For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Sentinels of our streets (17.09.13)

Boris described it as “a national treasure of global importance”, and yet one of London’s least-known museums boasts an average of just 10 visitors a day; it is the British Postal Museum & Archive.

We now live in a world of emailing, twittering, texting and Facebooking each other. I’m as bad as the next techie-junkie for why should I be writing this post!), but for over a century-and-a-half we managed to get by with the Royal Mail – Thank you very much.

Currently situated behind Mount Pleasant Sorting Office the archive in its title doesn’t do it justice. A collection of old phone boxes; every sort of pillar box ever built; two million stamps, many never issued and worth thousands; and all houses in two-and-a-half miles of archives.

The museum has its own 6-mile private underground stretching from Paddington to Whitechapel which was in use by the Post Office until 2003. There is also the British Postal Museum Store at Debden, Essex for larger objects.

When producers of the BBC series Lark Rise to Candleford want to recreate an authentic Victorian post office counter, they borrowed an original from here.

During the Blitz, the pillar box was often the only thing left standing on East London’s streets so deep are their foundations, but that should keep these sentinels of our streets immune from thieves with a JCB digger.

In 1874 the Post Office switched from green pillar boxes to the familiar red to make them more visible in urban fog – people kept bumping into them.

As with the telephone box letter writing and posting is becoming rarer, and we need a museum to celebrate this lost art. With £20 million from the National Lottery and a further £5 million from the sale of some of their collection the British Postal Museum & Archive plans to open a proper museum attracting 80,000 visitors a year, and it has plans to reopen a section of the old London Post Office Railway for tourist journeys.

With the imminent sale of Royal Mail, we might one day need a museum to show future generations this uniquely British institution.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Driving my Droschky (10.09.13)

In 2006 Stuart Pessok, Managing Editor of the trade’s biggest-selling newspaper Taxi ran a series entitled ‘We Speak Your Language’ in which he invited readers to submit examples of cab slang in an attempt to keep the language alive.

He put together a ten-page glossary of the cabbie’s lexis. It was divided into locations and buildings, ranks and shelters, drivers, cabs, passengers, the Public Carriage Office (The Knowledge and subsequent technicalities), money, the police and miscellaneous. Thus he produced the bible of the cabbie’s universe.

The Bell and Horns cab shelter will resound to tales of trapping a job as you set down a punter at the Shakespeare during the kipper season and take a bowler-hat to the Inside-Out Building only to find that he is a bilker.

Driving a cab is a lonely profession, for much of your working life is spent with only strangers for company. So when cabbies meet colleagues it is hardly surprising that much banter takes place.

As London’s cabbies have been working the streets for nearly 400 years it should come as no surprise that the trade is rich in parochial slang. We learned acolytes of The Knowledge have our own language, although, since it stems from a closed, occupational group it should properly be referred to as jargon. In this case, it is taxi-speak, which seems to have existed since the mid-19th century. It is, one might suggest, the ultimate take on ‘London in Slang’.

A butter-boy whose a Gantville Cowboy can easily find him (or her) self fouling the rank, which is not that he has enjoyed a curry the previous night. The Grapes of Wrath are a common occupational hazard another is finding one caught short. Should this happen when you are near the Aztec Temple the Iron Lung is but a short drive away. This is a urinal in Regency Place opposite Portuguese Tony’s Café where you can have a splosh with other mushers.

Jargon proper comes from within: the drivers and the vehicles. An owner-driver has been a musher since the 1880s; the cab roof being equivalent to a mush, an umbrella. The Gantville cowboys: predominantly Jewish cabbies who live around Gants Hill, Newbury Park, Ilford and Claybury; Copperarse or Leatharse: one who works long hours hence the condition of their trousers; Butterboy: a novice, likely to be that butter that won’t melt in an innocent mouth, this cabbie jargon, like many words is used by other professions, in this case the police.

To suck the mop is to be left on a rank when everyone else has got jobs (literally trips, figuratively passengers). Ranking on a long ’un is driving around in search of fares and hanging it up waiting outside hotels, lights off, ready to jump on the Billy Bunters (punters; an old squirt is an ageing gent, a mystery a young woman). A shtumer, originally a bad cheque, is a booked job that on arrival has evaporated.

Driving your sherbet you might be given a shtoomer by your radio circuit or at Harabs when on point you could forget to hit the zeiger (the meter maker’s name) when a punter gets in which would mean that you would do a stalker as you duck and dive through the Dirty Dozen in Soho.

Many nicknames for the destinations and ranks seem to have fallen into disuse: The lines of cabs that once marked The Ditch (Fleet Street) are no longer needed. The punning and disinformation terms have fallen out of favour. Bishopsgate: the Athenaeum wherein crowd the senior clergy; The Deaf and Dumb: the wartime ministry of information, The Flowerpot: Covent Garden market. Harley Street was The Resistance: as in fighting c. 1945 against the nascent NHS.

