Cockneys, Routed From London’s Heart, Are Endangered Species : Lifestyle: Many former residents of inner square mile, including the prime minister and archbishop of Canterbury, have even shed their accents.

The chirp of the Cockney is still heard in the heart of London, but it is getting fainter, fainter and ever more fainter.

“As London changes, so the Cockney is vanishing,” says octogenarian Cockney Bill Springle, born in the “square mile” of the city of London, the traditional Cockney heartland.

“Favorite haunts and places of interest are disappearing, bulldozed in the name of progress.”

Fellow Cockney Dennis Lincoln puts it more bluntly: “The Cockney community doesn’t exist no more.”

The Cockney was the archetypal Londoner, bawling and brawling in the street markets, immortalized in the stories of Charles Dickens and as Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion.”

Some Cockneys were driven out by German bombs in World War II, others were shoved aside by a building boom in the financial district, dispersed throughout London, to the suburbs and beyond.

Former residents of inner London, including the present prime minister and the archbishop of Canterbury, shed their Cockney accents on the way up the ladder.

Cockneys traditionally were born within the sound of the famous “Bow Bells” at St. Mary-le-Bow church. The only local maternity unit, at St. Bartholomew’s hospital, moved away to Hackney in the East End in 1986, and few children are born in the few homes within earshot of the bells.

James Surplis, verger at St. Mary-le-Bow, confirms that there are “very few Cockneys in the congregation now. We cater primarily to businessmen and commuters and we close at weekends.”

Definitions of Cockney identity have loosened.

Tommy Johnson, who was born close to St. Mary-le-Bow 69 years ago, considers himself a Cockney though he has moved across the Thames to Southwark, where he says he can still hear the bells.

“I met someone the other day who said his mother was a Cockney from Wimbledon,” a good 7 miles away, he says. “But that’s OK.”

Johnson is something of a professional Cockney, one of the “pearly people” who dress up in dark suits lavishly covered by mother-of-pearl buttons.

The tradition dates from the 1860s and is rooted in the street traders’ community, whose leaders favored shining attire. Johnson, “The Original Pearly King of Bankside and Bow Bells,” is one of a dwindling number of “pearly kings and queens” who raise money for charities and enliven the Lord Mayor’s annual parade.

He appeared in his finery at St. Mary-le-Bow on March 27 for a ceremony confirming the election of a Cockney lad, George Carey, as archbishop of Canterbury.

Carey grew up in one of those working-class Cockney families that moved out after their homes were destroyed by German bombs.

The Cockney heartland was roughly a square mile between the Thames and the Barbican, bounded on the west by the Law Courts and on the east by the Tower of London.

Here generations of Cockneys toiled on London’s docks or in furniture factories. Swaggering Cockney barrow traders, always ready to haggle, were the main event at street markets.

The docks are closed and the smaller industries have moved away in search of cheaper rents. Many street markets, deprived of local clientele, have become little more than tourist attractions.

In his book “Cockney Past and Present,” Cockney linguist William Matthews catalogues the social dislocation: “The music hall, which both voiced and fostered the Cockney spirit . . . has been replaced by television and the movie, the pub is not the social center that it once was; street markets are fewer, slums have largely given way to isolating towers, family gatherings are less frequent as members move into the outer suburbs and the motor car contributes its divisiveness.”

Johnson still turns out for Cockney Nights, fund-raising events where “we sing all the old Cockney music hall songs.”

But he concedes that the tradition is dying. So is Cockney rhyming slang, a convoluted code developed in the 1700s to frustrate eavesdropping outsiders, particularly the “peelers” (police), created by Sir Robert Peel.

A rhyming Cockney might say:

“ ‘Ullo Fred. Come in awf of de frog an’ toad (road) an’ ‘ave a cuppa Rosie (tea). It’s on de Cain an’ Abel (table). But wipe yer plates o’meat (feet) ‘cos de trouble an’ strife’s (wife’s) just scrubbed de Rory O’More (floor).”

Past hardships have faded in a nostalgic glow. Springle has documented some of the old delights in his book, “The Vanishing Cockney.”

“I still remember the itinerant Russian with a bear chained to a large pole, that danced to a penny tin whistle played by its master,” says Springle, who recalls streets alive with buskers and childrens’ horse-drawn roundabouts.

“The old houses had no bathrooms and for thruppence (three pennies) we would have a soak at the nearest bath house on a Saturday.”

Front doors were always open, Springle says, and community spirit was strong. When someone was seriously ill, “straw was put on the road outside to stop the sound of vehicle wheels, which were all solid, made of iron or steel.”

Len Smith, raised in Shoreditch near the square mile, remembers “sleeping six in a bed because we was poor.”

“We also made our own entertainment. The magic lantern and a candle on a whitewashed wall was a favorite. And there was Saturday morning pictures (movies).”

Smith laments the loss of old Cockney pubs, where raucous music hall songs were sung around a slightly out-of-tune piano.

Some shops still do a Cockney meal of meat pies and “mushy” (mashed) peas, and cockles, jellied eels and whelks can be found at some street markets, Smith says.

The word Cockney is generally taken to have come from the middle English word “Cokeney,” or “cock’s egg.” Originally it meant a small or misshapen egg and was probably a synonym for anything odd.

The Cockney hall of fame includes Geoffrey Chaucer, John Keats, John Milton, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron and Samuel Pepys, and the actors Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins. Yet society’s judgment is about what it was in 1821 when the historian Peirce Egan described Cockneys as “pert and conceited, yet truly ignorant.”

Professor John Honey, a student of speech, says Cockney is at the bottom of a “hierarchy of accents” dominated by Received Pronunciation (RP), the plummy Queen’s English favored by the BBC.

“RP speakers are seen as reliable, honest and educated, Cockneys are not,” Honey says.

So, like Eliza Doolittle, Cockneys tamed their accents to get ahead. Carey and Prime Minister John Major, who also grew up in a working-class London home, speak something closer to RP, says Honey, who teaches at Kumamoto University in Japan.

Honey believes RP will eventually kill the true Cockney dialect. “But it will take a hundred or more years to die out and there will be traces of it for many years after that.”