70 Displaced Cockneys The EconomistDecember 21st 2019
11964 there were said to be just 20 unemployed people in the whole
town. The problem was the pay, especially for men. In 1971 Mal-
colm Moseley, a social scientist, conducted hundreds of inter-
views in Thetford. Although 57% of the people he spoke to de-
scribed their houses as very good, just 4% said the same of men’s
wages. The migrants had chosen quality of life and made them-
selves poorer.
And there was no getting away from it—the new settlers were a
loud, lairy bunch. Danny Jeffrey, who moved from east London to
work at Jeyes, a maker of cleaning products, eventually stopped
drinking in the Londoners’ pubs because of all the fights. Stuart
Wright, a councillor from a Norfolk family, says that some of the
new arrivals dug up his grandfather’s potatoes. When challenged,
they were affronted. Spuds just grow naturally, don’t they?
At first, the new settlers went back to London by coach every
month or so to visit their relatives. As they settled down, the trips
became less frequent. But they did not really blend in to the quiet
Norfolk life. After six decades, they still have not. Instead they
boiled down the working-class London culture they had brought
with them into a concentrated broth. Whether they came from
east, south, west or north London, they adopted the East End fu-
neral. Many still shun Norwich City, the local Premier League
team, in favour of London clubs—some of which, like Queens Park
Rangers, are no better than Norwich.Talk of the town
Above all, you can hear old London in their voices. Young working-
class Londoners of all races now speak a dialect known as Multi-
cultural London English, or mle, which mixes Cockney words and
sounds with Caribbean and South Asian ones, stirring in a few in-
ventions of its own. Popular culture helps it spread: grime stars
such as Dizzee Rascal and Stormzy rap in, and speak, mle. But on
the council estates that ring Thetford, you hear one of mle’s ingre-
dients in its pure form. The town’s name begins with an fsound
and has a glottal-stop in the middle. A Thetford poet could rhyme
“arrow” with “Mo Farah”. “Oi oi” is fine as a greeting; to tell some-
one off you “give them grief”. People in other parts of south-east
England, such as Essex, speak similarly. But there is something
peculiarly urban and old-fashioned about Thetford Cockney. Your
correspondent grew up in north London in the 1970s. No current
accent reminds him so strongly of his
childhood as the Thetford one.
Susan Fox, who studies English speech
at the University of Bern in Switzerland,
suggests that the authentic Cockney voice
may have endured in Thetford because
Londoners overwhelmed the locals, then
remained dominant. In Milton Keynes, a
new town established not much later, you
hear nothing of the kind—but in Milton
Keynes, Londoners were only one incom-
ing group among many.
Another possibility is that speech re-
flects aspiration as well as history and ge-
ography, and Thetford has remained in-
tensely working-class. In 2011 when the last
census was conducted, manufacturing was
by far the largest industry, employing 24%
of the town’s workers, compared with 8%
in Britain as a whole. Many of those factory
jobs are unskilled or semi-skilled. One
Thetford firm that employs skilled engi-
neers is Warren Services, which makes
things like props for pop concerts. Richard
Bridgman, the founder, spends half an
hour walking the factory floor trying to finda worker who moved from London or is descended
from someone who did. He fails. His engineers all
seem to come from Norfolk families, or from some-
where other than the capital.
Something else arrived with the Londoners—an at-
titude to family and labour that seemed exotic in
mid-20th century Norfolk. In April 1959 the Thetford
and Watton Timesreported that 40 or so “housewives”
from London had travelled to Thetford to see their al-
most-finished homes and examine “the factory in
which the husbands will soon be working”. When the
factories opened, though, London women rushed in.
It was part of their culture. As early as 1961, 37% of
workers in London were female. They did not just work
in offices, hospitals and shops; a quarter of metal-
manufacturing jobs in the capital were taken by wom-
en. The married couples who moved to Thetford often
both worked, alternating shifts so that one partner
could watch the children.
Occasionally it was the wives who took jobs in Thet-
ford factories and their husbands who came along.
That was true for Brenda Canham, now Thetford’s
mayor, who moved from east London to work in a fac-
tory that made insulated Thermos flasks. “I got mar-
ried at 16 and I’ve always worked,” she says.
Just as London’s accent has changed, leaving the
Cockney Thetfordians with an antique, so has Lon-
don’s work culture. Since the 1970s the capital has gone
from having the highest rate of female employment in
Britain to the lowest rate. Two sorts of British women
are less likely to do paid work: immigrants from coun-
tries where it is frowned upon, and the wives of ex-
tremely wealthy men. London now has lots of both.
Thetford also resembles 1970s London in a less for-
tunate way. State schools in London used to be terrible.
A government survey in 1978-79 found that 24% of Lon-
don children left school with no qualifications, not
even a Certificate of Secondary Education. The nation-
al figure was 14%. The situation had become so dismal
that some universities required lower exam marks2