Before getting into the subject of this week’s post, a quick update to last week’s post on Jacob’s Island. The comments from readers are always appreciated, and often add lots of additional detail to each post, and such was the case with last week’s.

I stated in the post that probably Charles Dickens had first used the name Jacob’s Island to define the area around Jacob Street because I could not find any earlier reference, however I had a comment from Matthew, who wrote an MA dissertation about “The History of Jacob’s Island”, and wrote that:

“The earliest known map to show the name “Jacob’s Island” is dated 1610. The copy I referred to back then was held in the Minet Library, but I suspect that the original is held by the Hatfield House library, as it was commissioned by Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury. The map title is “Earl of Salisberies (sic) Land” and shows the plan outline of Jacob’s Island, surrounded by waterways. It appears to be an accurate plan projection, but with pictographic representation of buildings.”

So the name was in use well before Charles Dickens set some key parts of Oliver Twist in the streets surrounded by the ditches.

Now to today’s subject – the title will become clear at the end of the post.

Whilst researching last week’s post on Jacob’s Island, I came across a number of news reports covering many aspects of criminality in 19th century London, some of which mentioned Flash Language.

A few years ago I wrote about the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, a dictionary published in 1785 by Captain Francis Grose, which listed the words and phrases, along with their meanings, that he heard on the streets, in pubs, the docks, on ships, and from anywhere where those who were not members of so called “polite society” would congregate.

Flash appears to have been a strand of language that was used mainly by those engaged in some form of criminal activity, but many of the words within Flash did make their way into everyday use. Flash also took hold in Australia due to the number of convicts who were transported.

Language is fascinating as it provides a window into everyday life in the past, and with Flash, we can get a glimpse of the type of criminality that took place across the streets of London, and how those engaged in such activities used Flash as a means of keeping their activities private.

A suspect’s use of Flash would be used in evidence in court to help demonstrate that they were of the criminal class, such as in a court case in 1817 when two people were accused of stealing from a public house and, “two witnesses proved that the parties conversed in flash language“.

In an 1829 report about a forgery case: “Cross-examined by Mr. Hunt, about five years ago he first became connected with the Police. he could not say what the price of a flimsey, or forged note, was now. The price of a flimsey then, in the flash language, was ten bob (ten shillings). That was, that a £1 bad note was sold for 10 shillings.”

In April 1842, there was a report about three girls, aged between 16 and 19, who had been charged by the overseers of Clerkenwell with disorderly conduct in the workhouse and refusing to work. They had been paupers in the workhouse from their infancy, and whilst the parish had found situations for them on several occasions, it was reported that they left every position within a very short time, and returned to the streets and then applied to the parish for relief and readmitted to the workhouse.

They had probably been institutionalised, having been in the workhouse for almost all their lives.

They rebelled in the workhouse, stopped working and returned to their beds, where “they continued bellowing loudly, singing flash songs, and making use of profane language, until some policemen were called in, and with great difficulty they were taken to the station-house.”

As could be expected, flash language was also used by those in prison, and prisoners who used the language were seen to be of the worst type of criminal.

The following is from the “Minutes off Evidence on the Prison of the Metropolis” given in 1818 to a committee established to look into prison conditions. It is a small part of the evidence given to the committee by William Robert Henry Brown who was the Keeper of Newgate Prison. He was being asked about the conditions in Newgate when he took over responsibility for the prison from Mr. Newman, the previous keeper, and was asked about the Wardsmen, prisoners who had the role of keeping “a proper degree of discipline in the wards”:

“Are the wardsmen prisoners? – Yes. When I took possession of that prison I found that the wardsmen in general were persons composed of characters of the blackest dye. It was considered by Mr Newman, that these kind of characters were the fittest to govern the wards; consequently there was flash language, which was consequently kept up, and blasphemy was encouraged. I thought it best to take the opposite approach, and take the best men that I could find. to see what effect that would have; and it has produced very beneficial results, inasmuch that I do not hear, in my different visits to the wards, that blasphemy or flash language which I did when I first came to the prison.”

Flash language was not used just by the criminal classes as many of the terms had crept into normal usage, including by medical students, as this report from the London Morning Herald on the 24th of December 1825 records: “Among the night-charges brought before R.J. Chambers for investigation yesterday, was one in the watch-house book of St. Saviour’s parish, Southwark, in which three students belonging to one of the Borough Hospitals were accused of what is called in the flash language ‘a lark’ – that is, doing something mischievous by which others are either injured or annoyed.”

The students were drunk, and were accused of knocking on the doors of local residents, asleep in their beds, at one in the morning. They had to “pay the usual fine to the King for intoxication , and give the watchmen a trifling remuneration for their trouble”.

