I think it's a bit tough to call W G (or G W) Ross 'an unsuccessful actor'. Any performer who could silence a noisy Cyder Cellars audience in the small hours of the morning must have had a powerful presence. Ross took pre-existing ballads and created a dramatic monologue and a style of delivery that thrilled the supper rooms. It was his great misfortune to reach his peak (in 1849) before the new music halls, that took the likes of Jack Sharp and Sam Cowell to their bosom, had come into existence.

An even greater misfortune was to become so closely associated with a single song that, when that song went out of fashion, as it was bound to, he ceased to be noticed. It was impossible to think of Ross without Sam Hall. The two went down together and poor Sam finished up as a supernumerary in an opera bouffe company.

Incidentally, it is time to demolish some of the myths surrounding Ross's performance.   The anachronistic word 'wankers' (first recorded by Partridge in 1948) has already been mentioned. And although the early and mid Victorian mens' supper rooms were tolerant of some pretty salacious stuff, Ross would never have used the word 'muckers' or anything more explicit. The Coal Hole in its prime period had a reputation for uttering obscenities 'plain and right out' and the Cyder Cellars sailed very close to the wind, but not that close. Increasing caution was being exercised by the 1840s by licensees who were concerned to retain their their licences (the Cellars finally lost its licence for far lesser indiscretions).

The fact that Ross's performance was described at the time as 'blasphemous' has to be considered in the light of the fact that expressions like 'Damn your eyes!' 'Indeed to God' and 'Kingdom Come' were so regarded by goodly people who did not frequent the Cellars, but knew its reputation, while some who did attend and wrote about what they heard had done so with the clear intention of being shocked. The character represented by Ross as a murderer defiantly facing death by hanging, without an atom of repentance, was itself, at the time, shocking.

It is significant that, giving evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee in the 1860s, Paddy Green, who had been proprietor of the Cellars in Ross's time (he later ran the ultra-respectable Evans's) was at pains to dismiss the story that Ross had ever used the 'wicked' verse about the the parson who (as we learn, not from the Committee report, but from oral tradition) would 'look so gallows glum and talk of Kingdom Come, but he can kiss my bloody bum'. It seems fairly certain that the process of elaborating and adding colour to Ross's text had already stated in the 1850s and it has continued to the present day, as the shockability bar has steadily risen.

It is a pity that all the accounts of Ross's performance are so sketchy and the only contemporarily printed lyrics of his song are so obviously unreliable. W G Ross must have been a performer of some stature (Paddy Green certainly thought so), or we wouldn't be going on about him today.