The New Cockney

New Ethnicities and Adolescent Speech in the Traditional East End of London

S. Fox

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137318251
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Alemán

The New Cockney provides a sociolinguistic account of speech variation among adolescents in the 'traditional' East End of London. Embedded in its social context, it focuses on the interaction and social practices within a single community and highlights some of the possible mechanisms for language change.

1

The Social and Historical Context

1.1 Introduction

This chapter provides the historical background against which the current situation in the traditional East End of London can be evaluated. In order to understand today’s profile of Tower Hamlets and to consider why changes to the traditional Cockney dialect might have taken place we must chart the changes that have occurred in the area from the time of the first redevelopments following World War I. Since that time, there has been a mass exodus of the white working-class population, whose families had lived in the East End of London for generations. Between 1901 and 1981 there was a staggering decline in the population of Tower Hamlets from 600,000 to just 140,000 and the reasons for this will be explored throughout this chapter.

The decline in population began to halt during the 1970s with the development of the dockland area but this regeneration did not attract the working-class families back; instead derelict council blocks stood side-by-side with luxury riverside homes and the area saw the emergence of a new kind of resident – the ‘yuppies’ as they were known – and Wapping, where the fieldwork for this research was carried out, and now other places in the borough such as Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs, have become trendy places to live and work for a more affluent and middle-class community. It is the home of the Canary Wharf development and is an area where one of the most rapid social and economic transformations has taken place anywhere in Britain.

Also in the 1970s, the relatively small pre-existing Bangladeshi community of Tower Hamlets began to grow in size. Changes in the immigration laws together with civil unrest between what was then West Pakistan (now Pakistan) and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) led to the predominantly male migrant workers who were already in London, sending for their families and subsequently settling in England. Their number continues to increase and today, the Bangladeshi community constitutes over 33 per cent of the borough’s population.¹

Before considering these factors in more detail, I should first clarify what I mean when I refer to the ‘East End’ and to ‘Cockney’ as, I believe, the perceptions of these concepts have changed from their original meanings. It has to be conceded that there is a difficulty in defining what the East End is and where its boundaries lie, as references to the East End now appear to cover the whole area east and northeast of the City of London, spreading into much of urbanised south Essex. In Map 1.1 the shaded areas show the inner and outer London boroughs east and northeast of the City of London and north of the River Thames that are generally included nowadays in references made to the East End. Similarly, references to ‘Cockney’ are no longer confined to the area with which that dialect was once associated (traditionally within the sound of ‘Bow Bells’ that is, the bells of St Mary-le-Bow Church in the City of London) but are also applied to those speakers who live in the areas outlined above. Indeed, Pointer (1996) uses the term ‘Cockney’ to refer to the accent spoken in Romford (situated in the outer London Borough of Havering) and its surrounding areas and frequently, in discussions of so-called ‘Estuary English’ (EE), the term ‘Cockney’ is applied to the accent of those speakers at the basilectal end of the EE continuum (see for example Coggle 1993).

However, this was not always the case. In its earliest conception, the East End corresponded to the old manor of Stepney, or Stibenhede, which belonged to the Bishop of London and was separated from Hackney in 1652 (Cox 1994). It can best be defined as the ancient Tower Hamlets, which serviced the Tower of London and provided yeoman to guard the tower (Taylor and Lloyd 1999). It was made up of the hamlets of Spitalfields, Stepney, Whitechapel, Wapping, Ratcliff, Shadwell, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, Bromley, Bow, Mile End New Town, Poplar, Blackwell and Shoreditch. The East End was also well defined, with its boundaries formed by the City of London to the west, the River Thames to the south, the River Lea to the east and Victoria Park, an open space transformed in the early 19th century, forming a natural demarcation to the north. This area today falls within the modern-day borough of Tower Hamlets (with a small proportion in the borough of Hackney), a name which was revived in 1965 with the creation of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and which was a referent to these ancient settlements (O’Neill 1999). This then is the area that I will refer to as the ‘traditional’ East End and is the concern of this book. I would argue that this area, the East End as it was originally defined, remained geographically static until the middle of the 20th century. It is within the living memory of the author of this book, and as described by O’Neill (1999), that parts of the borough of Newham and towns further east such as Barking and Romford which once came within the jurisdiction of Essex were deemed by traditional Eastenders to be too upmarket (or ‘posh’ as they were termed) to be considered part of the East End. Indeed, the town of Romford was almost rural and Romford market was still used as a cattle auction right up until 1958.

