Tell Them You’re A Londoner

Letter dated 3 February 1911 from Fred Godfrey assigning the rights to Tell Them You’re A Londoner (and several other songs) to Billy Williams. Interestingly, Williams had already recorded the song for the Zonophone Twin label when this letter was written.

Billy Williams & Fred Godfrey, 1911; manuscript of lyrics in author’s collection.

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A song of working-class London pride that must have gone over well in the Metropolitan Halls, complete with the obligatory reference to that hoary thoroughfare, the Old Kent Road:

Tell them you’re a Londoner,
Just an ordinary little Londoner.
You don’t come from the best end, boy
But you’re as good as anybody in the West End, boy.
Your mother, too, was a Londoner,
Proud of her tiny abode.
So when they ask you where you come from,
Tell them you were born
Somewhere in the Old Kent Road.

Recordings

Billy Williams recorded two versions of this song: 26 January 1912 for Zonophone Twin (reissued on Cinch and Australian Zonophone), and ca. April 12 for Edison Amberol.¹

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Note

1  For comprehensive discographies of recordings by Billy Williams, see Brian Rust, British Music Hall on Record (Harrow, UK:
    Gramophone, 1979); and Frank Andrews and Ernie Bayly, Billy Williams’ Records: A Study in Discography (Bournemouth, UK:
    Talking Machine Review, 1982).