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Cheapjack
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360 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1934
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October 8, 2015
Once a grafter, always a grafter...
Philip Allingham - the brother of Margery Allingham, the English writer of detective fiction who is best remembered for her "golden age" stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion - being bored by a succession of office jobs to which he was ill suited, stepped out of his own social class and set out on the open road to work initially as a fortune teller.
Unlike George Orwell and Monica Dickens (Orwell lived as a tramp and a plongeur in Paris; Dickens worked as a servant in the 1930s, and in a munitions factory in the 1940s), Philip made no secret of his class origins and was usually immaculate in evening dress complete with top hat.
“Cheapjack” is Philip’s story of life on the road as a fortune teller, grafter, knocker, and mounted pitcher in the markets and fairgrounds of 1920s England and Wales. A memorable encounter with a preacher helps Philip to realise he has the gift of the gab, and he then goes on to mesmerise crowds into buying fountain pens, patent medicines, stain removers and - most successfully - curling tongs.
It’s a wonderful book that is filled with fascinating anecdotes, bizarre characters, and the boom and bust nature of a life on the road lived on wits. Philip's vivid descriptions of the characters he meets and befriends, and their rich slang (much of which has subsequently passed into common parlance) and ingenious scams is a continuous delight. If getting to know the likes of Three-fingered Billy, Madame Sixpence, Cross-eyed Charlie, the Little Major, Ezra Boss the king of the gypsies, and many more, doesn’t make your heart soar then you may need to check your pulse.
“Cheapjack” was understandably a best seller when it was first published in 1934. After being out of print for many years, “Cheapjack” was republished in March 2010 by Golden Duck and is available direct from their website and all good online retailers.
The Golden Duck reprint includes a new introduction by Francis Wheen and an afterword by Julia Jones, biographer of Margery Allingham, who, it transpires, helped to make “Cheapjack" such a wonderful read. It also contains many helpful photos and, in the afterword, more information about the Allingham family and a summary of their lives. These “extras” all make a splendid book even more interesting and rewarding.
This compelling, witty, poignant, well written book deserves to be better known and is essential reading for anyone interested in the social history of early twentieth century England and Wales as it offers a priceless and nostalgic glimpse of a world that, whilst recognisable, has quite vanished. An era when every community had a thriving market, and entire towns shut down for their Wakes week holiday.
5/5
Philip Allingham - the brother of Margery Allingham, the English writer of detective fiction who is best remembered for her "golden age" stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion - being bored by a succession of office jobs to which he was ill suited, stepped out of his own social class and set out on the open road to work initially as a fortune teller.
Unlike George Orwell and Monica Dickens (Orwell lived as a tramp and a plongeur in Paris; Dickens worked as a servant in the 1930s, and in a munitions factory in the 1940s), Philip made no secret of his class origins and was usually immaculate in evening dress complete with top hat.
“Cheapjack” is Philip’s story of life on the road as a fortune teller, grafter, knocker, and mounted pitcher in the markets and fairgrounds of 1920s England and Wales. A memorable encounter with a preacher helps Philip to realise he has the gift of the gab, and he then goes on to mesmerise crowds into buying fountain pens, patent medicines, stain removers and - most successfully - curling tongs.
It’s a wonderful book that is filled with fascinating anecdotes, bizarre characters, and the boom and bust nature of a life on the road lived on wits. Philip's vivid descriptions of the characters he meets and befriends, and their rich slang (much of which has subsequently passed into common parlance) and ingenious scams is a continuous delight. If getting to know the likes of Three-fingered Billy, Madame Sixpence, Cross-eyed Charlie, the Little Major, Ezra Boss the king of the gypsies, and many more, doesn’t make your heart soar then you may need to check your pulse.
“Cheapjack” was understandably a best seller when it was first published in 1934. After being out of print for many years, “Cheapjack” was republished in March 2010 by Golden Duck and is available direct from their website and all good online retailers.
