Circa 1950 one of the songs taught at the school I attended, started with the words:
D'ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay,
D'ye ken John Peel at the break of day,
D'ye ken John Peel when he's far away,
With his hounds and his horn in the morning.
The schoolboy version was:
D'ye ken John Peel,
With his cock of steel,
Balls of brass,
and a carrot up his a r s e.
|These days the word “gay” would evince a classroom titter. In darkest Africa in 1950, it was the surname “Peel” that did that, because it sounded like the Afrikaans word “piel”, which has the same meaning as the third word in the second line of the schoolboy version – perhaps a corruption of the Dutch word “piemel”.
