Did you have elocution lessons ?

I certainly did - my poor mother was horrified at the Essex accent we children were picking up! - though what she expected bringing us up in Essex I do not know.

"The goldfish in the bowl goes Oh, Oh, Oh" - how could I forget it!

My poor mother hated the fact that my friends failed to pronounce the H at the beginning of my name, and her true low point was when a group of lads were playing marbles outside our house and one of them shouted excitedly: "I i i" - think about it!

We're only just catching up with tonight's episode Greenfinch.

I remember asking my aunt why she pronounced words a certain way (I must have been about seven - how embarrassing ) so she definitely had an accent.

Callistemon I wonder how much Pam’s accent is acquired. She spoke on her programme about the Cotswolds tonight of her Vale of the White Horse accent. I am the same age as her and went to school in Faringdon at the same time(different schools) but I have no accent at all and neither did most of my contemporaries.

Up in the North East its 'Shut yer mush!' too.

Greenfinch

It is a good job Pam Ayers didn’t have elocution lessons. Her poems would not be the same without being spoken in her local Berkshire accent.

My father was from Berkshire/Oxfordshire and he didn't have much of an accent. He must have lost it along the way because his sister had a strong local accent as she had stayed in the area..

"Around the rugged rocks the ragged rascals ran."

how do you say that with a Scouse accent, please - lol

Never had elocution lessons from a professional. At about 4 I was failing to say my "r"s properly. My mother took up teaching me. I can still remember chanting the line "Around the rugged rocks the ragged rascals ran." and I learned to say "r". My mother spoke without a local accent. Her sister married a farm worker and my cousins had much broader accents. I was warned that I was never to speak like them.
One of the most valuable lessons I had was at college when we learned to project our voices. I can still speak to a whole hall full of people, without using a microphone and be heard, and do it without straining my voice.

It is a good job Pam Ayers didn’t have elocution lessons. Her poems would not be the same without being spoken in her local Berkshire accent.

But Joanna, many well educated people speak in local dialects and foreign accents.

Yes! My parents paid for them as an extra as my verging on Brummie accent was not suitable for someone who hoped to go to university. We were taught by two lovely ladies, one very fond of pretty dresses and the other had cropped hair and wore a men’s suit, we never twigged they were a couple. I remember having to repeat “my father’s car is a jaguar “ endlessly.

When I went to work in the West Midlands, the char lady and the engineers used to love coming to my office to teach me how to 'speak proper like what they did' with the local accent- and I was happy to oblige and make them all laugh (and made great friends).

Strangely I can still remember a poem from my elocution lessons

I went to say 'Good morning' to a little furry bunny
He stood inside his doorway for the day was bright and sunny
But oh I grieve to tell you he would not stay to play
He turned his tail and bobbed it, and quickly ran away.

Message deleted by Gransnet. Here's a link to our Talk guidelines.

I had a very strong Welsh accent when small .
This is because my parents left me in the full time care of my grandmother .
Then , because I spent so much time in Wales my accent became stronger .

I had elocution lessons in London .
We all did at school .

My parents spoke very quietly and didn't swear .
They were extremely reserved .
Speaking loudly and "too much " and laughing was considered unladylike .

Times have changed !

Thankfully not. I still have my East Midlands accent and it really hasn't been a problem. The only time it was ever mentioned was in an annual review when I worked at the bank. The manager was ex military and more than a bit stuck up. He wanted us all to say grarss, barth , parth etc. I did say that all of our customers also spoke the same way as me. So he grinned and left it at that. Even when I moved to the main city branch it was never a problem. All sorts of accents there. Many customers spoke very broken English with an Asian accent. It took time to get accustomed to that.

I live in Essex, but my mum and dad were both born in London.

Yes, we use 'cake 'ole', too.

Oh miss Adventure shut yer gate made me really laugh! Where do you live? I’ve never heard that expression, but where I grew up I had heard the expression shut your cake hole, ???