The Golden Duck reprint includes a new introduction by Francis Wheen and an afterword by Julia Jones, biographer of Margery Allingham, who, it transpires, helped to make “Cheapjack" such a wonderful read. It also contains many helpful photos and, in the afterword, more information about the Allingham family and a summary of their lives. These “extras” all make a splendid book even more interesting and rewarding.
This compelling, witty, poignant, well written book deserves to be better known and is essential reading for anyone interested in the social history of early twentieth century England and Wales as it offers a priceless and nostalgic glimpse of a world that, whilst recognisable, has quite vanished. An era when every community had a thriving market, and entire towns shut down for their Wakes week holiday.
5/5
December 26, 2016
One day in the early summer of 1928 Philip Allingham, a 21-year-old from a good family, looked out of the window of the room he had rented in an office in London’s Coventry Street, and considered his options. He had failed at school, then failed to get into Oxford; and then, despite being from a family in what we would now call the media, he had failed at every copywriting and publicity job he had tried. He was now freelancing but there was no work, and he was down to his last few shillings.
He decided, in desperation, to do the one thing he had always been quite good at, though he had never done it in earnest: read palms and tell fortunes. After a trial run in West End pubs (with mixed results), he bought a tent from Gamages for 35/- (£1.75), put on his top hat and tails (the image, don’t you know), and hit the road. Cheapjack, first published in 1934, is his story of his first years on that road.
Not all goes well. At his first pitch two ladies of the night steal his day’s takings. At Southend he has no luck at all, but spies a pleasure cruiser and persuades the crew to let him tell fortunes for the day-trippers at sea. He then becomes the only person on board to be seasick, and vomits over the side while wearing evening dress.
But bit by bit he learns his trade, and makes many friends. Cheapjack is a cornucopia of palmists, showmen, Gypsies, conmen, landladies, and general odd characters. There are the travelling boxers. There are the “windbag” workers, who sell people envelopes that might contain a watch, or a cheap trinket, or nothing at all; it is a form of gambling, and of course the odds are loaded. There are the Gypsies, who take a shine to Allingham and prove to be good friends when he is set upon in Newcastle (though he himself, if he is to be believed, could be handy with his fists).
Fairgrounds were raffish places then and no doubt sometimes still are. J.B. Priestley, visiting Nottingham’s famous Goose Fair as part of his English Journey (1934), had a liverish reaction to it, and perhaps he was right (though as the author of The Good Companions, he could perhaps have been more charitable). The ambiguous morality of the showman did not bother Allingham, or perhaps he did not think about it. He does not rush to judgement on the people he met. There are exceptions – for example, a fake “theatrical agent” who trades on dreams and exposes his “clients” to ridicule. In the main, however, Allingham and the other barkers, pitchers and fortune-tellers are simply selling the punters a bit of fun and a dream. Both sides know that and there is no real deception. It’s a point well expressed when Allingham has a confrontation with an unpleasant evangelical preacher on a fairground in the Midlands. “After all,” Allingham tells the crowd, “we both set up as prophets. He tells you what will happen to you after you die, and I tell you what will happen to you in the near future. He advises you, and so do I. ...True, I charge a fee – we all have to live – but I will not be impertinent and inquire into any financial arrangements which our friend may have.” Quite.
Allingham is always entertaining. For a flavour of the book, one may scan the introductory standfirst at the head of each chapter (books still sometimes had these in the 1930s). Thus Chapter 13 is headed: “I take part in Hull Fair, and meet many strange and interesting people, including Mad Jack, Peter the Whistler, and Madame Sixpence. I am invited to become an orthodox Jew, but decline and leave Hull.”
