Flash Jim: The astonishing story of the convict fraudster who wrote Australia's first dictionary

Dedication

For my three grandsons:

William, Adric and Obi

Contents

Dedication

The Dawn of Aussie English

The Life of James Hardy Vaux, aka Flash Jim

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

And Aussie English Was Born

Appendix: Vaux’s Dictionary

Original Dedication

A Vocabulary of the Flash Language

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

The Dawn of Aussie English

The first dictionary ever written in Australia was a dictionary of slang – so the Australian language appears to have begun as it intended to go on: as an inventive, informal, cheeky branch of English. And the author of that first dictionary was a convict – so our first dictionary also captured the anti-authoritarian, egalitarian strain of the Australian character. The dictionary he wrote recorded what was called the ‘flash’ language. This was the slang spoken by the criminal class in Britain. It was also the language of the convicts, who, along with the soldiers guarding them, were the first European settlers on the Australian continent.

The flash language started as a kind of secret code, allowing criminals to speak aloud in the presence of policemen and magistrates without being understood. But over time, the flash words became so deeply embedded in the vocabulary of the working criminal that all of his conversation was peppered with it. This left the magistrates on the bench frequently baffled as to what was being said. As early as 1791, marine officer and author Captain Watkin Tench had complained of the need to employ interpreters to ‘translate’ the evidence of prisoners and witnesses in court. The dictionary compiled and written by James Hardy Vaux (aka Flash Jim) was, he wrote in the dedication, designed to help magistrates understand this flash talk.

Vaux was perhaps uniquely equipped to notice and record this language. He had been born into a middle-class family, and had been given a good education and – as he says often in his memoirs – every opportunity to find a sound career and live an honest life. This meant that as he drifted into criminal ways, he had to learn to speak flash as a second language. He had the education to understand how these words were being used, and the literary skill to record this knowledge.

So Vaux’s little dictionary plays an important role in helping us understand the birth of Aussie English – our very own ‘dingo lingo’. And given the prominence of slang in modern Aussie English, it is entirely appropriate that the first dictionary written in this country should have been a dictionary of slang.

As you read Vaux’s remarkable and colourful story in this book, you’ll find that it includes quite a few examples of flash talk. All the words that appear in Vaux’s dictionary are printed in bold text, and Vaux’s complete dictionary can be found in the Appendix at the back of the book.

One question that might occur to you is: how should we pronounce his last name? Well, the answer is we don’t know. Given the absence of audio recordings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is impossible to know with any certainty how James Hardy Vaux pronounced his own name. There is some evidence that Vaux, in the England of his time, was often pronounced as ‘Vorx’ (to rhyme with ‘Hawkes’). However, because he sometimes used ‘Lowe’ as an alias, James Hardy might have pronounced Vaux in the French fashion as ‘Voe’. On the other hand, since his maternal grandfather’s name was ‘Lowe’, this may be the source of his alias, so ‘Lowe’ may be no guide to the pronunciation of his last name at all. (You see how confusing this can get?)

I myself find that I keep pronouncing it as ‘Vox’ – perhaps because I grew up in the age of the Vauxhall motor car, and the first syllable of that brand name was pronounced ‘Vox’ too. Since we cannot know for sure, you are free to pronounce the name in whatever way you prefer.

Nor can we be sure whether to trust the colourful story Vaux tells in his memoirs. He was, after all, a con man, and inventing arresting fiction at short notice was his gift. He also does rather a lot of special pleading in his memoirs, along the lines of ‘Well, I was bad then but, hey, look how remorseful I am now!’ In retelling his fairly astonishing story I have tried to be critical and put his adventures into the context of the times in which he lived. But in the end you’ll have to decide for yourself how much you trust the colourful and persuasive Mr Vaux.

When you browse his small but very important dictionary, what may surprise you is the number of his words that still are, or recently have been, part of our living language. Here are just a few examples of flash words that remained part of Aussie English long after the convict days were over:

AWAKE: if you are aware of what’s really going on, as opposed to what appears to be going on, you may still say, ‘I’m awake to what you’re up to.’ This usage seems to have grown out of Vaux’s original definition: ‘To be awake to any scheme, deception, or design, means, generally, to see through or comprehend it.’

