You can’t get many pimples on a pound of pickled pork

Lyrics Fred Terry Music Fred Terry Roud Index RN21953
Pub 1914

Music Hall performers Ernie Mayne
Folk performances Source singers
Jim Copper, 1936, Sussex, England
Emily Howe and Elsie Jaggard, 1964/65, Suffolk, England
George Spicer, 1972, Sussex, England
Bob Copper, 1992, Sussex, England		 

From the sheet music 
 
I've been sent out by the missus just to do a bit of shopping
In every blessed public house for pickled pork have I been popping
I've been in Dunns the hat-shop, not to buy myself a bonnet
But to get the wife some pickled pork with lots of pimples on it.

But you can't get many pimples on a pound of pickled pork
Whether it comes from China, Japan or Carolina
You can go to Pimlico, Chicago or New York
But, you can't get many pimples on a pound of pickled pork.

I stopp'd listening down the street where several suffragettes were shouting
I raised me hat and clapped me hands each time they started spouting
At last I said to one old girl, all thoughts of black eyes scorning
You can get a vote, then get a month, then get let out next morning.'

When I started out this morning I had sixpence wrapped in paper
I've only got three-halfpennies now, the rest has gone in vapour
When I get home I'm sure the wife will start her crockery flinging
It's ten to one she'll kill me, then I'll hear the angels singing 

I went into Cross and Blackwell's, but they made me feel so silly; 
The nearest thing to pickled pork they'd got was piccalilli
The manager at Selfridge's said "Try the lace department"
But the lady said as she dug me in the "third class compartment"

Ernie Mayne (1871-1937) – born in Devon but lived but lived in London most of his life. It’s hard to find out much about him, but he was a larger than life comic with a number of novelty songs – including Where do flies go in winter time, I never wronged an onion, and Lloyd George’s Beer. He also sang What do you think of that? which was reversioned by Lonnie Donegan into My old man’s a Dustman.

I first heard the chorus of this song by sung in Sheffield by Jim McDonald and I had to find the verses. When I sing it I tend to miss out the verse about the suffragette and replace “Mrs” in the other verses with “mother” in an attempt to minimise the routine sexism which reflects the time that the song was written. We all have our red lines, and there is a long tradition of modifying songs to make them fit more closely to the sensibilities of the time…

The song was first published in 1914, and is another example of early 20th century Music Hall songs remembered in the pub singaround’s of south-east England in the 1950s and 60s.

Sources: