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Christopher Breward
Street and all those other turn-of-the-century monkey parades, not as a bit-player
in some abstract subcultural grand narrative. Edwin Pugh, in his collection of
journalistic vignettes The Cockney at Home of 1914, presented just such a male
promenader, as sharp and self-aware as any Colin MacInnes character from fifty
years later, though the subversive coding of his clothing and attitude have
remained invisible to those who locate the emergence of such behavior after 1945:
Said the cynical youth in the amazing collar: “There’s a kind of young man who is merely
background. I mean that without his clothes he wouldn’t be noticed . . . There was Bertie
Amplett for instance . . . I remember him as a perambulator . . . This Bertie you know
. . . was a deuce of a fellow. He didn’t ‘work in the City somewhere’, he drew, I believe,
a quid a week, but I vow he never earned it. His wages went on clothes mostly, and
Woodbines. His mother was a charwoman . . . Bertie was king of the local monkey
parade. And if you don’t know what a monkey parade is ask Anderson here. He’s straight
off one . . . It’s a place where the elite of the beau monde of suburbia meet nightly for
purposes of flirtation . . . the fellahs and the girls wink and smirk as they pass, and break
hearts at two yards with deadly precision . . . The Kentish Town Road was his preserve,
and he paraded it nightly, like a revolving sky sign. There wasn’t any escaping him. You
see he was a tall chap, and that isn’t usual. He was good looking too, in the style of the
novelette hero. And he really knew how to wear clothes. In fact it was in his blood, his
father having been a shopwalker.” 43
Pugh’s perambulator displayed all of the tensions that absolved his parading of
the cosmopolitan image from becoming a straight emulation of more metropolitan
or suburban modes. Aside from the question of his upbringing and occupation, his
single-minded embracing of a “flash” façade for its own sake marked him out from
the underplayed sentimentality of suburban masculine display or the nonchalant
luxuriousness of the bachelor dandy. In all other respects his deceptive, parodic
public persona mirrored the familiar respectable role models, though the ostentatious
mention of a cigarette carried its own complex symbolism. MacQueen Pope
nostalgically recalled that “a man could get gold-tipped cigarettes . . . if he wanted
to be ostentatious. Some men even had their cigarettes specially made . . . with
their name printed on the paper . . . there were cork tipped cigarettes then too, one
brand known as ‘the belted earl’ having the cork surrounded by two little belts of
silver paint.” 44 In a similar vein Alexander Paterson referred to the practice
whereby
one commonly lights his fag, draws in the smoke twice, inhaling deeply, breathes it out,
spits, says something, and then holding his cigarette in his right hand, extinguishes it
with the thumb and first finger of his left, and replaces it in the bottom right pocket of
his waistcoat. Ten minutes later the process will be repeated and by this means, though
the boy will always seem to be smoking, he will only consume a penny packet a day. 45
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