The Dirty Dozen refers to twelve streets that take you from Regent Street to Charing Cross Road without using Oxford Street: Crossrail has seen that one off. It’s a long time since anywhere in Soho qualified, as once did Archer Street, as Poverty Corner, the poverty presumably being that of the musicians who sought work there, rather than the drug dealers who traded amongst them. Admirals the name of Dolphin Square which has mansion blocks bearing the names of maritime heroes. Dead Zoo unsurprisingly refers to the Natural History Museum. Anyone who has been involved in lengthly litigation would like the name given to the home of many top solicitors’ offices Bedford Row – Shark’s Parade.

New ones have been invented The Wet Doughnut for the Diana memorial and the unlamented bendy-buses were dubbed sixty-foot accordions. The cab itself, better known as a sherbert (dab) has been given the moniker after a popular modern author Sandy McNab, while many of the old hands still refer to it by it Russian-Jewish name a droshky.

London cabbies once called the minicab men touts or scabs if they were illegal and little people if not. Now their cars are big and shiny, determine themselves as ‘private hire vehicles’ and pose as cut-price challenge the traditional cabbies. Do Addison Lee’s drivers have their own jargon? Is any among them likely to collect it? It is unlikely as has happened with the London Taxi profession.

Sarf London boy Graham Gates who passed The Knowledge in 1992 has continued compiling the original list started by Stuart Pessok and has written a book on this fascinating subject London Taxi Driver Slang published by Abson Books. Be Lucky!

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Is Cockney Rhyming Slang Really Dying or Is Someone Telling Porkies? (06.09.13)

A recent survey by the Museum of London suggests that the use of Cockney rhyming slang, a tradition which originated with the market traders and street vendors of London’s East End in Victorian times, is gradually dying out. As successive generations become attuned to different nuances of a constantly evolving language, it appears that Cockney rhyming slang has largely been superseded by the language of the internet age. Although immortalised in countless films, television programmes and written works it seems that Cockney rhyming slang, whilst still a recognisable mode of speech, is no longer regularly spoken even by East End Londoners themselves.

What is Cockney rhyming slang? Cockney rhyming slang involves the substitution of a common word with an alternative phrase that, in part, rhymes with the original word. The non-rhyming part of the phrase is then uttered in place of the original word, leaving the listener to work out what the speaker is referring to. For example, in Cockney rhyming slang the word ‘telephone’ is substituted for the phrase ‘dog and bone’. In usage, the phrase is shortened simply to ‘dog’. Therefore, in Cockney rhyming slang you might tell someone that you were going to telephone your wife by saying “I’m going to call my trouble on the dog”. (Trouble and strife = wife). Since a vast lexicon of Cockney rhyming slang phrases entered into common usage amongst East London’s tradesmen from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, conversations between those fluent in the language could be difficult to decipher by anyone not familiar with the practice. Opinions vary as to the purpose of Cockney rhyming slang; some believe that it enabled traders and criminals to discuss matters amongst themselves in a way that could not be understood by the casual listener, whilst others suggest that the adoption of a particular language register among a group of people acts as a means of strengthening and unifying the group. Or, it might simply have evolved to enable people to communicate more easily in the noisy environment of a crowded London marketplace.

The Evolution of Cockney Rhyming Slang Although its original purpose may have been lost, the appeal of Cockney rhyming slang sustained its continuing use and adaptation until well into the twentieth century. In their depiction of characters from the East End of London, television shows such as The Sweeney ( the title itself an example of rhyming slang for a unit of the Metropolitan police; ‘Sweeney Todd’ = ‘Flying Squad’), ‘Minder’ and ‘Only Fools and Horses’ popularised Cockney rhyming slang, spreading its appeal to a national rather than regional audience and prompting the expansion of its vocabulary with contemporary additions. Perhaps the best-known and most widely used modern example of a modern-day addition to Cockney rhyming slang is the phrase “It’s all gone a bit Pete Tong” whereby the famous dance DJ’s name popularly replaces the word ‘wrong’. Similarly, phrases such as ‘cream-crackered’ meaning ‘knackered’ (i.e. tired or worn out), ‘Barney Rubble’ for ‘trouble’ and ‘Hank Marvin’ for ‘starving’ have entered the public consciousness and remain in popular everyday use.

The Future of Cockney Rhyming Slang The findings of the Museum of London’s investigation into the currency of Cockney rhyming slang reveal that many people still recognise phrases that have entered into the widest usage throughout history, for example, ‘apples and pears’ for ‘stairs’, ‘plates of meat’ for ‘feet’ and ‘pork pies’ or ‘porkie pies’ for ‘lies’ but that this recognition no longer extends to actual regular usage of Cockney rhyming slang in speech, even among Londoners. Whilst new phrases have been introduced in the last two decades (‘Britney Spears’ for ‘beers’ for example) many of these new additions have failed to capture the wider public’s imagination suggesting that in the longer term, Cockney rhyming slang is losing its relevance for a contemporary and technologically literate generation. Sadly, it seems that where once we were having a ‘bubble bath’ (laugh), nowadays we’re content to LOL.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Passport for Pimlico (20.08.13)

Just south of bustling Victoria lies a little enclave comprising some of the quietest streets in London. It is an area full of intrigue and scandal, so isolated yet near to the seats of power if I were a spy I would seek out a pad here.

