Mind your language
I'M glad all the football is over, but a legacy of the World Cup, according to the BBC, is that the word hooligan has passed into Japanese with the meaning merely of 'football supporter'.
The word hooligan came into vogue in 1898 during a fashion for being shocked by the behaviour of young criminals on the streets of London. Its origins are unknown, though many have been claimed. Some said it was a corruption of 'Hooley's gang', but for this there is no evidence. The earliest known appearance in print is in the Daily News of 26 July 1898, a reference to 'Hooligan gangs bred in these vile, miasmatic byways'. A report in the same paper in August 1898 speaks of 'a gang of young roughs calling themselves Hooligans'.
By early in the next year the Daily Chronicle began to run supposed episodes from the life story of a 17-yearold Hooligan called Alf, as told by the writer Clarence Rook. Later in 1899 an amplified form was published as Hooligan Nights. I assume Clarence Rook was a pseudonym. The experiences of All seem like a heightened account of a way of life then to be found south of the Thames. Clarence places the Hooligans' territory inside the boundaries of the Albert Embankment, the Kennington Road and the Lambeth Road. Their heartland is Lambeth Walk.
Rook writes: 'There was but a few years ago a man called Patrick Hooligan, who walked to and fro among his fellow-men robbing them and occasionally bashing them.' In his version, Patrick Hooligan dies in prison, but Rook admits that the life of the original Hooligan has become as overlaid with legendary accretions as that of Buddha. Rook's account of the young hooligan Alf has the same ambiguous attitude to criminality and the horrors of slum life as Arthur Morrison's Child of the Jago (1896) or Raphael Samuel's oral histories of pre-war life in Bethnal Green. William Nicholson's illustration of a hooligan, from 1898, shows the dress favoured by hooligans and the physiognomy expected from them by the law-abiding.
I think the Japanese should read Clarence Rook.
Dot Wordsworth
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