Flash was also used in the press to emphasis a point, such as in the following from an 1810 article about a publication that a Mrs Clarke was intending to publish of letters which included references to certain members of Court:

“The friends of Colonel Wardle and the enemies of the Duke of York, are much alarmed and annoyed at the expected appearance of this publication; and they are already sedulously endeavouring to prepossess the public against the impression it is calculated to make. Nothing is so detestable in the eyes of a thief as the evidence of an accomplice; and when one of the gang is suspected of an intention to inform, or to turn nose, as the flash language calls it, that person is immediately denounced as an informant, excluded from the protection of the laws of honour that prevails among thieves, and almost marked as a wretch who it would be meritorious to assassinate.”

Slang language had been in use for centuries before the 18th and 19th century use of Flash and the books published to provide definitions of the Flash language, indeed slang has probably existed for a long as there have been formal languages.

As an example, the following article appeared in October 1835, and discusses a pamphlet from 1591, which looked at the slang language used by thieves, and links what was called Pedlar’s French with Flash Language:

“THE ‘SWELL MOB’ IN QUEEN ELIZABETH’S REIGN’ Robert Green, in his ‘Notable Discovery of Coozenage’, a quarto pamphlet of excessive rarity, printed in black letter in 1591, informs us that ‘coney-cathers’ and ‘cross-bylers’ were much to be feared and carefully avoided, in his time. The first, he says, are fellowes in goode fashion and apparrell, who will find the means to introduce themselves into good society, and then endeavour to draw persons to card playing, at which the devilish thieves, by cheating winneth all the money. The pick-pockets and cut-purses are not half so dangerous ‘to meete withal as these same coozening and coney-cathers’. The ‘cross-byters’ seem, by the authors description, to have likened more to the ‘swell mob-men’ of the present day than the coney-catchers. In the course of the pamphlet is a slang dictionary, containing ‘the wordes used by cross-byters’ and other villaines’. In 1592 there appeared a pamphlet on ‘coney catching’, which as the title page states. ‘gives the meanes to understane the Pedlar’s French (flash language), and the meanes to understande the counterfeit cranke – all writ by a Justice of the Peace of great authoritie, who hath had the trouncing of many of those villaines.’. This curious publication gives several instances of ‘the swell mob men’ of the olden time ‘plundering merchants counting houses’ and ‘several of the palaces of the nobilitie in Drurie-lane and the Strande.'”

In some news reports there are accounts of police officers consulting their “vocabulary of flash language”, as well as individuals building up their own dictionaries of Flash, there were also a number of publications providing a comprehensive list of terms.

One of these was part of a very comprehensive and wide ranging review into crime and prisons, published in 1839, and titled:

“Poverty, Mendicity, and Crime, Or, The Facts, Examinations, &c. Upon which the Report was Founded: Presented to the House of Lords”

It was based on a report given to the House of Lords by W.A. Miles, and a typical advert for the publication (5 shillings from Shaw and Sons, 137 and 138 Fetter Lane) stated that:

“There is scarcely anything connected with crime, from its first germ through the various stages of its development in the nurseries of low lodgings, flash houses and fences, to its maturity in the prisons, of which most ample and accurate information is not afforded.”

The report has a fascinating amount of textual data covering crime and prison in London as well as numerical data, and a theme that comes across is that many of the issues when the book was published in 1839, are much the same today.

One of these was crowding and conditions in prisons, including the issue of cells being shared, rather than an individual having their own cell, which was believed would lead to better discipline and conditions in the prison, as well as a more favourable outcome when the prisoner left prison.

The following table using data from the book lists the main prisons within London, and shows that the overall number of prisoners was 3165, but the prisons only had sufficient cells to allow 1105 prisoners to have their own individual cells, and a further 2060 cells would be needed to achieve a cell per prisoner:

Another aspect of criminality that has not changed is the ratio of crime to population within London.

Between 1830 and 1834, the number of criminals per head of population in the manufacturing districts of the country were reported as shown in the following table:

Only Bristol has a worse ratio than London, possibly because, as with London, Bristol was a major port city, and ports meant lots of expensive goods being imported and exported, transient populations, variable employment levels, wealthy residents etc.

Lancashire, which was the county of the port city of Liverpool has the third highest criminal to population ratio which tends to support the argument that port cities had more crime than other parts of the country.

It is hard to compare with today, as there appears to be very little criminal to population ratios published, with crimes per head of population being the common measure in use.

