If it wasn’t for the ‘ouses inbetween

AKA	The cockney garden

Lyrics

Edgar Bateman

Music

George Le Brunn

Roud

RN32469

If you saw my little backyard
What a pretty spot you'd cry
It's a picture on a sunny summer day
Wiv the turnip tops and cabbages
Wot people doesn't buy
I makes it on a Sunday look all gay
The neighbours' finks I grows 'em
And you'd fancy you're in Kent
Or at Epsom if you gaze into the mews
Its a wonder that the landlord
Doesn't want to raise the rent
Because we've got such nobby, distant views.

Oh it really is a werry pretty garden
And Chingford to the Eastward could be seen
Wiv a ladder and some glasses
You could see the 'Ackney Marshes
If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between.

We're as countrified as can be
Wiv a clothes-prop for a tree
The tub-stool makes a rustic little style
Ev'ry time the blooming clock strikes
There's a cuckoo sings to me
And I've painted up “To Leather Lane a mile”
Wiv tomatoes and wiv radishes wot 'adn't any sale
The backyard looks a perffick mass o' bloom
And I've made a little beehive
Wiv some beetles in a pail
And a pitchfork with the handle of a broom.

Oh it really is a werry pretty garden
And Rye 'ouse from the Cockcroft could be seen
Where the chickweed man undresses
To bathe 'mong the water cresses
If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between.

There's the bunny shares 'is egg-box
With the cross-eyed cock and hen
Though they 'as got the pip and him the morf
In a dog's 'ouse on the line-post
There was pigeons nine or ten
Till someone took a brick and knocked it off
The dust cart though it seldom comes
Is just like 'arvest 'ome
And we mean to rig a dairy up somehow
Put the donkey in the wash-house
Wiv some imitation 'orns
For we're teaching him to moo just like a cow.

Oh it really is a werry pretty garden
And 'Endon to the westward could be seen
And by clinging to the chimbley
You could see across to Wembley
If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between.

Though the gas-works isn't wilets
They improve the rural scene
For mountains they would very nicely pass
There's the mushrooms in the dust hole
With the cowcumbers so green
It only wants a bit of 'ot 'ouse glass
I wear this milkman's nightshirt
And I sits outside all day
Like the plough-boy cove
What's mizzled o'er the Lea
And when I go indoors at night
They dunno what I say
Cause my language gets as yokel as can be.

Oh it really is a werry pretty garden
And soap-works from the 'ouse-tops could be seen
If I got a rope and pulley
I'd enjoy the breeze more fully
If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between. 

Edgar Bateman: ex-printer, heavy drinker, talent scout, a big name in professional Music Hall song writing, lived to be 86. His biggest hit was sung by Gus Elen with music by George le Brunn.

George Brun: born to a coach building father, he added the “le” to his name in order to be taken more seriously as a musician. He wrote an awful lot of music for an awful lot of songs working with amongst others John P Harrington. Richard Baker’s excellent book on music Hall contains this quote from Harrington about LeBrun:

George could compose songs as easily and deftly as another man might write a letter. A rapid glance at the Lyric, a grunted “this is in 6/8 time,eh?” And after a nod of my acquiescence, Presto! his fluid pen would positively fly over the sheet of music paper before you had time to gasp “Geewhiz!”. Seldom, if ever, was so much as a note of altered afterwards and never once was the piano touched, until the melody was completed… Some of our most popular songs were composed in 10 or 15 minutes… Foolishly, at first, I was a little indignant that George earned his money so easily whilst the lyric took me perhaps an hour or two to write.

Gus Elen: ex-egg packer, one-time shop assistant, was one of the great coster comedians. At the height of his fame on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1890s and 1900s, he retired in the first world war. MacQueen Pope considered this the greatest of all his songs:

He saw right through the bricks and chimney pots to Chingford, to Hackney Marshes and other delectable places made dear by odd days of holiday, wondering that the landlord did not raise the rent of the home from which such views might be enjoyed; to heighten the illusion he even went the length of wearing a smock on Sundays and adopting a rustic brogue incomprehensible to his family. This was presumably meant to be a comic song but Elen made much more more of it than that, getting right down to the simple pathos of the words, which were helped by an equally simple, very charming melody. He sang it with his usual somewhat saturnine expression, a choker around his neck, a coster cap, with the peak turned the wrong way round, over his ear, just like the man to be met everywhere, pushing his “barrer”… A true masterpiece of London

MacQueenPope, Melody Lingers,p405

Sources:

• Sheet Music in Bumper Book
• Baker British Music Hall
• Words from monologues.co.uk
• MacQueen Pope Melody Lingers

Gus Himself: