Tommy French: How British First World War Soldiers Turned French into Slang

By Julian Walker

‘Napoo’, ‘compray’, ‘san fairy ann’, ‘toot sweet’ are anglicized French phrases that came into use on the Western Front during the First World War as British troops struggled to communicate in French. Over four years of war they created an extraordinary slang which reflects the period and brings the conflict to mind whenever it is heard today. Julian Walker, in this original and meticulously researched book, explores the subject in fascinating detail. In the process he gives us an insight into the British soldiers’ experience in France during the war and the special language they invented in order to cope with their situation. He shows how French place-names were anglicized as were words for food and drink, and he looks at what these slang terms tell us about the soldiers’ perception of France, their relationship with the French and their ideas of home. He traces the spread of ‘Tommy French’ back to the Home Front, where it was popularized in songs and on postcards, and looks at the French reaction to the anglicization of their language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526765949

Julian Walker

Julian Walker is a social development practitioner, with a background in social anthropology and research interest related to urban spatial rights, gender and social identity. He is an Associate Professor at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit of University College London, where he is the Co-Programme Leader of the MSc Social Development Practice, the Director of the DPU's Training and Advisory Services, and the Director of the DPU's Gender Policy and Planning Programme.

Book preview

Introduction

Some time ago, on a trip with some friends to the Western Front, we were settling ourselves onto the Eurostar when there was an announcement recommending that we keep an eye on our baggage, the French version ending with the phrase d’équipages . One of my companions, with the quick verbal wit of a Merseysider, picked this up and asked, ‘Dicky Parge? Is there a Dicky Parge on board?’ Dicky Parge immediately became a passenger on the train, to whom all kinds of mishaps and problems were attributed. On the way back a few days later we asked the train guard if anything untoward had happened to Dicky Parge; unsurprisingly, he did not get the joke.

The English relationship with the French language is indicative of the complicated and flexible relationship between the two nations and cultures. For 350 years after the Battle of Hastings the nobility preferred French to English, and speaking French was a way to get on in society, a social grace that was still evident in the nineteenth century. French has become the standard modern foreign language taught in schools, and for many in the twentieth century the foreign language they were most likely to have to use; singing classes in junior school in the 1960s included songs referring back to the wars against Napoleon. Caxton in the preface to the Aeneid, one of the first books printed in England, gives the story of a Yorkshire merchant who uses his own dialect to try to buy eggs from a woman in Kent; she does not understand him, and assumes he is speaking French, the archetypal foreign language. For over a thousand years, speakers of English have been mangling words from the French language and bringing them into their own speech. For this process, ‘borrowing’ is the term usually used, curiously, where ‘adopting’ might be more appropriate, though some terms have been returned to French – often occasioning imagined or real grumbling by French linguists – such as ‘le parking’, ‘le challenge’, or ‘le coach’. There is one famous term that shows this happening spectacularly – ‘rosbif’, the name given to British soldiers on the Continent some time during the nineteenth century, possibly earlier. British soldiers were popularly supposed to eat roast beef, ‘roast’ and ‘beef’ both being words that moved from Anglo-Norman into Middle English during the Medieval period.

Borrowed or adopted words usually show an alteration of sound, as often happens when foreign words are adapted to suit home mouths; but sometimes English happily adopts the French pronunciation with little or no change, as in the case of ‘chauffeur’ or ‘baguette’. Or there might be a compromise, as in ‘garage’ or ‘café’. We regularly use words that have been retained as obviously French – ennui, double entendre, faux pas – which bring no reaction from Spellcheck on the computer. Embracing a variety of adaptations of sound and spelling, English has taken thousands of French words and made them its own.

Possibly the most concentrated mangling of the French tongue in English-speaking mouths, and the subject of this book, involves British soldiers abroad again, between 1914 and 1919, as the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) found itself singularly ill-equipped to communicate with its nearest allies. The 1914 army was initially a regular force, most of whom had served in various colonial theatres, and if its soldiers had fluency in or familiarity with any foreign language it was more likely to be Urdu than French – a soldier called Billy in 1914 was reported as trying to order a drink using ‘English, Hindustani and Chinese, with one French word to help out’.¹ As the regular soldiers were quickly supplemented by territorials, and then huge numbers of volunteers, and from 1916 by conscripted men, knowledge of French might come from school lessons, consisting largely of sentences learned by rote, and bewildering conjugations of irregular verbs, or for the better off, from phrases applied from phrasebooks designed for day-trips to Boulogne. A few clerks might know French for foreign commerce, though this was more likely to be conducted in English, along the routes of imperial trade. Generally only for the very wealthy, for whom foreign travel by train was a development of the grand tour, was French a comfortable means of communication. There was however a widespread use of recognisably French words as a way of indicating increased social status – ‘restaurant’ superseded ‘chophouse’ during the nineteenth century, people who wanted to sound respectable used the ‘toilet’ rather than the ‘privy’, and ‘lovers’ became ‘fiancés’. These, however, acted to make the language more distant from working-class and lower-middle-class standards.

