G'day McGrath,

You are right - there are examples of rhyming slang that appear in English usage before the 1890s ... what I ought to have said was:

"... a bit early for the craze for rhyming slang (in the 1890s) ...".

It is interesting that Mayhew's 1850 book gives a lot of London street slang and (virtually .. ?) none of it is rhyming slang ... but there is a great amount of "back-spell" slang. (Yob = boy, [~] ecollop from backspelled 'police', &c) I gather this is still used, to some extent by Cockney traders ... when they aren't putting on a show for the American tourists ... and they don't want to be understood. (An old TV program on the History of the English Language shows Cockneys discussing prices at the fruit market ... and gives sub-titles ... and 'footnotes'!)

In the case of Who'll come a'soldiering for Marlborough, the first recorded citations of the chorus seem to be just after WW II - but were mostly from the families of WW I soldiers who were adamant that the song was ancient and genuine, because Dad / Grandfather sang it when he came back from France (or wherever) in 1919/20.

A substantial pile of books, by authors looking for (sometimes commissioned to find ... ) a respectable English origin for the song, have used this to claim the existence of an old English folksong, which has totally escaped the notice of English collectors from the time of Marloborough ... but which has been remembered by a large number of unrelated Australians ... two centuries later!

Certainly this was the claim of pioneer Australian field collector John Meredith ... and a point on which I had to keep (fairly) silent over the decades I knew him. John also claimed he could see no resemblance between the Cowan tune and Craigielea ... although there was also a fair amount of 'folk' evidence that this was the real tune source ... and Paterson had given his account of the circumstances of the composition - but he was distrusted by the hardcore "folkies"!

It was Richard Magoffin who actually located the papers of Christina McPherson and at least two different holograph copies of the tune - with Paterson's original words written below, in her handwriting... which she had given to people around Dagworth Station and Winton in 1895. However, by this time the earlier books ... or just someone's memory of the chorus that they quoted ... got back to the Old Dart ... and to Pete Coe - who proceeded to make up the verses to flesh it out.

Regards,

Bob Bolton