The Brummy accent, Trigger and who was Chris?

I get responses to my posts in two ways; as comments on the site and as personal emails. I got a few emails about my post on Dreamboats and Petticoats and in particular about Birmingham, and the Hippodrome there.

The most famous thing about Birmingham is its accent; a lot of people like it and a lot of people don't. A lot of the people who live there don't like it and a lot who don't live there like it. So there is no set opinion.

The accent is a guttural one and I think the most famous user of a Birmingham accent is Julie Walters - but the first thing about the Birmingham accent is the way Birmingham is pronounced.

In Alabama they say BirmingHAM; in other words they pronounce that aitch and say the word ham, as Americans do in words that end with ham such as Buckingham. Whereas in Birmingham, England it is pronounced Burrr min gum. The Burr at the beginning defines how much of an accent you have.

I was in Wolverhampton a few years ago at the railway station and a woman at the front of the queue asked for a return ticket to Bar mingum, BARRingham!! The rest of the queue could hear this and started laughing, pulling faces and doing funny walks.

That old lady didn't want to be thought of as being common as muck and must have practised her delivery before asking for her ticket for quite some time – and then made a Hames of it!

Not everybody can do a good Brummy accent (which is what it's called) and I have heard Harry Enfield – whom I love – try one. The character he was playing was very rich and obviously lived in one of the southern suburbs of Birmingham and worshipped money. The trouble was he thought the Brummies would call it 'munay' – I loike munay, he was saying. - No they say 'munny'.

The accent is often confused with the Black Country accent which comes from Wolverhampton, and surrounding area, but the Black Country accent is more rural and is not so guttural as the Birmingham one – they say things like 'bay yow kicka bow agen a wow, 'ed it an bust it!!'

Yes, they do.

Translation: Can you kick a ball against a wall, head it and burst it - bay yow kicka bow agen a wow, 'ed it an bust it!!'

The answer being 'ah' of course – ah being 'yes.'

I mentioned the other day that Birmingham was in Warwickshire – well it is – or was. There is a place in Birmingham called 'The County Ground' where Warwickshire Cricket Club play and yet they say Birmingham is now in the West Midlands; Warwickshire is somewhere else!

The new counties have done nothing but confuse people; I know that there is no such place as Middlesex any more even though there is a Middlesex cricket club and that I live in Middlesex; I officially live in Greater London, of course. Doesn't sound very good does it, bit like giving everybody a number and calling them that. I can't see poets using it for inspiration.

There used to be two questions schoolboys knew the answer to – the biggest and the smallest counties in England. The biggest was Yorkshire and the smallest was Rutland. Now neither of them exist.

Yorkshire used to have three ridings – north, east and west – in fact the word 'riding' means – ha ha, what does it mean? Does it mean a third? Does it mean a third of Yorkshire or does it mean a third of an administrative anywhere?

Well it comes from the word thriding and there you can see how it came about – the thri being similar to a third but the word was lost through assimilation as it just sounded like riding – for example the word grandpah was changed into grandpa eventually due to assimilation – that's why I like to be called granddad; eventually that second 'd' will disappear – betcha.

Now we have West Yorkshire which is a county unto itself – the same with the North and South Yorkshires. And where is South Riding? South Riding is a book.

Of course I received an email from my brother too as he would come with me to the Hippodrome; in his email he said 'what about Roy Rogers and Trigger?'

Well, yes we were taken to see Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and they had Trigger with them, his horse. It was great for us kids and as usual we went to the stage door to see the stars coming out. That was interesting as they would come out and sign autographs (not Trigger). Who knew how close I would be to Roy Rogers later on in life although I didn't actually meet him.

Everybody would gather by that narrow stage door so autographs had to be signed and off the stars would sweep into their cars – not limos – and then . . . and then there was Trigger - when everybody else had gone!

He was the last one out and quite a few big men tried to squeeze him through that door. They pulled one way and Trigger pulled the other. The men wore brown cow-gowns and were pulling backwards but Trigger liked The Hippodrome and wanted to stay in there.

But the narrow door wasn't for Trigger; he had to come through the big door; the door they used for moving scenery in and out of the theatre but there was always the problem of getting Trigger to that big door and we could hear shouts and neighing and collopping (no I just made that word up) and everybody in the street looked towards that big door; then the van arrived.

We were in the street and, I suppose, it was some kind of horse box and it backed up to the stage door. Trigger took one look at it and wanted to go the other way but the men pulled on his reigns and one of the men was actually pulled a long by the great horse.

They eventually got him (Trigger, not the man) into the box which was Trigger's cue to kick the walls. It sounded like thunder or the hammering of a group of boot repairer trainees as the bloody great beast whinnied and snorted and kicked and kicked. I can still hear the kicks and screeches as he was driven away.

Off went the van in to the distance leaving behind it a neat pile of horse-shit.

The next time I saw Trigger he was stuffed and standing outside the Roy Rogers' museum in Victorville, California.

Of course Trigger was only the name the horse was playing in the movies. I believe he was 15 hands high which is about 65 inches. His real name was Golden Cloud and he lived for about 30 years.

Now here is a bit of family news: I don't usually make these posts personal and very rarely mention the name of a friend or someone in my family, so you will not be familiar with any of my families' names unless you know me personally.

I have a cousin, whom I have never met, who is older than me, I believe, and who likes looking into our family tree. A few years ago he sent me a list of my ancestors and it was very interesting. It went back to County Cork, in Ireland, in the year 1770; that was when Michael O’Leary stole a sheep and was transported to Australia for punishment. He left his wife/woman/partner at the time and she went off and married a Sullivan – or a suilleabhain, more like or even an o'suilleabhain – and that's the line on my father's side where I came from.

I looked at the names of some of them and they are names like Timothy, Patrick, Michael, Daniel, John, Mary and a few Jeremiahs. But there was no Chris and we wondered where it had come from as my dad was Chris as well – Christopher.

Those names, incidentally, have been in the family since the date of 1770. In the last 40 years or so it hasn't been a tradition to keep names in families and we're as guilty of it as any body but my son's middle name is Christopher and it's the same with his son.

My other cousin in Dublin thought that it might have been on our gran's side, maybe a brother. When the elder cousin had been in touch that time he said that very little was known about our grandmother and he wondered what she was doing in Dublin at the time she met our granddad. We knew she was from Kildare but he found no trace of her. This was when I was writing my last novel and I knew that my girl, Gertie, was a mystery to her family as to where she came from too – not a mystery to me as I wrote it!!

Then last year another cousin in Cork died and papers were found last week amongst her effects. It turns out that Chris was one of my grandmother's brothers after all and their parents died when when my grandmother and her siblings were children. It also transpires that the poor fella, Christopher Condron, was killed whilst in the Navy serving as a Leading Seaman on the ship HMS Canopus. He fell headlong into the hold – about 40 feet – whilst loading ammunition. It's very hard for me to find out the exact date of the accident but very proud am I to be named after such a man, even though by proxy through my father, and so on with my son and his son.

Then another startling fact came up – my grandmother's parents – Mr & Mrs Condron – were called Margaret and Chris – just like me and my wife.

Not a great thrill there for you but . . . it thrills me!!