During the First World War the major difference in this friendly nudging of French into English was that it took place largely on French soil, as millions of British soldiers, drivers, nurses, airmen, mechanics, clerks, engineers and doctors found that their knowledge of French, if any, was close to useless. For many of them French was neither intelligible nor necessary – ‘why for goodness sake didn’t the blinkin’ Froggies speak English’. Many French and Belgian people living and working in the areas where English-speaking soldiers were stationed (by 1916, only about 15 per cent of the people in unoccupied Belgium were Belgian) quickly learned English to realise the commercial potential of so many hungry and thirsty mouths. But even so, communication across languages is often governed by laziness – if a working lingua franca can be created with the minimum of discomfort, then everyone is happy. For the soldiers there was frequently the need to communicate in situations that might have ramifications of life or death, making it necessary to learn recognisable versions of certain terms, concerning places, foods, procedures, equipment, situations, and people. Adopting and adapting, the soldiers, with a bit of help from the locals, created their own version of the Gallic language, which may be called Tommy French; this term indicates the role of the English-speaking soldier (not so much the officer) in constructing a version of French that was accepted and used by his comrades and by many French people. It was, as Brophy and Partridge say, ‘something neither English nor French’.

This study of the encounter between two languages uses research material that includes letters, postcards, official documents, newspaper articles, academic studies, memoirs, novels, cartoons, jokes, comics, trench journals, dictionaries, voice recordings and photographs. It records a lingua franca that was used by soldiers to soldiers, soldiers to locals, soldiers to families back home, newspapers to civilians, French and Belgian locals to soldiers from Britain, Canada, Australia, South Asia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States; it was a language that broke down the barriers of language and helped to cement the unity of the Entente Cordiale. It is a story of changing fashions in slang and of the development of personal ways of speaking, though much of it was remarkably unchanging, for though people fell and were replaced, and moved around almost constantly, the situations remained much the same. The voices are those of soldiers, drivers, nurses, prisoners, teachers, people who were curious, afraid, surprised, bewildered, tired, angry, and for the most part realising that they had to get on with the job in hand. They are mostly male voices, as the Western Front was an overwhelmingly male environment; the tones are those of the male environments of the times, the factory and farm, the shop-floor, the office, the camp, the church choir, public school, the street, the pub and the university. They are often misogynistic, more often sentimental, hopeful or nostalgic in their view of women; but there are also the female voices of nurses, canteen servers, teachers, drivers, wives, mothers and lovers, who shared and developed the slang.

It is drawn from a range of individual voices, such as Lancelot Spicer, who felt his French improved during his time in France, and who won the Military Cross; Frank Richards, who began and ended the war as a private, and later wrote Old Soldiers Never Die, recording his comrades’ mangling of French in his memoir of his war experiences, one of hundreds of memoirs written by former soldiers; Kathleen Morse, American YMCA canteen-assistant, observing the doughboys’ impatience; Ian Hay’s Sergeant Goffin, blustering his way through the French language in a shop in Flanders; and Kate Finzi, sent to France as a dresser with the Red Cross, helping her colleagues with her knowledge of languages. There are four people whose work collecting the slang of the time did the groundwork for any studies of the English language during the First World War: Edward Fraser and John Gibbons, and John Brophy and Eric Partridge, authors respectively of Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases (1925), and Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914–1918 (1930). Edward Fraser was a military history writer, whose books on the Napoleonic Wars are still widely read; John Gibbons served in the London Regiment through the war, and in 1935 wrote a popular humorous memoir of his experiences, Roll On, Next War: the common man’s guide to army life. John Brophy lied about his age and enlisted in 1914 at the age of 14; he later became a writer, on literature and art, and a novelist, his semi-autobiographical 1928 novel The Bitter End being an exemplar of the mixture of nostalgia and bitterness that characterised the ‘war book boom’ of the time. Eric Partridge served as an ANZAC in Egypt, Gallipoli and on the Western Front, and went on to become an authority on English slang, writing several books on the English language, including Slang Today and Yesterday in 1933 and the magisterial Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English in 1937. But for the most part, this book depends on the use of language by mostly forgotten people who made a little creativity in a world of destruction.