There is a certain jocularity about these standfirsts, and yet they are quite unselfconscious. And it seems that Allingham himself was. This must have been the key to his success as a palmist and pitcher. It is also the key to the book. Francis Wheen, in his introduction to the new (2010) edition, talks of the young men on the left – including Orwell, Christopher Isherwood and Tom Driberg – who went slumming in the 1930s in an attempt at working-class authenticity. Working people in South Wales and elsewhere suffered a deluge of earnest Fabians anxious to find out what they ate. It was not always well received. Allingham could not have been more different. He is quite clear with everyone he meets that he is a toff on his uppers, trying to earn a crafty bob. It is clearly true, and he is accepted.
While this is attractive, it does mean this book isn’t a major social document. Allingham didn’t write it for that. Although obviously intelligent, he was not reflective, and had no wish to join the earnest Fabians. He mentions the Depression and the effect it had on business, but does not say much about it; he didn’t need to – his readers were still in the middle of it. The difficult social conditions of the early 1930s do come into focus at one point; Allingham needs a model to demonstrate the hair-wavers he is selling, and finds a certain 14-year-old girl to be very suitable. So he persuades her parents to let her travel with him (it should be remembered that children could then leave school at 14, and often did). His interview with the parents is in the worst kind of slum in the north-east, an area badly hit by the Depression; there are no shoes, no furniture, just bare boards and children. In the main, however, this book isn’t social history.
What it did do, though, is make its mark on the English language. Fairground people, grafters, call them what you will, had an argot of their own. Gypsies especially did, as Romany had only just slipped out of common use as a language, and was still occasionally spoken. This argot was a mixture of English and Cockney rhyming slang and Yiddish, as well as Romany. Allingham provides a glossary; some of these words (“bevvy” for a drink – Allingham and his friends have quite a few of these; “rozzer” for a policeman) found their way into the language as a result, and the book has been so credited by the Oxford English Dictionary. Allingham finds it is as well to know this argot. One day he is in a train with other palmists, including a Gypsy who is wearing many fine rings on her fingers. There are several toughs in the compartment, and one tells the others to “Take sights. Screw the donah’s groinies”. “We knew at once,” writes Allingham, “that he had suggested to his friends that they should watch the lady’s rings.” They change compartments at the next station.
The book was a success in 1934, and was widely reviewed. But it was then out of print for many years. Allingham was unable to get it republished postwar. He died in 1969, and although there seems to have been one edition in the 1990s, the book was mostly out of print until 2010. It was then republished by a small company, Golden Duck, owned by Wheen and his partner, Julia Jones. The latter is an expert on the Allingham family and the book was published with the support and encouragement of the Margery Allingham Society (the famous crime novelist was Philip’s older sister, and helped edit the original book). The new edition reproduces the letterpress text of the original, but also includes some splendid contemporary photographs – including a number of Allingham at work, most of which were likely taken as publicity shots for the original 1934 Heinemann edition.
We should thank Jones and Wheen for reprinting this. Cheapjack may not be, or have been meant as, history – yet it is redolent of its era; and it is also great fun. Allingham was no philosopher. But it is clear that he was the most likeable, unhypocritical and generous of men. To travel with him through the fairgrounds and pubs of England and Wales was a pleasure. And should I hear a fellow-passenger mention screwing a donah’s groinies, I shall ask the cabin crew for an upgrade to business class at once.
He decided, in desperation, to do the one thing he had always been quite good at, though he had never done it in earnest: read palms and tell fortunes. After a trial run in West End pubs (with mixed results), he bought a tent from Gamages for 35/- (£1.75), put on his top hat and tails (the image, don’t you know), and hit the road. Cheapjack, first published in 1934, is his story of his first years on that road.
Not all goes well. At his first pitch two ladies of the night steal his day’s takings. At Southend he has no luck at all, but spies a pleasure cruiser and persuades the crew to let him tell fortunes for the day-trippers at sea. He then becomes the only person on board to be seasick, and vomits over the side while wearing evening dress.
