I question this, even though you have Wikipedia on your side. My mother, a Londoner born and bred (though not a cockney), told me the bells in question were those of St Mary and Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, Bow, in what is now Tower Hamlets. This is the east-end, the working class area of London where cockney culture was truly centred. Cockneys were not from the city, which has long been relatively prosperous and much more full of businesses than residential; they were from the poor east-end. I was also told that, in the aftermath of WWII no true cockneys were born because the church had been bombed and the bells silenced (again, referring to St Marys church in Bow, not St Mary le Bow in the city).
I am not sure, however, which of these churches (if either) housed “the great bell of bow” mentioned in the song Oranges and Lemons.
That’s generally my understanding too, although I believe there are a few genuine examples predating WWII. ANZAC (Australia & New Zealand Army Corps) is from World War I, for example.
I’m not aware of any English-use acronyms in any sense we’d recognise them (with the exceptions of AM/PM, BC/AD and OK) from before the first two-thirds of the 19th Century or so, however.
If you’re going to count any string of initials as an acronym, then acronyms are very ancient. (SPQR, anyone?) What is modern is a string of intials (or intial syllables) stuck together and pronounced as a word - laser, radar, scuba, Nabisco, Benelux. AM, PM, BC, AD and OK do not fall into this category.
Pom, were it an acronym, would fall into this category, but it’s a sufficiently recent coinage (early twentieth century) that it wouldn’t be the oldest such acronym. What puts the kibosh on the idea that it’s an acronym is the fact that the various phrases of which it is supposed to be an acronym (Prisoner of His Majesty, Prisoner of Mother England, Prisoner of Milbank) never had any currency. The convicts were both officially and colloquially referred to as convicts, not prisoners - not least for the reason that, by and large, they weren’t in prison.
Plus – many of the apocryphal acronym-type explanations for words, strike me as highly stilted and far-fetched: IMO in the main, an expression and its origin must be basically “catchy”, for it to catch on. Would reckon stilted / far-fetched, the above (fallacious anyway) “Prisoner” things. Likewise the origin sometimes suggested, of the regrettable word “wog” for a non-white person: supposedly arising from labourers, locally recruited in the Middle East for British projects in the area, being issued with clothing labelled WOGS, = Worker On Government Service – “Wogs” for short. Feeble and convoluted, to the nth degree…
Convicts not prisoners, indeed not in prison: I do gather that the penal settlements were truly not hard to escape from, and escapers were often not vigorously pursued. The catch being, that if you got away; unless you were very hardy, and able quickly to learn bushcraft, and found ways of getting along with the often unpredictable native folk – you were in a worse situation, than if you’d stayed put as a convict.
Don’t agree with this. St Mary Le Bow may now be deep in Banker territory, but it wasn’t always so. The term ‘cockney’ has been used to refer to Londoners since at least the 1600s, referred to as someone born within the sound of Bow Bells, when the City was London, with everything beyond belonging to surrounding counties. The place we now called Bow was just a village on the outskirts of London back then, certainly not the heartland of the East End as we now think of it. Heck, even Hackney was a village on the road out of London back then, and you don’t get anywhere more ‘East End’ these days than Hackney. The descendants of original cockneys were no doubt pushed east as London grew, but that doesn’t make Stratford the traditional heartland of cockneys.
On Pom I have also heard it came from Prisoner of mother England. The problem with that is it only works if you spell it Pome. It’s another explanation I have heard though. It seems fairly unlikely to me.