While the corpus of words that form the basis of this study is quite small, it tells us a lot about the nature of the relationship between France and the vast number of English-speaking troops and staff who occupied the north-east of the country for over four years. Small nuances and connections show the attempts and the limits of communication, the reaching out and the retrenchment. The sources of slang expressions gave rise to arguments that still continue: was ‘cushy’ from the Hindustani (now known as Urdu) ‘khush’, meaning ‘pleasant’, or from the French coucher (lie down); Kipling was using the Urdu form in this way in the 1880s, but it may have been reinforced by the similarity to the French word. As an example of how a word could create its own microculture, the Australian dictionary of soldier slang, Digger Dialects, extended the use of coucher to ‘coushay full marching order’, meaning to go to sleep in full kit. If this gives rise to images of French academicians wringing their hands, a warning: the quoted texts contain horrors of French spelling or usage that may distress teachers of the language; but spellings such as ‘pommes de terre frits’ or ‘apres la guerre’ have been retained as the forms in the original texts.

In November 1914 an editor in the weekly magazine Home Chat wrote, ‘Some day a whole book will be written on the language troubles which confronted our troops, suddenly landed in a strange country, whose ways, as well as their language are vastly different from our own.’ Rather late, but this study attempts to be that book.

Chapter 1

Parley Voo

(Two English visitors to France are in a costumier’s shop)

This is from Parlez Français , a revue written in November 1914 by F. Frith Shepherd and Fred Karno, who had recently discovered Charlie Chaplin, and who was commemorated in the song ‘We are Fred Karno’s Army’. This sequence tells us a lot about anglophone attitudes to French at the time – that it was strongly connected with sex, that it was a poor translation of English, that it was funny, and that French people who didn’t understand this pastiche French could not understand their own language. All of these attitudes, apparently present in soldiers’ attempts at French, were by the early twentieth century deeply embedded in the relationship with France and the French. ¹

One of the factors was that French had over a millennium added grammatical structures and masses of vocabulary to the English language, so that on the face of it, there were as many similarities as there were differences. Earlier in the revue Solomon confuses garçon for ‘gasman’: playing with the sound of language, for which French was a useful tool, can be found in the prevalence of the pun, word jokes, pastiches, and parodies of accents, much of which has lasted to the present.

In the era following the Napoleonic wars, tourist travel across the Channel, in both directions, gradually became more straightforward, though after 1815, 70–80 per cent of it was from England to France, around 14,000 people annually.² By 1910, travel to France by trains and ferries was within the budget of the middle classes, though still fairly expensive: The Briton in France in 1904–1906 listed five starting points in London, with the shortest sea passage lasting one hour, and tickets to Paris from £2 16s down to £1 5s (third class, night service, and twenty-five times the price of the phrasebook, or twice the cost of a night in a first-class Paris hotel). Enthusiasm for France had been kindled by the Entente Cordiale, the agreement between France and England made in 1904, which ended the two countries’ isolation in terms of European alliances, and recognised their respective spheres of influence and colonial control in other parts of the world. It also pitted the two countries against Germany, increasing the tension between Britain and Germany, and consequently reinforcing the attractions of France. As The Briton in France put it, ‘in these days of rapid and comfortable travel a visit to France is within the reach of most, and indeed, since the establishment of l’entente cordiale, a greater desire is everywhere observed to become more intimately acquainted with our neighbours across the Channel.’³ Random postcard messages indicate that a trip to France was generally fun, and different, though sometimes viewed with a critical eye: a 1911 postcard of the seafront at Dieppe, sent to Worthing, states, ‘We have just landed – had a grand evening – this is where we landed – it’s rather a muddy place – with love – Beautiful sunshine’. Another from 1911 from the Côte d’Azur highlights the beneficial distinctions of southern France: ‘having lovely weather, shall not like coming back to cold again’, but one sent from Paris to Liverpool in 1912 complains that ‘the French seem to like scratchy pens’.⁴ By 1914 local newspapers far from the south coast were advertising excursions to France: the Birmingham Daily Post advertised ‘Polytechnic Holiday Tours’ including a week in Paris, with excursions, for 4½ guineas (£4.72), and the Sheffield Daily Telegraph advertised a weekend train and ferry ticket to Dieppe for 15 shillings (third class).⁵ Soldiers retained this sense of novelty and tourism: ‘Dear Ma, I have just had a feed of snails not so bad’, wrote Arthur in a postcard home in November 1918, and in July 1919, while still On Active Service, ‘a party of us went a motor ride to this place [Château Gaillard]. Richard King of England built this years ago. It is a lovely view from the top.’⁶ But difference also meant keeping a cautious distance: a Punch cartoon shows a ‘London dame’ in a railway carriage maintaining a haughty refusal to speak to a French man with a cartoon accent (‘Is zat your beautiful Thames – yes?’) even in April 1917. A lingering memory of hostility survived too in the application of the term ‘Frenchmen’ to conscientious objectors held in Harwich prison, a relict from the Napoleonic wars.⁷