But bit by bit he learns his trade, and makes many friends. Cheapjack is a cornucopia of palmists, showmen, Gypsies, conmen, landladies, and general odd characters. There are the travelling boxers. There are the “windbag” workers, who sell people envelopes that might contain a watch, or a cheap trinket, or nothing at all; it is a form of gambling, and of course the odds are loaded. There are the Gypsies, who take a shine to Allingham and prove to be good friends when he is set upon in Newcastle (though he himself, if he is to be believed, could be handy with his fists).
Fairgrounds were raffish places then and no doubt sometimes still are. J.B. Priestley, visiting Nottingham’s famous Goose Fair as part of his English Journey (1934), had a liverish reaction to it, and perhaps he was right (though as the author of The Good Companions, he could perhaps have been more charitable). The ambiguous morality of the showman did not bother Allingham, or perhaps he did not think about it. He does not rush to judgement on the people he met. There are exceptions – for example, a fake “theatrical agent” who trades on dreams and exposes his “clients” to ridicule. In the main, however, Allingham and the other barkers, pitchers and fortune-tellers are simply selling the punters a bit of fun and a dream. Both sides know that and there is no real deception. It’s a point well expressed when Allingham has a confrontation with an unpleasant evangelical preacher on a fairground in the Midlands. “After all,” Allingham tells the crowd, “we both set up as prophets. He tells you what will happen to you after you die, and I tell you what will happen to you in the near future. He advises you, and so do I. ...True, I charge a fee – we all have to live – but I will not be impertinent and inquire into any financial arrangements which our friend may have.” Quite.
Allingham is always entertaining. For a flavour of the book, one may scan the introductory standfirst at the head of each chapter (books still sometimes had these in the 1930s). Thus Chapter 13 is headed: “I take part in Hull Fair, and meet many strange and interesting people, including Mad Jack, Peter the Whistler, and Madame Sixpence. I am invited to become an orthodox Jew, but decline and leave Hull.”
There is a certain jocularity about these standfirsts, and yet they are quite unselfconscious. And it seems that Allingham himself was. This must have been the key to his success as a palmist and pitcher. It is also the key to the book. Francis Wheen, in his introduction to the new (2010) edition, talks of the young men on the left – including Orwell, Christopher Isherwood and Tom Driberg – who went slumming in the 1930s in an attempt at working-class authenticity. Working people in South Wales and elsewhere suffered a deluge of earnest Fabians anxious to find out what they ate. It was not always well received. Allingham could not have been more different. He is quite clear with everyone he meets that he is a toff on his uppers, trying to earn a crafty bob. It is clearly true, and he is accepted.
While this is attractive, it does mean this book isn’t a major social document. Allingham didn’t write it for that. Although obviously intelligent, he was not reflective, and had no wish to join the earnest Fabians. He mentions the Depression and the effect it had on business, but does not say much about it; he didn’t need to – his readers were still in the middle of it. The difficult social conditions of the early 1930s do come into focus at one point; Allingham needs a model to demonstrate the hair-wavers he is selling, and finds a certain 14-year-old girl to be very suitable. So he persuades her parents to let her travel with him (it should be remembered that children could then leave school at 14, and often did). His interview with the parents is in the worst kind of slum in the north-east, an area badly hit by the Depression; there are no shoes, no furniture, just bare boards and children. In the main, however, this book isn’t social history.
What it did do, though, is make its mark on the English language. Fairground people, grafters, call them what you will, had an argot of their own. Gypsies especially did, as Romany had only just slipped out of common use as a language, and was still occasionally spoken. This argot was a mixture of English and Cockney rhyming slang and Yiddish, as well as Romany. Allingham provides a glossary; some of these words (“bevvy” for a drink – Allingham and his friends have quite a few of these; “rozzer” for a policeman) found their way into the language as a result, and the book has been so credited by the Oxford English Dictionary. Allingham finds it is as well to know this argot. One day he is in a train with other palmists, including a Gypsy who is wearing many fine rings on her fingers. There are several toughs in the compartment, and one tells the others to “Take sights. Screw the donah’s groinies”. “We knew at once,” writes Allingham, “that he had suggested to his friends that they should watch the lady’s rings.” They change compartments at the next station.