BANG-UP: we still talk about a job well done as a ‘bang-up job’. Vaux’s definition is very close to this: ‘A person, whose dress or equipage is in the first style of perfection, is declared to be bang up to the mark.’

BASH: Vaux defines this as ‘to beat any person by way of correction’, and we use it with exactly this meaning today.

BEAN: for Vaux, a bean meant a guinea (21 shillings). Now we use it to mean money in general, as in ‘I haven’t got a bean.’

BOLT: ‘to run away from or leave any place suddenly’, says Vaux, and so do we to this day.

BOUNCE: Vaux says this means ‘to bully, threaten, talk loudly, or affect great consequence; to bounce a person out of anything, is to use threatening or high words, in order to intimidate him, and attain the object you are intent upon’, and this may well be why we now call the guard on the door of a night club a ‘bouncer’.

BUSTLE: if you are doing things in a rush you can still be said to be ‘bustling around’, which fits with Vaux’s definition: ‘any object effected very suddenly, or in a hurry, is said to be done upon the bustle’.

CADGE: ‘to beg. The cadge is the game or profession of begging’, writes our convict lexicographer, and we use it in exactly the same way still.

CHEESE IT: is this still used? When I was a boy I remember it being used in the schoolyard to mean ‘Drop it’ or ‘Don’t go on about it’, which is the meaning Vaux gives.

CHUM: a dated expression for a friend or mate, which is also Vaux’s meaning: ‘a fellow prisoner in a jail, hulk, &c.’

CLEANED OUT: ‘said of a gambler’, Vaux writes, ‘who has lost his last stake at play; also, of a flat who has been stript of all his money by a coalition of sharps’. Today anyone who has lost their money by any means is said to be ‘cleaned out’.

CONK: the nose. Still, I think, occasionally used today.

COVE: slowly dying out of Aussie slang, this used to mean much the same as ‘bloke’ – a man. In Vaux’s day it was a little more precise: ‘the master of a house or shop, is called the Cove; on other occasions, when joined to particular words, as a cross-cove, a flash-cove, a leary-cove, &c., it simply implies a man of these several descriptions’.

CROAK: to die. Still used.

DOLLOP: ‘a dollop is a large quantity of any thing’, Vaux wrote in his dictionary. And today we can still ask someone: ‘Would you like a dollop of ice cream on that?’

DONE: convicted. Still used, as in ‘He was done for computer hacking by the federal police.’

DUDS: in Vaux’s day this meant women’s apparel, but today has broadened to mean any clothing in general.

DUES: originally this referred to ‘money’, Vaux writes, ‘where any certain sum or payment is spoken of; a man asking for money due to him for any service done . . . would say, "Come, tip us the dues"’. Today it can be used for non-monetary payment as well. For example, someone who has worked hard and deserves a promotion may be said to have ‘paid their dues’.

FENCE: ‘a receiver of stolen goods’, writes Vaux; still used as such.

FLASH-MAN: this could mean a pimp, Vaux says, or just ‘a favourite or fancy-man’. Today that notion of being fancy has taken over, and someone who is all dressed up can be said to be ‘looking pretty flash’.

FLOOR: originally ‘to knock down anyone’, but now it can have a wider, metaphorical meaning. When you get a shock, you might say, ‘The news floored me.’

GALLOOT: originally ‘a soldier’, this has changed its meaning, and if it’s used today, it refers to someone who is not too clever, who is ‘a bit of a galloot’. Given the lack of respect convicts had for soldiers, this might have grown directly out of the original sense of the word.

GAMMON: ‘flattery; deceit; pretence; plausible language; any assertion which is not strictly true, or professions believed to be insincere’, writes Vaux. Interestingly, this has survived in Australian Aboriginal English with exactly the same meaning.

KID: ‘a child of either sex’. Still, obviously, in common usage.

LARK: ‘fun or sport of any kind, to create which is termed knocking up a lark’. Probably only used by older Aussies these days.

LUSH: ‘beer or liquor of any kind’. Today used to describe someone who is frequently drunk.

MITTS: gloves. Used today in the challenge to fight ‘Put your mitts up’, and every time you pick up the oven mitts in the kitchen.

