zodiac1 Nov 2005

I'll say. As a race, cockneys are even thicker than mere coloureds. Check out this description of 18th-century Calcutta by eminent historian Stephen Taylor:

"Behind the esplanade of the East India Company lay the great maidan, a grassy parade ground almost two miles long and a mile deep where the colony's furbelowed gentry, jodhpured regulars from the cantonment, and even the scantily-drawered Phowdar, the roy royan and Nawab of Bengal themselves, descended by carriage and palanquin for the nightly ritual known as 'the airings'."

Tell me, where were the mass airings in London's parks and squares, when the vapours rising from an unbathed chimneysweep's woolens in Cheapside could could be smelt as far as Grosvenor Square? Why weren't they mandatory?