A major difference, and one that puzzled many, was the sound of the language; the foreignness of French lay not so much in its grammar, much of which had transposed into English, nor its spelling, much of which was very close or identical to English, but in the strangeness of its sounds, and the fact that so many letters were not pronounced at all, or were somehow lost or hidden. Anglicisations of French pronunciation ranged from a simplified nasal ‘le continong’, to the parody of the sound of French itself, roughly transcribed as a nasal ‘hon-hi-hon’, which derived from itinerant Breton onion sellers who cycled round southern England and South Wales, shouting their wares. In this linguistic journey English voices imitated French voices pronouncing a word that had come into English from French.

During the war, pastiches of French and German appeared widely, the German made to sound pompous and foolish, the French hopefully not. The main pathways for this were comic postcards, magazines, cartoons, comics, advertisements and performance scripts. A 1917 advertisement for Chairman cigarettes posited a conversation between two soldiers:

When Tom and Jacques meet in a trench,

They parlez-vous in ‘pidgin’ French.

Says Tommy ‘Prenez cigarette?’

And Jacques exclaims ‘Oui, oui! You bet’

He scans the packet’s red and green,

And puzzles o’er the dinner scene,

‘Who ees zis Chairman zat I see?’

‘He’s the top man at the feed. Compris?’

‘Ah, oui! I see he takes ze cake;

And I will one more Chairman take.’⁸

Here Jacques, apart from the substitution of ‘z’ for ‘th’, and the lengthened vowel, speaks competent English, even managing a pun of sorts. The ‘z’ substitution is the immediate identifier for a French person speaking English, as one character in a restaurant says to another: ‘Ah! Mon ami, desist from consuming zat café au lait, and come and try zis beautiful soda wiz ze lovely Scotch!’⁹ The man being addressed would have been immediately recognised, with his pointed beard and moustache, as the cartoon Frenchman from advertisements for ‘Kaffay-o-Lay’, a brand that started advertising with this name in October 1914, disappearing in 1920.

Despite this widespread recognition of French, plenty of English-speaking soldiers arrived in France to be shocked by the realisation that French people did not speak English: when a soldier of Kitchener’s Army asked a French civilian ‘Well, oo’s goin’ ter win?’ he got the response ‘I not understand’, and replied, ‘Oh love a duck, can’t the Froggies understand blinking English?’¹⁰ The Daily Mirror took a dim view of this, noting that ‘Tommy … knows, of course, no French. He thought everybody spoke English’,¹¹ and that British soldiers felt it was ‘utterly incredible that they will really need to speak French’.¹²

It was particularly problematic for American troops,¹³ with a certain poignancy for two black American soldiers meeting a French tirailleur from Senegal described by Floyd Gibbons, the encounter ending with mounting mutual incomprehension; there was despair that ‘I don’t believe these Frenchies ever will learn to speak English’,¹⁴ rather than a feeling that the Americans should learn French. The slightest hint of a French person’s ability to speak English was pounced on:

This joke from an American trench journal right at the end of the war points out the doughboys’ minimal linguistic compromise, suggesting that to ‘carry on with the mademoiselles, buy a souvenir shop [sic], see a cinema or order Vermouth-Casseis [sic]’, all that was needed were ‘nine words of French and muscular arms cleverly used’.¹⁶ Cavander’s Army Club Cigarettes advertisements used ‘the American Doughboy’ at the end of the war, still puzzling to match the lived experience to the language of the schoolbook: ‘Can’t make nothing of this gol-darned French phrase book. All about the wooden leg of the gardener and the pens of my aunt, and that kind o’ junk.’¹⁷

Equally baffling was the fact that French people did not understand when English-speakers took the trouble to speak French: Second Lieutenant Norman Down felt that the French were to blame, with ‘they don’t seem to understand their own language’;¹⁸ but Gunner J.A. Baker was amused rather than confused: ‘it’s very funny here – the money, it’s all francs, … Fancy bread 9d. a loaf (they call it pain)’.¹⁹

In terms of popular culture, Britain’s relationship with France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was deeply connected to sex. France entertained sexuality in a way that was inaccessible in Britain as a result of moral precepts and the obscenity laws; though no doubt much of this was imagined, the can-can, illustrated pornographic novels, studio photographs and scurrilous magazines supplied sufficient kinds of material to securely fix on France the label of the land of