MUG: ‘the face; a queer mug is an ugly face’. Still commonly used.

NAIL: ‘to nail a person, is to over-reach, or take advantage of him in the course of trade or traffic; also, to rob, or steal’, Vaux wrote. Today this has broadened, so that if we’ve done any job well, or done it to completion, we can say that we’ve ‘nailed it’. And I suspect this convict word is the source of our modern expression.

NEEDLE: ‘to needle a person is to haggle with him in making a bargain, and, if possible, take advantage of him, though in the most trifling article’, according to Vaux. Today we have broadened the meaning from haggling to just irritating someone in general. To needle someone is to annoy them.

NIB: ‘a gentleman, or person of the higher order’, and today we still refer to an important (or self-important) man as ‘his nibs’.

OLD LAG: ‘a man or woman who has been transported, is so called on returning home’, wrote Vaux, but as the nineteenth century went on this came to mean any old convict. In Illalong Children, Banjo Paterson’s memoir of his rural childhood in the 1860s and 1870s, he refers to farm hands who had come to Australia as convicts, perhaps many years earlier, as ‘old lags’.

OUT-AND-OUTER: we can still describe real commitment as being ‘out and out’ support for whatever it might be. Which seems to be a development of Vaux’s definition: ‘a person of a resolute determined spirit, who pursues his object without regard to danger or difficulties’.

PINCH: Vaux’s definition of pinch is the same as the one we use today: ‘to purloin small articles of value’.

PINS: the legs. If someone tells you they are ‘a bit wobbly on their pins’, they are using convict slang.

PLANT: ‘To hide, or conceal any person or thing, is termed planting him, or it; and any thing hid is called, the plant’. In crime stories writers still talk about how corrupt police have ‘planted evidence’.

PUSH: ‘a crowd or concourse of people, either in the streets, or at any public place of amusement, &c.’, said Vaux. Over the course of the nineteenth century this narrowed to mean just a gang, often of young thugs. The most famous of these was the Rocks Push, active in The Rocks area of Sydney from the 1870s to the 1890s. Henry Lawson wrote about them in his ballad ‘The Captain of the Push’, published in Verses Popular and Humorous in 1900.

PUT UP AFFAIR: ‘any preconcerted plan or scheme’, says Vaux, and we still talk about any organised deception as a ‘put-up affair’.

RACKET: ‘some particular kinds of fraud and robbery are so termed’, says Vaux – and they still are.

RINGING, or RING-IN: ‘to ring is to exchange’; in Vaux’s day almost any deceptive exchange was ‘ringing’; nowadays this sense is preserved in the word ‘ring-in’, such as in horse racing when one horse (the ‘ring-in’) is substituted for another.

SHARP: ‘a gambler, or person, professed in all the arts of play; a cheat, or swindler’, Vaux writes – and the expression ‘card sharp’ is still in use.

SKIN: ‘to strip a man of all his money at play, is termed skinning him’, according to Vaux. When we call someone who is broke ‘skint’, we are using a variation of ‘skinned’.

SLY: Vaux writes: ‘Any business transacted, or intimation given, privately, or under the rose, is said to be done upon the sly.’ And we still speak of underhanded transactions or behaviour as ‘sly’.

SNITCH: ‘to impeach, or betray your accomplices, is termed snitching upon them’, Vaux tells us. And a child today can still be told in the playground: ‘Don’t snitch.’

SQUARE: ‘all fair, upright, and honest practices’, says Vaux, ‘are called the square’. (In his world if you weren’t on the square then you were on the cross and not to be trusted.) In our current vocabulary, ‘square’ is the opposite of ‘cool’ or ‘hip’. But is our modern usage all that different? Isn’t Vaux describing just what kids today would think of as square?

STING: ‘to rob or defraud a person or place is called stinging them’, writes Vaux – and the 1973 Paul Newman and Robert Redford movie The Sting shows this was never confined to Australia.