Roughly a lop-sided square with Lupus Street running along its southern edge and Warwick Way to the north, with Belgrave Road and Sutherland Street enclosing this labyrinthian pattern of parallel streets, one might be excused for thinking its layout was the easiest to learn while studying The Knowledge.

But there is a problem none of the roads comprising the Pimlico Parallelogram can be driven along their entire length as most are one-way in multiple directions.

The kernel of this post was that recently I asked a customer to direct me to their house, complaining, as usual, that I had given up years ago trying to learn the geography of his neighbourhood. It was then he told me that the bizarre one-way system was to protect MPs.

Apparently it is impossible to transverse this little area, this was in part to prevent the IRA targeting its high profile residents. I pointed out that if an individual was prepared to kill to further their cause, compliance of the Highway Code would not be high on their agenda, but he insisted that that was the case.

The resident safety would probably not have occurred to the speculative builder Thomas Cubitt who in the 1820s started to build these houses with their perfect Regency symmetry which were described in an 1877 newspaper article as:

“Genteel, sacred to professional men . . . not rich enough to luxuriate in Belgravia proper, but rich enough to live in private houses, its inhabitants were more lively than in Kensington . . . and yet a cut above Chelsea, which is only commercial.”

The area’s isolation was the setting for the 1949 comedy Passport to Pimlico where in a cellar children find an ancient parchment document which authenticates Pimlico as legally part of Burgundy and therefore outside British Government jurisdiction.

Now the area has over 350 Grade II listed buildings and without grand houses, Victorian serial killers, ancient monuments or tourist attractions it still feels detached from London.

With its proximity to The Houses of Parliament over the years the area has attracted Members of Parliament – and their mistresses. Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, the young women at the heart of the Profumo scandal were sub-tenants of Dolphin Square, but no one seems to remember which flats they occupied; some say Keeler lived in 501 or 601. Other famous or infamous politicians have included Sir Winston Churchill, Jomo Kenyatta, Charles De Gaulle and Oswald Mosley.

With MI5 and MI6 a short walk away this seems to make Pimlico and perfect spot for those protecting – and spying on – the corridors of power . . .

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Back to Black (09.08.13)

It now has been 17 years since I started pushing a cab around London looking for fares and in that time I’ve probably driven most post-war taxis. Even before I had qualified going to a trade exhibition at Islington’s Business Design Centre got me a test drive in one of those boxy Metros. They always had trouble shifting those utilitarian boring beasts.

When I was first let loose on the streets of London my baptism of fire was an old – no very old – FX4. Registered in 1982 at a time when air conditioning was something an East Ender massaged into their hair, and without power steering, your arms would ache negotiating its two tonnes of steel around London with a penchant for swinging left unannounced when squeezing between tight gaps.

When the old girl gasped its last (well the drive to the meter broke) it was saying just let me die in peace, I’ve taken my last paying passenger.

A succession of Fairways followed some you couldn’t lock the doors, others that the only means of exiting the driver’s compartment was via the window and opening the door from the outside. One vehicle accumulated rainwater beneath the for hire sign to ensure the driver had a shower whenever he had occasion to brake heavily.

I’ve owned a more modern TX1, its shape unfairly likened to a blancmange, as with most of its siblings it had the ability to track down top secret transmissions. Perplexedly at certain ‘hot spots’ (outside the Langham Hotel is one of them), the central locking on the fob key would fail to work, occasioning a complicated procedure punching in PIN numbers to get the vehicle started again.

I should have headed this post ‘Tickled Pink’ but some enterprising cabbie has beaten me to that for recently I’ve been driving what must be the most photographed cab in London – it is pink.

A neighbour, also a cabbie, declared that it matched my eyes, while I’ve received opprobrium from Aussies standing outside a local hostelry, “strewth mate!” I think was the refrain at the time.

My postman just had to knock to deliver a parcel which clearly fitted the letterbox, so he could voice his mirth at seeing ‘Pinky’ parked outside.

Ladies would choose my distinctive livery over my more conservative colleagues while many will strike up a conversation, rather a novelty for decades the fair sex have ignored my presence.

Henry Ford might have generated the quip ‘any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it’s black’ after he realized that drying paint took the longest of any step in the assembly line and had his factory switch to the fastest drying paint they could find, which, of course, was black. But I think old HF would be speachless at the sight of Pinky.