The book was a success in 1934, and was widely reviewed. But it was then out of print for many years. Allingham was unable to get it republished postwar. He died in 1969, and although there seems to have been one edition in the 1990s, the book was mostly out of print until 2010. It was then republished by a small company, Golden Duck, owned by Wheen and his partner, Julia Jones. The latter is an expert on the Allingham family and the book was published with the support and encouragement of the Margery Allingham Society (the famous crime novelist was Philip’s older sister, and helped edit the original book). The new edition reproduces the letterpress text of the original, but also includes some splendid contemporary photographs – including a number of Allingham at work, most of which were likely taken as publicity shots for the original 1934 Heinemann edition.
We should thank Jones and Wheen for reprinting this. Cheapjack may not be, or have been meant as, history – yet it is redolent of its era; and it is also great fun. Allingham was no philosopher. But it is clear that he was the most likeable, unhypocritical and generous of men. To travel with him through the fairgrounds and pubs of England and Wales was a pleasure. And should I hear a fellow-passenger mention screwing a donah’s groinies, I shall ask the cabin crew for an upgrade to business class at once.
February 20, 2021
“[Because of] my succession of failures in every occupation I had yet essayed...I decided to steal out of London as quickly and as quietly as possible and join the gypsies.”
And so Phillip Allingham, aged 21, clad in a top hat and tails, joins the prewar world of the fairground grafters and pitchers, working the crowds up and down the country from Whitby to Llanfairfechan.
Mad Jack, Doncaster Jock, Three-fingered Billy, Cross-eyed Charlie, Napoleon Jackson, the Little Major... the same grafters follow the punters from fair to fair, and for young Philip Allingham it’s a more welcoming world than one might expect. He starts by doing the tick-off (fortune-telling), tries his hand at knocker-working (selling door-to-door), and finds his feet as a mounted pitcher (demonstrating and selling goods from a platform), always keeping his top hat and tails as part of his flash (display).
The language is fascinating, the people peculiar, the tricks and dodges extraordinary, and the anecdotes bizarre. It’s a true history, helped no doubt by Allingham’s better-known sister Margery, but engagingly written in a strangely open and innocent style. The text is enlivened in this edition by some period photographs of fairs and showmen – including Allingham in action.
“Once a grafter, always a grafter” is a phrase repeated through the book, and for Phillip it was the truth. He never went back to the office... and who could blame him? Cheapjack was first published in 1934 and deserves to be much better known. Wonderful book.
And so Phillip Allingham, aged 21, clad in a top hat and tails, joins the prewar world of the fairground grafters and pitchers, working the crowds up and down the country from Whitby to Llanfairfechan.
Mad Jack, Doncaster Jock, Three-fingered Billy, Cross-eyed Charlie, Napoleon Jackson, the Little Major... the same grafters follow the punters from fair to fair, and for young Philip Allingham it’s a more welcoming world than one might expect. He starts by doing the tick-off (fortune-telling), tries his hand at knocker-working (selling door-to-door), and finds his feet as a mounted pitcher (demonstrating and selling goods from a platform), always keeping his top hat and tails as part of his flash (display).
The language is fascinating, the people peculiar, the tricks and dodges extraordinary, and the anecdotes bizarre. It’s a true history, helped no doubt by Allingham’s better-known sister Margery, but engagingly written in a strangely open and innocent style. The text is enlivened in this edition by some period photographs of fairs and showmen – including Allingham in action.
“Once a grafter, always a grafter” is a phrase repeated through the book, and for Phillip it was the truth. He never went back to the office... and who could blame him? Cheapjack was first published in 1934 and deserves to be much better known. Wonderful book.
