Tell Them You’re A Londoner

Billy Williams & Fred Godfrey, 1911; manuscript of lyrics in Billy Williams Collection, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, Australia.

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A song of working-class London pride that must have gone over well in the Metropolitan Halls, complete with the obligatory reference to that hoary thoroughfare, the Old Kent Road:

Tell them you’re a Londoner,
Just an ordinary little Londoner.
You don’t come from the best end, boy
But you’re as good as anybody in the West End, boy.
Your mother, too, was a Londoner,
Proud of her tiny abode.
So when they ask you where you come from,
Tell them you were born
Somewhere in the Old Kent Road.

Recordings

Billy Williams recorded two versions of this song: 26 January 1912 for Zonophone Twin (reissued on Cinch and Australian Zonophone), and ca. April 12 for Edison Amberol.¹

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Note

1  For comprehensive discographies of recordings by Billy Williams, see Brian Rust,
     British Music Hall on Record (Harrow, UK: Gramophone, 1979); and Frank
     Andrews and Ernie Bayly, Billy Williams’ Records: A Study in Discography
     (Bournemouth, UK: Talking Machine Review, 1982). For a collection of recordings of
     all the Billy Williams songs, see J.P. Myerscough, Billy Williams: All the Songs
     [8-CD set and accompanying notes] (Lowestoft, UK: Music Hall Masters, 2001).