That’s the opening theme credits of “Dad’s Army”, a long running British sitcom. At around the 33s mark the line “Mr Brown goes off to town on the__” is sung, followed by either A21 or 8:21. Which is more accurate?
A21
The A21 had been established by the 1940s and it happens to be located in pretty much the right area for “Mr Brown”, however private motoring is not a usual thing for the time period. This is what is clearly sung though, although almost certainly unintentional.
8:21
An unusual time to be taking a train to “town”. It would get Mr Brown there much later thatn you’d expect from a commuter, of course 8:01, 7:51, 7:41, 7:31, 7:21 and 7:01 don’t scan with the next line. The sheet music published well after the series started does say 8:21, but again clearly not sung with 2 distinct t sounds in the actual titles, and what happens in the titles is more important athan what someone says about it later.
So which is more accurate, did Mr Brown drive or get a train?
Not only would most people not have been commuting to work by car, but they’d have been still less likely to in view of wartime petrol rationing. Much more patriotic (and practical) to take the train.
It might also have been a bus, unless such transport was curtailed during the war. Commuter buses with routes along country roads are commonplace in Europe, and they run according to timetables.
It’s 8:21 - a reference to the classic stereotype of the British white-collar worker, complete with bowler hat, briefcase and umbrella, catching his morning train from the suburbs to the centre of the city for work. In colloquial British speech, trains are very often referred to by the time they leave the station, but buses never are.
This stereotype brings with it the assumption that the worker in question is a timid, conventional, soul, which is helps the contrast when he’s “ready with his gun” to defend the country that evening. Making him a car driver at that time would suggest a far richer “flash harry” type, who would not suit the song’s purposes nearly as well.
It’s perfectly reasonable to imagine Mr Brown catching that train for a 20 or 25 minute commute and still reaching his desk in time for the start of the working day at 9:00am. In any case, the lyricist’s primary concern in picking this time would be the fact that it has the required number of syllables to fit the song’s scansion (4 in this case) and provides a convenient rhyme for “gun” in the next line. Of the four possible times satisfying these criteria - 8:21, 8:31, 8:41 and 8:51 - he picked the most credible.
I side on the A21. It goes from the coast to London, exactly in the area where the show is set, Walmington-on-sea, fictionally located in East Sussex. That’s too perfect to be coincidental.
Yeah, what Slade said. Commuter train = simple, ordinary man. It ties in with the cast of the show: bank managers, grocers etc. Not car owners with business in London.
Anyhow, the message to the Nazis was clear: only invade during business hours.*
*Yes, I know when the song was written. It’s a weak enough joke as is without trying to write it around that.
The is no question that is 8.21 and refers to a train. Slade is 100% correct. It is very much colloquial British English to refer to a train (but not a bus) by its departure time (compare The Who’s song “5:15”, also about a London commuter train), and in the relevant era not only would people not have been commuting into “town” (i.e., London) by car, they would not have been mentioning the road number in a casual, pointless way like that.
I doubt whether there was ever an era when commuting into London by car was common, even after cars themselves became common. Certainly when I grew up in a commuter town in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, nearly all the commuters went in by train, even though most of them probably owned cars by then. I am confident that this is still the case now. Most of the jobs are in the central part of London, which just does not have the parking, and gets congested even with the cars that are are there for reasons other than commuting (not to mention that there is now a congestion charge for entering the area).
A bit of a problem with scansion and word-emphasis here IMO, in whatever way the lyricist might have chosen to tackle it. The line “as is”, has to be sung: “Mr. Brown goes off to town ON THE eight-twenty-one” – needing to take a little poetic license: in ordinary speech, the natural intonation would put the stress more on “eight”, than " on the". If the lyricist had chosen a train half an hour earlier, or more, the line would have been, “Mr. Brown goes off to town on the seven-fifty-one” [or .41, 31, or whatever] – the two syllables of “seven”, making the line a little clumsy. The lyricist basically can’t win.
I’m British, but don’t drive; so the matter of the A21 road (as below, and in the OP) had never previously occurred to me. It has entered my mind in the past, that a seaside town in East Sussex would be about fifty miles from London; so a train leaving Walmington-on-Sea for London at 8.21, would get the commuter in, very much on the late side for a start to his working day. Of course, “town” does not necessarily refer to London – though colloquially in England, it tends to have that implication in this context. Brown might possibly work in another town in East Sussex, and have a short daily commute between Walmington and there…
Overall, I suspect that any envisaging of any detailed connection between Walmington-on-Sea and its Home Guard unit, and the song, is a mistake. I see the song as being a generic one, such as might well have been written circa 1940 (though we know that in fact, this song wasn’t), reflecting the mood in Britain at the time.
Correct. The song was written as a pastiche of the kind of thing that Bud Flanagan actually sang twenty-five years previously. He was quite elderly when the song was recorded - he died a year later - which would explain any deficiencies in the pronunciation, which isn’t helped by the awkward stresses imposed by the music: “MISter Brown goes OFF to town on THE eight-twenty-ONE” is not at all how it would be pronounced in ordinary speech.
Since the song, in-universe, is a generic song about the Home Guard and not specific to Walmington-on-Sea, Mr Brown can be leaving a suburb much closer to London on his morning commute - and hence board an 8:21 train and still be at work by nine. Places like Croydon and Barnet are now absorbed in the general urban sprawl, and even somewhere as far afield as Reigate is barely out of it, but in 1940 they were still distinct from London itself. I doubt commuting from the South Coast to London was at all common back then, much less by road and with wartime petrol rationing.
Incidentally, if Mr Brown went off to town on a bus, even one that was routed on the A21, any Englishman of that period or pretty much any other would refer to it not by the road number but by the number of the bus service - the “No 9” for instance.
Not only is there no Mr Brown in the show, but none of the show’s regular characters (or even occasional ones that I can recall), commute to London to work. They all work in Walmington (or are retired). As you say, it a generic song about the Home Guard; it is not specifically about the imagined Walmington platoon.
There’s this thing people do when it seems the facts and reasoning do not accord with what their first instinct was…
Yes: Mainwaring, Wilson and Pike work at the Walmington bank, Jones is the town butcher, Fraser is the undertaker, Godfrey is retired, Walker is undoubtedly a work-shy lounger and is known to be a black-marketeer on a presumably petty scale. I forget what Warden Hodges does for a living, much less Private Sponge, but the vicar and verger are self-explanatory… have I missed anyone out?