Using the “Crime in England and Wales: Police Force Area data tables” from the Office for National Statistics, gives a total recorded crime rate (excluding fraud) in London (City and Metropolitan police forces) as 101.4 per 1,000 of population – a higher rate than any other police force area in England and Wales, although at a more granular area level within a police force area, Cleveland has a rate of 128.4 per 1,000.

The types of crime today are broadly similar to those of the early 19th century, and I suspect for many centuries before, with theft being the most common crime at 46.3 per 1,000 today, which is also the type of crime most commonly reported in the past.

Back to the Flash language, and at the end of the book there is a “Dictionary of the Flash or Cant Language; Known to every Thief and Beggar”, and the following is a random selection of examples, which also show the types of crimes that the law-abiding on London’s streets had to be careful of:

• Bloak – a gentleman, – Fancy Bloak – a fancy man. – Swag Chovey Bloak – a marine store dealer, who buys stolen property
• Booked – caught, taken, disposed of
• Boozing ken – drinking shop
• Bouncer – one who contrives to steal while bargaining with the shop keeper
• To Buzz – to pick pockets. In the following print, in the auction room to the left, a raffish-looking, smartly dressed man is picking the pocket of a countryman:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

• Cadger – a beggar
• Cocum – very cunning and sly. To fight cocum, to be wary
• Crocusses – men who travel about the country, pretending to be doctors; they sell their medicine always a panacea
• Cross Cove – a thief
• Dookin – fortune telling
• Doss – a bed
• Drag – a coach
• Dragsman – one who cuts trunks from the backs of carriages. They have a quick horse and a little cart, and drive off with their booty in an opposite direction. They are mostly about New Cross, or any neighbourhood badly lighted, or where there are several cross-roads
• Duffer – a man who hawks things
• Everlasting Staircase – the treadmill
• Fakement – a begging letter
• Family men – thieves
• Fawney – a ring
• Fenced – sold
• Fences – buyers of stolen property
• To Free – to steal
• To Free a Prad – to steal a horse
• On the Game – thieving
• Glaze – a window
• Starring the Glaze – breaking the window quietly by means of a diamond or nail
• Spanking the Glaze – break a window with the fist
• The Highfly – beggars, with letters, pretending to be broken-down gentlemen, captains, &c
• Hip Inside – inside coat pocket
• To Hocus – to stupefy a person by putting opium or some other drug in his liquor, and when he is asleep robbing him
• To Hoop it – to run away
• Jomer – a fancy girl, – term of friendship
• Hicksters – a pair of breeches
• Kidding on – to entice one on
• Kidment – a pocket handkerchief, pinned to the pocket with a corner hanging out to entrap thieves
• Kidsman – one who boards and lodges boys, training them to become thieves
• Lagged – transported. The following print shows a crowd of prisoners sentenced to transportation being led by rope, with Newgate prison in the background:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

• Leary – cunning
• Legged – in irons
• Long-tailed ones – large bank notes
• Lush Cove – public-house
• Lushy – drunken
• Marking – watching, observing
• Mobs – companions. Working with mobs. Robbing with companions
• Moll – a girl
• Mushroom Fakers – itinerant umbrella makers and repairers
• Nailing – stealing
• Nobblers – confederates of the thimble-men, who appear to play to induce others to do the same
• On the Nose – to watch, look out
• Pall – an associate
• Palming – robbing in shops by pairs, one bargains as with intent to purchase, while the other watches his opportunity to steal
• Paper Makers – a nickname for beggars who pretend to belong to a paper mill, or that they are agents to collect rags
• To Patter – to talk
• Plant – to mark a person out for plunder, also to deposit in some secret or settled place
• Prigg – a house thief
• Pudding Snammer – one who steals from a cook shop
• Reader – a pocket book
• Redge – gold
• Roll of Snow – piece of Irish linen
• Ruin – gin
• Sailors – turnpike sailors, beggars who go about disguised as sailors
• Sawney – bacon
• Screws – housebreaking implements
• Shop Bouncing – shoplifting
• Skilley – nickname for a broth given on board the hulks
• Slumming – passing bad money
• Smasher – a passer of bad money
• Snaggling – driving geese into a corner in a stubble-field; the man then gets into a ditch and throws among them a line with a hook and a worm at the end; the goose swallows it, is pulled away and bagged
• Sneaks – boys who creep into houses, down areas, or into shops, &c. to enter premises, while another who is called a crow watches
• Sneezer – a snuff-box
• Snow-dropping – stealing linen off a hedge
• To Split – to inform
• Spunks – matches
• Spunk-fencers – match sellers
• Swag – stolen property, also a portion of, a quantity of
• Swell – well dressed person
• Tats – old rags
• To Tip – to pay
• Togs – clothes
• To Tout – to watch
• Turkey Merchants – purchasers of plundered silk, from the weavers, who rob the over-weight
• Watchmakers – the idle and dissolute, who live in Calmet’s buildings, Oxford-street
• Watersman – a sky-coloured silk pocket handkerchief
• Wedge – silver
• Wedge-feeder – silver spoon
• To Work – to rob, or act in any way according to the divers occupations of thieves, &c
• Work the Bulls – to get rid of bad 5s pieces
• Yack – a watch
• Yokel – a countryman