SWAG: Vaux defines this as ‘a bundle, parcel, or package’ in his day. From those humble origins it grew to play an important role in Aussie English. An itinerant bush worker carried a ‘swag’ on his back and so became known as a ‘swagman’, or ‘swaggie’ for short. The most famous ‘jolly swagman’ in Australia is the one who stuffed a stolen sheep into his swag and then jumped into a billabong to escape the law, which extends Vaux’s shadow as far as Banjo Paterson’s bush song. Such is the power of the flash language. To this day we still use the word to mean a whole lot of something, as in ‘I’ve got a swag of good ideas.’

SWELL: ‘a gentleman; but any well-dressed person is emphatically termed a swell’ – now dated, but this remained part of Aussie English for well over a century after Vaux.

TOGS, or TOGGERY: ‘wearing-apparel in general’, in Vaux’s day. I remember when I was a child, clothing was referred to as ‘togs’. And in some parts of Australia, your swimmers were, and still are, called your ‘togs’.

WHACK: ‘a share or equal proportion, as give me my wack, that is, my due part’, says Vaux. We still talk about an indeterminate amount of something as being a ‘whack’, as in ‘I’ve got a fair whack of credit left on my travel card.’ (Vaux always spells the word ‘wack.’)

YARN: ‘to relate their various adventures, exploits, and escapes to each other’, Vaux writes – in other words, storytelling. We still use ‘yarn’ in this way, but we’ve broadened it over the years so that having a general conversation is known as ‘having a yarn’.

All of this came from the alert ear and lively pen of James Hardy Vaux – and contributed to the rise of the Australian dialect of the English language that we speak today.

Now discover his story . . .

The Life of James Hardy Vaux, aka Flash Jim

1

Night had settled on the convict settlement of Newcastle. It was June 1812, and the name of the settlement had just been proclaimed – or rather, borrowed from the English coal port – as the permanent replacement for the earlier designation, Coal River. The long, low wooden convict barracks building was in darkness, except for a flickering light that could be seen through a small open window at one end of the building.

The light was coming from a candle sputtering on the table at which the convicts had eaten their evening meal. Sitting next to the candle was a still young-looking man of thirty, wearing the grey flannel of a convict. Spread on the table in front of him were sheets of paper, a pot of ink, a small knife and a quill.

The man’s name was James Hardy Vaux.

He picked up the knife, used it to sharpen the quill, dipped the quill into the ink, then hesitated. As he sat in thought, a rough voice bellowed out of the darkness where the convict bunks were lined up against the walls.

‘When’re yer gonna stop, Vaux? Blow out that candle so we can all get some sleep.’

‘Another ten minutes,’ muttered the writer. Then he said it again, more loudly: ‘Another ten minutes. Just give me another ten minutes.’

‘Bender!’ the voice growled sceptically.

‘Ah, yes,’ Vaux thought, and he wrote the word ‘Bender’ on his sheet of paper. After the word, he added a colon, and a blank space for the word’s definition. For a moment he chewed on the end of his quill, and then he wrote the following (underlining certain words for emphasis – shown here as italics):

an ironical word used in conversation by flash people; as where one party affirms or professes any thing which the other believes to be false or insincere, the latter expresses his incredulity by exclaiming bender!

‘Not bad,’ he thought, ‘but not quite enough.’ There was another, related use of the word that needed including. So he dipped his quill into the ink pot again and continued the paragraph . . .

or, if one asks another to do any act which the latter considers unreasonable or impracticable, he replies, ‘O yes, I’ll do it – bender’; meaning, by the addition of the last word, that, in fact, he will do no such thing.

He wrote in the neat copperplate of the trained office clerk. In fact, Vaux was one of the few convicts in the colony who could read and write fluently, and who had experience in office work.

And that was what he was counting on to change his fortunes.

His muscles still ached from a day in the coal mines – pushing a heavy, coal-laden trolley from the tunnels to the surface, and dragging the empty trolley back again. He had no intention of serving the rest of his time straining his muscles and hauling heavy loads. He was above that!

He glanced over at a sheet of paper on his left, and at the title page he had written out. It said ‘A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language’, and was dedicated to the Commandant of Newcastle, Lieutenant Thomas Skottowe. Vaux re-read the definition he had just written and chuckled to himself. ‘Skottowe will like this,’ he thought, ‘and if he does . . . Well, if he does, then no more heavy labour for me.’ Already he had his eye on a desk in the quarter master’s storeroom.

