to flirt or show off. Mord was all that. And then some.

She wasn’t, in fact, a cockney proper – her home turf was The Cut, near Waterloo – but for her creator’s purposes she might as well have been. Mord is of course poor, her mother a nervous wreck and her father ‘away’ (i.e. in prison) but if she runs in the streets as the junior member of the all-girl Gilliken Gang, there is no malice let alone hard-core criminality in her. (Nor in the gang whose leader subsequently joins the Salvation Army. They harass the local boys but the violence is verbal – and witty – rather than physical. We are not talking Crips or Bloods. Still, a girl gang in 1898…) Dicky Perrott of the Jago sees crime as an escape from wretchedness, but Mord Em’ly is above all out for fun, enjoying life, and giving as good, if not better than she gets. ‘How old might you be?’ ‘I might be a ‘undred and forty-nine,’ said Mord Em’ly … ‘I am jest close upon thirteen.’

Mord’s world is gentler than that of the Jago, and her slang reflects it. There is none of Dicky’s gutter cant in act the giddy goat, soft (a weakling), song and dance, stony (broke), bounder; it often appears as interjections: cheese it!, give over!, I don’t think, s’elp me greens!, language!, or in Mord’s imagery: someone has ‘a face on ‘im like half-past six’. It represents not her femininity – her verbal sophistication can outwit virtually every male she meets – but her ‘civilian’ status.

Language and what modernity terms attitude make her indomitable. She is poor, working class, she lives that life, but she gives no quarter. She is always, unconquerably, herself. Never more so than when, sent off by her mother on behalf of the family budget, she arrives in still bourgeois Peckham to become a maid.

‘This, dears,’ said the youngest sister, ‘ is the little girl who has come after the place. She looks willing, and my idea is that we might take her for a month, at any rate. Her mother is a good worker.’
‘I expect Letty is right,’ said one of the elder sisters. ‘ What is your name, my girl ?’
‘Mord Em’ly.’
Name interpreted by the youngest sister.
‘Oh, you must really learn to pronounce distinctly. You should say Maud, and then wait for a moment, and then say Em-ily.’
‘All very well,’ said Mord Em’ly, ‘ if you’ve got plenty of time.’
‘Are you a hard worker, my girl ?’
‘Fairish, miss. I ain’t afraid of it, anyway.’
‘I think we shall decide to call you Laura if you stop with us.’
‘Whaffor ?’ demanded Mord Em’ly.
‘We always call our maids Laura,’ explained the eldest of the ladies complacently. ‘It’s a tradition in the family. And my youngest sister there, Miss Letitia, will look after you for the most part. My other sisters are engaged in—er— literature; I myself, if I may say so without too much confidence, am responsible for’—here the eldest sister looked in a self-deprecatory manner at the toe of her slippers— ‘art.’
‘My sister Fairlie,’ went on the eldest lady in a lecturing style, and pointing with her forefinger, ‘ writes under the pen name of ‘ George Willoughby,’ and has gained several prizes, some of them amounting to as much as one guinea. My sister Katherine pursues a different branch. Her speciality to use a foreign expression, is the subject of epitaphs—queer epitaphs, ancient epitaphs, pathetic epitaphs, singular epitaphs, amusing—’
‘Talking about epitaphs,’ interrupted Mord Em’ly, ‘ how much do I get a year for playing in this piece ?’

Unsurpisingly Number 18 Lucella Road, SE does not hold her long. The bright lights of Walworth are far more alluring. 

What matters is freedom and after a series of misadventures which include reform school (and she is, to an extent ‘reformed’, or certainly enough to allow her discharge), she sails off with the one boy who, still on her own terms, she has permitted to woo her. They are destined for a new life in that emblematic land of liberty: Australia. Walworth may have teemed with Mords but real-life London would have trampled their joyous self-sufficiency. Like his cockneys, Mord’s merry life is Pett Ridge’s fantasy: its only hope was to journey to what was still a fantasy land.

image ©Gabriel Green

You can buy Green’s Dictionary of Slang, as well as Jonathon’s more slimline Chambers Slang Dictionary, plus other entertaining works, at his Amazon page. Jonathon also blogs and Tweets.