There were also Flash terms for most denominations of money, and perhaps highlighting their importance in being easy to steal and sell, each type of silk pocket handkerchief had its own name, again, just a small example:

• Billy – is the general term for silk pocket handkerchiefs of all sorts
• Belcher – close striped pattern
• Blood-red Fancy – all red
• Cream Fancy – any pattern on a white ground
• Green King’s-man – any pattern on a green ground
• Randle’s-man – green, with white spots

At the end of the list of flash words and terms, there are a couple of examples, showing first a paragraph of Flash, followed by a translation. One of these is reproduced below:

First the Flash paragraph:

“I buzzed a bloak and a shakester of a reader and a skin. My jomer stalled. A cross-cove, who had his regulars, called out ‘cop bung’ so as a pig was marking, I speeled to the crib, where I found Jim had been pulling down a sawney for grub. He cracked a case last night and fenced the swag. He told me as Bill had flimped a yack and pinched a swell of a fawney, he sent the yack to church and got three finnips and a cooter for the fawney.”

Then the translation of the above:

“I picked the pocket of a gentlemen and a lady of a pocket-book and a purse. My fancy girl stood near me and screened me from observation. A fellow-thief, who shared with me my plunder, called out to me to hand over the stolen property, so as somebody was observing my manoeuvres, I ran away to the house, where I found James had provided something to eat, by stealing some bacon from a shop door. He committed a burglary last night and had disposed of the property plundered. he told me that Bill had hustled a person and obtained a watch; he had also robbed a well dressed gentlemen of a ring. The watch he sent to have he works taken out and put into another case, (to prevent detection) and the ring realized him three five-pound notes and a sovereign.”

One of the prints in the post above showed prisoners who were Lagged, or in the process of being transported for their crimes. Transportation was frequently to Australia, and prisoners took the Flash language with them.

To help those responsible for managing prisoners in Australia, “A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language” which was written by James Hardy Vaux in 1812, and the dedication in the book was:

“To Thomas Skottowe, Esq. of His Majesty’s 73rd Regiment, Commandant of Newcastle, in the Colony of New South Wales, and one of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for that Territory.”

The author of the comprehensive vocabulary, James Hardy Vaux, was a prisoner in Newcastle, New South Wales, as the following note in the book explains:

“The Author (a prisoner under sentence of transportation for life) having, by an alleged act of impropriety, incurred the Governor’s displeasure, was at this period banished to Newcastle, a place of punishment for offenders; these sheets were there compiled during his solitary hours of cessation from hard labour; and the Commandant was accordingly presented by the Author with the first copy of his production.”

James Hardy Vaux was described as a swindler and pick-pocket, and he was transported twice to Australia, the second time for life after trial at the Old Bailey. As well as the Vocabulary of Flash, he also wrote a memoir of the first part of his life, which was published in London. In a review of the book, he was described: “Mr Vaux seems to have had natural abilities which under a better system of education, would have ensured his prosperity’ but, destitute of good principles from his very infancy, the perversion of his talents only rendered him a more conspicuous object of infamy than his lower associates.”

During his second transportation, he absconded and escaped to Ireland, where he was convicted of using forged bank notes, and was again sentenced for transportation – a third time.

James Hardy Vaux from the frontispiece of his Memoirs:

Attribution: State Library of New South Wales, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Looking at the use of slang such as Flash is another way of understanding past life in London, but what of the title to the post – Alderman Lushington Is Concerned.

In Flash, as it still does, the word Lush was associated with different descriptions of drink and drunkenness, for example;

• Lush – to drink, speaking of a person who is drunk, also beer or liquor of any kind
• Lush-Crib or Lush-Ken – a public-house or gin-shop
• Lushy – drunk, intoxicated
• Lushy-Cove – a drunken man

And the phrase Alderman Lushington Is Concerned used the word Lush to provide a more graphic and humorous way of saying that someone was drunk – and if you want a challenge, try working that bit of early 19th century Flash language into conversation in the coming months.