April 27, 2020
'Cheapjack' is Philip Allingham’s autobiography of his happy-go-lucky time as a fortune-teller, ‘grafter’ and ‘mounted pitcher’ on the fairgrounds and markets around England and Wales in the 1930s. It’s a vivid, thoroughly entertaining, nostalgic, gentle trip through fairground culture and a way of life that has largely disappeared. What gives it originality is that this was Allingham’s real life – he wasn’t living it temporarily or undercover like other writers at the time, nor was he setting out to write about a book about it (indeed, the afterword makes it clear that his sister, the celebrated writer of detective novels, Margery Allingham, was responsible for finessing the draft). Vanessa Toumlin and Francis Wheen's introductions and Julia Jones's afterword provide fascinating background on fairground society and the Allingham family. A charming read.
June 23, 2020
Phillip Allingham, an engaging, honest rogue, was the brother of novelist Margery Allingham. This is his autobiography, and it's fascinating. It also sheds light on aspects of some of Margery Allingham's Campion novels.
If you're a Campion fan I strongly recommend this, along with Allingham's memoir 'Hearts of Oak' and Julia Jones' excellent biography.
If you're a Campion fan I strongly recommend this, along with Allingham's memoir 'Hearts of Oak' and Julia Jones' excellent biography.
February 10, 2021
I'm pretty new to reading autobiographies as non-fiction was never really my scene outside of academia. However I read this book as language research and I love it - the argots, the anecdotes, the sheer anarchistic whimsy of a running-away-with-the-circus fantasy realised. We're given a wonderful insight to a secret world (AKA a world consisting of those marginalised by 'polite society'), but are still not granted full access, as Allingham is himself an outsider to the traveller and fairground communities. I think this makes it an incredibly important book from a historical and cultural perspective, given that these communities have never had much of a voice (or if they have, they haven't been considered important enough to record as a part of British heritage).
There's also something so utterly charming about the casual way in which Allingham goes about his journey - he's not quick to judge those he meets, therefore we actually get a glimpse into their lives that unconscious bias might cause us to miss out on. The social history we're accustomed to remains in the backdrop, as readers in the 1930s would have been well aware of the Depression as they lived through it. This allows space for a vivid and authentic day-to-day account of a school system dropout just trying to make ends meet, back in a time where it was easy to up and go where the wind took you. Allingham's perspective of the banal world beyond his adventure reminds me of Dinah Hall's teenage diary entry for 20th of July, 1969: 'I went to arts centre (by myself!) in yellow cords and blouse. Ian was there but he didn’t speak to me. Got rhyme put in my bag by someone who’s apparently got a crush on me. It’s Nicholas I think (UGH). Man landed on moon.'
It's just so delightfully human.
I'm not articulate enough to give a sense of just how entertaining the tone is, so I'll leave one of the chapter headings as an example:
I make money and go to South Shields, where I meet Sally : Sally adopts me.
There's also something so utterly charming about the casual way in which Allingham goes about his journey - he's not quick to judge those he meets, therefore we actually get a glimpse into their lives that unconscious bias might cause us to miss out on. The social history we're accustomed to remains in the backdrop, as readers in the 1930s would have been well aware of the Depression as they lived through it. This allows space for a vivid and authentic day-to-day account of a school system dropout just trying to make ends meet, back in a time where it was easy to up and go where the wind took you. Allingham's perspective of the banal world beyond his adventure reminds me of Dinah Hall's teenage diary entry for 20th of July, 1969: 'I went to arts centre (by myself!) in yellow cords and blouse. Ian was there but he didn’t speak to me. Got rhyme put in my bag by someone who’s apparently got a crush on me. It’s Nicholas I think (UGH). Man landed on moon.'
It's just so delightfully human.
I'm not articulate enough to give a sense of just how entertaining the tone is, so I'll leave one of the chapter headings as an example:
I make money and go to South Shields, where I meet Sally : Sally adopts me.
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