God no

That's a horrible memory Yangste, but I know exactly what you mean. At parents' evening a French teacher told my mum my French accent was poor, "but not surprising because my English one wasn't much better!" Charming.
I went on to get a degree in French from London University and my English accent is very acceptable in posh circles. But it really upset me.

Yes, I had elocution lessons. I was East End born and bred but we moved to NE Kent when I was 7 and I went to the local primary. At 11 my parents moved me to a private girls school. I can remember being asked to another girl's house for tea. She lived near me. Whilst there the friend had an older sister of 16 who was also at our school. I remember hearing older sister asking the mother who that awful girl was (me)? The Mother replied that actually she was a very nice girl if only she could speak properly. At age 11 I was mortified and embarrassed. I told my mother and she organised the lessons at school but I never forgot hearing that conversation.

I vaguely remember speech and drama classes- which ( being shy and quiet) I hated. I went with my twin who was more confident- and a neighbours child - whose oldest sibling used to walk us there. I think it was partly to give my younger sibling some home time with my mother. We must have been about 8? It was more about voice projection and clear speech if I remember correctly. We attended for possibly a year. Money was very tight in our house so goodness knows how my parents afforded it! It must have been considered very important in the early 60s?
I don't have a strong accent - but I still call plimsolls daps.

From Melwyn Bragg's book 'the Adventures of English' (fascinating and a reall good read)

'Perhaps my interest in English began when I was speaking at least two versions of it in my childhood. And within these two were, I suspect, something like the jumbled, shifting sound and sense of much earlier centuries of English.

I spoke a heavily accented dialect in Cumbria until I was about sixteen. There was also a considerable purely local vocabulary. Then the influence of school and BBC English began to erode that accent. The local dialect words were discarded once I began to travel out of the county, simply because no one understood them. But for years I could revert to that accent and remembered those words. Friends back home still employ some of them. They, like me, could switch into the more mainstream English when necessary. The vocabularies intermeshed, sometimes a new word rubbed out an old, it was a jumble, not at all difficult to manage, subject to teasing, snubbing, and as the old yielded more to the new, some regret.

I thought that my experience on a local and much smaller scale might bear some resemblance to the spoken English in the ninth century. To test that, I went through a Cumbrian dialect glossary to look at some of the words I used most commonly.

First, though, the accent. In the 1940s and 1950s,Wigtonians, like so many others everywhere else in small towns and villages, were still largely immobilised in one small area save when wars took off the men or emigration lured away desperate or daring families. It was still heavily influenced by agriculture and agricultural terms which had been just as common more than a hundred, even two or three hundred years before. Its accent was broad. To refined speakers it could appear coarse. Class climbers could even pretend it was unintelligible and subhuman. Yet it carried the deep history of our language and perhaps it had carried it intact for centuries in sound as well as in vocabulary. '

I think many of us remember growing up 'bilingual' - speaking one type of English at home, and another at school, or with friends.

My parents always spoke very well, with no accent, and never swore. So I learnt to speak as they do, but soon realised it was not good for may 'street cred' - so I changed it for use with friends when I was a teenager. Perhaps the other way round to most. For OH, it was t'other way round- as he didn't want his parents foreign accent.

Shut yer gate in these parts means "shut up!"

I did.but it was all verse speaking/drama. I remember doing some exam/diploma and a poem called “shut gate” Weird.

Yes I did, private ones. I’m a Lancashire lass with a strong accent even now. I think I had started stuttering a bit because I could never get a word in in our family so my mum forked out for these lessons which I enjoyed. I still remember ‘Father’s car’s a Jaguar’ etc, I did enter some competitions as well I think.

My mum definitely had pretensions even though we were quite poor I suppose. I had lessons for the piano as well as elocution and dancing with private ballet lessons in French. I can’t play a note or speak well, I’m quite embarrassed sometimes how broad I speak but I’m not changing now! However, I have always liked dance of all kinds, even if now its line dancing, Fitsteps, dance exercise classes etc.