‘Yer ten minutes are up!’ came another shout from the bunks. ‘You blow that candle out or I’ll give yer a kick up the nancy.’

‘Yes, yes, right away,’ said Vaux hurriedly – never a physically courageous man. But he quickly grabbed a different sheet of paper and wrote:

NANCY: the posteriors.

Then he blew out the stump of candle before the threatened violence could become a reality.

Fortunately there was a full moon, and by the pale silvery light he was able to pack up his pen, knife, quill and candle. He put a cork into his small pot of ink and swept his papers together into a neat pile. Stumbling slightly in the dim light, he put them into a box in a corner of the hut, then made his way down the length of the building to his bunk.

For some time he lay on his back in the dark, staring at the ceiling. He had heard Lieutenant Skottowe talk often about the difficulty of understanding the convicts when they appeared before him in his capacity as the local magistrate. More than once the commandant had called upon Vaux to act as interpreter.

‘Vaux,’ Skottowe had snapped from the bench, ‘what does this witness mean when he says he saw the accused snatch a "grocery" from the victim? Translate, please.’

‘A "grocery", your honour, is a copper coin – probably a halfpenny.’

‘Then why didn’t he just say so?’ muttered the commandant, as he waved a hand at the witness and told him to continue.

Vaux imagined the day – not far off, for he was well advanced in his literary work – when he would present Skottowe with a handy little dictionary of the ‘flash’ language spoken by the convicts. He was sure that the lieutenant would find it both useful and amusing. And those convicts around him who had spoken flash from childhood, Vaux was certain, were quite indifferent as to whether he translated their language in court or wrote a guidebook on the subject.

* * *

What Vaux could not know, as he lay in the darkness that night, was that in seven years’ time his modest dictionary would be published in London – as an appendix to his own autobiography. Although if he had known, he would have thought it entirely good and proper, and nothing less than he deserved; he was not a modest young man.

James Hardy Vaux had been baptised on the 20th of May 1782. The exact date of his birth is not known, but this was an era when, because of the frequency of infant deaths, it was common for baptisms to occur as soon as possible after the birth – sometimes even on the same day. And in some parishes it was the practice to put down on the certificate of baptism the date of birth rather than the date when baby was ‘done’ by the local vicar. So we can say with confidence that Vaux was born on or shortly before the 20th of May 1782 (which Vaux himself always celebrated as his birthday).

The event took place in East Clandon, a small village in Surrey between Guildford and Leatherhead. On the certificate of baptism his parents are recorded as Sophia and Hardy Vaux. There was considerable strain between Sophia and her parents – mother, Dorothy Lowe, and father, James Lowe – because they thought she had married below her station.

James Lowe was a professional man, an attorney with rooms at Hemlock Court in London’s Temple Bar, as well as ‘clerk of papers’ (deputy warden) at the Fleet Prison. This latter job appears to have been a sinecure, producing a good income for little work. Vaux’s father, on the other hand, was a mere butler. To James and Dorothy Lowe, he was ‘below stairs’, while they were definitely ‘above stairs’.

Mind you, Hardy Vaux was a butler in no mean home. He was employed by Mr George Holme-Sumner, member of the local gentry, magistrate and Member of Parliament. The house in which Vaux’s father was butler and steward was the handsome country mansion of Hatchlands Park, one of the largest estates in the county, now owned by the National Trust. Nevertheless, Dorothy and James Lowe thought he was not quite one of ‘their people’, and they remained largely disappointed by their daughter’s marriage for the rest of their lives.

When James Hardy Vaux was just three years old, his parents moved to Shropshire, his father having entered the service of Sir Richard Hill at Hawkstone Hall, near Hodnet. Here young Vaux came into greater contact with his maternal grandparents. His grandfather had by now retired from legal life in London, and he and Dorothy had settled in the village of Shifnal, some twenty miles from Hodnet.

These affectionate grandparents took quite a liking to the child, who had, diplomatically, been named after his grandfather. Their interest suggests either that he was a cute and engaging child, or else that he knew how to butter up the old folks (and, given his later life as a con man and swindler, it might well