Hi Hoot - comments taken. I suppose my point was that Elen purposely cultivated the Cockney costermonger character - a very popular guise on the halls - in the wake of people like Vance, and that the accent was just part of that. I should have added that, as well as being born in Pimlico, he was not from a working-class background, so the whole Cockney persona - accent, clothing, character - was the act. He spent hours in preparation, getting every word and gesture to the exacting standard he set himself.

As to the word "Cockney" - well, I used it in the well-understood sense of the term. :-)