Hello everybody!

I think my question is going to be kind of a quiz (and perhaps quizzical).

Here's the context:


On 30 October 1943, Churchill was bequeathed £20,000 (over £800,000 in today’s money) on the death of his friend the South African miner and financier Sir Henry Strakosch.* The next day, Marian Holmes’s diary records that Churchill was understandably ‘in high spirits. He began, but did not finish, the jingle “There was a young lady of Crewe.” ’32 (This was probably just as well, as it was a lewd limerick unfit for the ears of his young secretary.)

My first problem is with the word "jingle". That may imply a use or origing in advertising, but then it would seem rather odd that a public jingle should be "lewd" as it's the case. This is not really relevant, anyway. What I find most intriguing is the fact that Clementine Churchill first met her future husband in 1904 "at a ball in Crewe House, home of the Earl and Countess of Crewe"  (Wikipedia dixit). That makes me think of the "young lady of Crewe" not being a totally innocent reference to Winston's wife. On the other hand the idea puzzles me because of it's "lewd" character, and I find it difficult to associate Churchill, who a few weeks before celebrated his 35th wedding anniversary telling Clementine that he "loved her more and more every year", with a dirty jingle somewhat connected to her —and that induces me to think that I am just making too much of the "young lady of Crewe" line —or am I not? I just cannot decide.

I'll be glad to have your advice, opinion or solid data on this question, as I've always had.

Grateful in advance,

CM

I think you're reading way too much into the Crewe "connection" between the limerick and the wife

"There was a young lady from Crewe ..." begins a whole plethora of limericks that would have appealed to Churchill's sometimes quite puerile humour, though at the age he'd reached by then he might genuinely have savoured some of these limericks as wistfully fond reminders of his younger days - schools and regiments both being very fertile ground for their proliferation, even today. I suspect the "Crewe jingle" could very well be traced back to his army days - singing them rather than merely reciting them has been employed by "quick marching" troops on exercise for as long as squaddies and limericks have co-existed on the planet.

The oldest Crewe version I could find on the internet is the one that includes the bishop (that other stock component of the most venerably recite-worthy of filthy poesy and wisecrackery as would have appealed to Winnie):

"There was a young lady from Crewe
Who said, as the Bishop withdrew;
The Vicar was quicker
and slicker and thicker
And nine inches longer than you!"

Hello nordmann!

I understand what you say. I suspected that was too much reading, but the perspective of a self-appraising footnote, plus some curiosity, led me to look for longer lights.

If I don't fool myself, Julius Caesar was also chanted by his legions as a somewhat priapic terror of husbands and not too prone to gender discrimination…

This spares me the toil of the footnote and warns also against Friday mirages.

Thanks a lot for your help. It's really interesting. [I've liked the Vicar stanza…]

Nordmann, "There was a young lady from Crewe... "    I'm shocked!

ComicMonster wrote:

If I don't fool myself, Julius Caesar was also chanted by his legions as a somewhat priapic terror of husbands and not too prone to gender discrimination…

... indeed, not just the terror of husbands. While some of the legions' ditties certainly concerned Caesar's supposed doings with senator's wives and even Queen Berenice (the daughter of Herod Agrippa), others concerned his affairs with strapping legionnaires (usually from another legion), the son's of senators, and even vegetables! According to Suetonius (always the gossip), in his speech to the troops before the battle of Pharsalia, Caesar himself said something along the lines of "I promise you we're gonna win, or you can bugger me with a radish!" which was of course, post battle, taken up and embellished upon by the successful troops. And note that ancient Roman radishes were considerably larger than modern ones, being more like a cross between a turnip and a parsnip. 

Wasn't JC who was called something like "the divine bald" in one of his triumphs or something of the sort, in an obvious reference to his particular "radish"?

Re CAesar :
Even as a general in Gaul he was sung of in this ribald Latin verse back in Rome, as rendered by Robert Graves in his landmark translation of The Twelve Ceasars:

                   Home we bring our bald whoremonger:
                   Romans, lock your wives away!
                   All the bags of gold you lent him
                   Went his Gallic tarts to pay.

Graves included this in "I, Claudius" anent C. Ivlivs Caesar

A hundred years of the Punic Curse
And Rome will be slave to a hairy man,
A hairy man that is scant of hair,
Every man’s woman and each woman’s man.
The steed that he rides will have toes for hooves.
He shall die at the hand of his son, no son,
And not on the field of war.

Thanks Green George. I read Robert Graves in Spanish translation a zillion years ago.

I remember the story of the bald whoremonger from The Roman Triumph of Mary Beard.

All the best,

CM