Do you still get genuine old fashioned cockney accents in the East End?
No you don’t, and it wasn’t widely spoken in the east end much anyway, anyone who tells you it was doesn’t know what they are talking about. It was devised to fool the cabbage (dock police) so as not to let on was was going on, all my family were dockers and lighterman on the male side from 1898 onwards. And most of it wasn’t rhyming slang either. I never used it, my parents, grand parents and there parents never used it, and you couldn’t get more cockney than me (born whitechapel) well within the sound of st mary le bow bells in cheapside.
