

VIEWS FROM THE TOILETS ADJACENT | Cray Valley (PM)
I was down at the Public Records Office in Kew a few weeks back, doing some historical research. When serendipitously I happened across an old War Cabinet file dedicated to one the strangest episodes of the Second World War; an episode with a local woman and our football club at its very heart.
The first paper on this old file shows that towards the end of 1940, with London in flames, and the memory of the Dunkirk humiliation still painfully fresh in the public consciousness, the War Cabinet met to discuss how the nation’s crumbling morale could best be bolstered. A range of worthy if rather dull ideas had been mustered and put forward by the Civil Service. But the minute of the meeting records little if any enthusiasm for any of them.
It does however record that Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour and National Service, and all round working-class hero, piped up at some stage with an idea of his own. One that ultimately would attract the unanimous and enthusiastic support of those around the Cabinet table. In short, Bevin proposed that the Government should announce a national competition to find the funniest limerick. He argued that every working man and woman in the land loved a good Limerick and everyone was in turn capable of writing one.
So a competition of this nature could unite the battered British nation and the wider Commonwealth. From the minute, Churchill and Atlee seem to have supported the idea: Attlee suggesting the competition might be judged by a panel of the country’s greatest wits; and Churchill offering to supply a bottle of his own champagne by way of a prize.
The Prime Minister also suggested that he should read-out the winning limerick live on the radio on Christmas Eve. The competition clearly enthused the nation because some weeks later a briefing on the file reports that over 200,000 entries had been received in Whitehall. It states further that the panel of wits, chaired by Noel Coward no less, had met to consider the entries and concluded that the winning entry, by some distance on account of its wit, wordplay and hilariousness, was a limerick penned by an East Dulwich housewife and Hamlet fan - one Elsie Kail of the Dog Kennel Hill estate.
The story doesn’t end there though because the final note on the file is one to Churchill from his Private Secretary outlining a rather pressing problem. The issue it transpires is that while the winning limerick is undoubtedly hilarious, it is also rather ribald and rude and, in the view of the Private Secretary “something whose indecency the civilized world could never weather.”
Fascinatingly, Churchill has scrawled his response on the corner of the note: “Will read to the nation, inserting the empty sound “dah” for any word unfit for the ears of a family audience.” Miraculously, after many hours searching the National Sound Archive, I managed to get hold of a scratchy old recording from Christmas Eve 1940. And this is the bowdlerized Limerick Churchill read out over the air:
Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah dah, Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah dah! Dah dah dah dah dah, Dah dah dah dah dah! Dah Tooting are f****** w****rs!