Map 1.1 Map of London boroughs: the shaded areas illustrate the region commonly referred to, in recent times, as the ‘East End’

If the perceptions of what constitutes the East End have changed then so too have perceptions of what it is to be Cockney. As Pointer (1996) acknowledges, the term ‘Cockney’ has, in the past, been used as a term for describing ‘a human being, being predominantly defined in terms of topography rather than speech’. Wells (1982) also agrees that Cockney was not only the name of the working-class dialect of the traditional East End but its speakers were also known as Cockneys. To be ‘a Cockney’ one was supposed to have been born within the sound of Bow Bells, a referent to the bells of St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, situated just within the City of London. It is likely that this definition is rooted somewhat in myth but even taking this as a loose definition it seems improbable that the term could be applied to someone born much further east than the River Lea boundary. One of the questions raised in this book is whether in fact this term can still be applied at all to the inhabitants of today’s traditional East End. These days the term ‘Cockney’ no longer appears to be applied to a particular group of people nor used as an identity marker but, rather, it has become synonymous with a particular accent used by a broad group of people in a wide southeastern area of England.

Why then have these perceptions of the East End and what it means to be Cockney changed in recent years? I hope that the answers to these questions will become apparent throughout this chapter and that it may also provide some insights as to how the notion of ‘Estuary English’ has come about. The fact is that the ‘Cockneys’, whose families had lived in the traditional East End for generations, have simply marched out of their homeland (sometimes through choice but more often through circumstances beyond their control) taking their language forms with them. In their place there is a new kind of ‘East Ender’ and it is doubtful whether they can be called ‘Cockneys’ anymore, although that is not to suggest that all features of the Cockney dialect have been erased. However, before we can explore further aspects of the dialect in the traditional East End of today, a sense of history is required.

1.2 Point of departure

The population of Tower Hamlets in 1981 was less than a quarter of what it had been at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1901, the figure was approximately 600,000 but, according to census figures, this had reduced to just 140,000 by 1981 (Forman 1989: 7). To put this into some kind of perspective, the number of people who left the East End during that period equates to the current population of the UK city of Liverpool.

The reasons for this mass exodus are twofold. Firstly, the two world wars inevitably took their toll, both through loss of life but also because many who were evacuated or who chose to move out during the war years simply did not go back. It is estimated that Tower Hamlets lost nearly half its population between 1931 and the end of World War II (Forman 1989: 18). Second, and perhaps more significantly in the light of discussions on the phenomenon of Estuary English, vast numbers of the population were moved out of the East End to the new estates of Dagenham and Harold Hill (then firmly in Essex but now usually referred to as part of the East End of London) and to the New Towns of Harlow and Basildon, both in the county of Essex. From the 1920s onwards, planners deliberately tried to reduce the number of people in the East End in order to try and alleviate some of its social and housing problems.

The first of the new estates to be built was the Becontree estate in Dagenham, the largest council housing estate in the world. It was built after 1921 by the London County Council to reward the families of soldiers who had served during the First World War. Between 1921 and 1932 over 25,000 houses were built within the Essex parishes of Barking, Dagenham and Ilford and over 186,000 people moved to the area (Abercrombie 1944). The estate was later extended to nearly 27,000 homes, occupied mainly by working-class Londoners.²

During the Second World War, planners worked on the post-war construction of Britain. In London, the County of London Plan was published in 1943 and detailed plans were drawn up for the East End. The main author of the plan, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, envisaged an East End made up of ‘neighbourhoods’ of approximately 100 acres each. Each neighbourhood would have a mixture of houses and high-rise flats with large open spaces in between. The aim was to provide four acres of open space per 1,000 population, which would ‘considerably reduce the gross housing density’ (Abercrombie and Forshaw 1943). The problem, however, was how the open space was going to be created since open space was somewhat lacking in the East End.

One solution was to reclaim land cleared of buildings ‘as a result of enemy action’ ...