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PORTMEIRION

The road south from Caernarfon into mid-Wales runs along the Lleyn peninsula then cuts across through Porthmadog and past the Italianate village created by Clough Williams-Ellis in the 1920s in loving memory of his visits to Portofino, on the coast of north-west Italy. Portmeirion. I had to go and worship there, for a little while, because it was chosen as the location for The Prisoner, the 1960s cult television series starring Patrick McGoohan. I am of the generation that watched it assiduously, week by week, and puzzled over what on earth it was all about.

Portmeirion was ‘the Village’ where (it seemed) kidnapped spies and agents of all descriptions were kept for interrogation, so that whatever data they had in their heads might be extracted for use by those (whoever they were) who were in charge. McGoohan’s character has suddenly resigned from his job in British intelligence. He is followed home, put to sleep with a gas spray, and taken to the Village. Each episode begins with his character, now a prisoner, waking up in his new bedroom and having an exchange with the Village’s current second-in-command (‘Number 2’).

PRISONER: Where am I?

NUMBER 2: In the Village.

PRISONER: What do you want?

NUMBER 2: Information.

PRISONER: Whose side are you on?

NUMBER 2: That would be telling. We want information. Information. Information.

PRISONER: You won’t get it.

NUMBER 2: By hook or by crook, we will.

PRISONER: Who are you?

NUMBER 2: The new Number 2.

PRISONER: Who is Number 1?

NUMBER 2: You are Number 6.

PRISONER: I am not a number. I am a free man!

Despite their hook and crook, the Village guardians don’t get their information. And at the end of the series, McGoohan triumphs (possibly).

The surreal location, and the ingenious, ambiguous ‘Big Brother is watching you’ plots, a combination of thriller, fantasy, and science fiction, reinforced by quirky music, clever camerawork, crisp editing and colourful design, resulted in a series now acknowledged to have been well ahead of its time. I especially admired the quickfire dialogue, with its contagious catch-phrases, and forty years on still find myself saying ‘Be seeing you’ as a farewell – the au revoir that all brainwashed inmates of the Village had been programmed to say.

Catch-phrases are notoriously difficult things to pin down, as they rarely get into dictionaries. Often, by the time lexicographers come to be aware of them, they are already on their way out, so they are never recorded at all. In any case, they don’t easily fit into a dictionary format. A dictionary is not the obvious place to put ‘Be seeing you,’ for instance. Or Victor Meldrew’s ‘I don’t beLIEVE it!’ from One Foot in the Grave.

Many catch-phrases are generated by particular radio or television series, or by TV advertising slogans, and last only as long as the transmissions take place. ‘Can I do you now sir?’ from the radio show ITMA in the 1940s. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ from Listen with Mother in the 1950s. ‘There’s no answer to that,’ from The Morecambe and Wise Show in the 1960s. ‘And now for something completely different,’ from Monty Python in the 1970s.

There can be huge generational gaps in communication – teenagers not understanding adult catch-phrases and, even more so, adults not understanding the latest teenage linguistic fashions. Nor are catchphrases much recognized outside the country in which they originate. Most British catch-phrases are not known in America, and vice versa. PC Dixon’s ‘Evenin’ all,’ from the 1950s and ’60s television series Dixon of Dock Green, never travelled across the Atlantic. Nor did ‘Gissa job’ (= ‘Give us a job’ in Liverpool dialect), from Alan Bleasdale’s 1980 television play Boys from the Blackstuff, and the series it inspired.

A favoured few phrases catch the public linguistic imagination, and live on. Some of them eventually become part of the mainstream of English usage, and their origin is lost to memory. Who now knows which film Western originally inspired ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’? And how many of us are aware that it was Al Jolson, in the first talking film, The Jazz Singer (1927), who gave us ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet’? Such phrases have refreshed parts of our linguistic intuition that other phrases have not reached.

For some (especially younger) readers, that last sentence will seem to be an original piece of literary expression, perhaps admired for its metaphorical ingenuity, more likely condemned as a piece of intellectual self-indulgence. Others (slightly less young) will nod wisely, and remember the original lager slogan which ran from the 1970s for some twenty years: ‘Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach’.

A significant amount of our daily language is a matter of recalling our individual past linguistic experiences, reflecting old interests and habits. Catch-phrases tell others what we have watched or listened to. If you have experienced the same happenings, you recognize the allusions and respond with pleasure. If you haven’t, you would probably think the behaviour puerile. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Say no more. Know what I mean?

When phrases are consciously taken from literature or high oratory, they are usually called ‘quotations’. Some people sprinkle them throughout their speech and writing. They may not know their origins, of course. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’ ‘O, what a tangled web we weave…’ ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.’ If they escape your memory, a book of quotations will tell you that these are from John Keats, Walter Scott, and Rudyard Kipling, respectively.

Some quotations have become so familiar that they have entered the standard everyday language. ‘The plot thickens’, from George Villiers’ play The Rehearsal. ‘Ships that pass in the night’, from Longfellow’s poem-saga Tales of a Wayside Inn. ‘Having your pound of flesh’ and ‘to the manner born’ from Shakespeare. ‘Six of one and half a dozen of the other’ from Frederick Marryat’s novel The Pirate – or, of course, from The Prisoner.

Misquotations enter the standard language too. Sherlock Holmes never said ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’ Ingrid Bergman never said, ‘Play it again, Sam’ (in the film Casablanca). Tarzan never said ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’ In each case, something similar was uttered, but it is the misremembered versions which have come down to us.

Catch-phrases help people to bond. Conversely, a difference of taste in catch-phrases, as George Eliot nearly said, ‘is a great strain on the affections’. Only the most successful advertising campaigns, or the most reported public statements, manage to reach out to everyone, and transcend individual tastes. ‘A diamond is forever,’ from a campaign of 1939. ‘Clunk, click, every trip,’ from a 1971 road safety campaign. The slogan ‘Drinka pinta milka day,’ from 1958. That brought the word pinta into English.

You can, of course, keep linguistic memories alive artificially. This is what fanclubs and anniversary gatherings and appreciation societies do.

There is a Prisoner Appreciation Society. The society has a shop in Portmeirion, in a building called the Round House, where they sell Prisoner books, recordings, and memorabilia. Each year they have a get-together in the village, and there is a tradition of re-enacting one of the scenes – the chess-match on the lawn from the episode called Checkmate in which the pieces are represented by Village inmates. Proper Prisoner dress is the order of the day. Everyone says ‘Be seeing you,’ when they leave. The appropriate response is ‘And you.’

To reach the village you follow the A487 out of Porthmadog, past the station where the Ffestiniog steam railway begins, and across the mile- long embankment built by local landowner William Madocks in 1811, known as ‘the cob’, to reclaim land from the Traeth Mawr (‘great beach’) estuary. Madocks had hoped that the embankment, along with the new model village of Tremadog, which he was building nearby, would provide an attractive road route between London and Dublin. Unfortunately for him – though fortunately for Holyhead and Llanfairpwll – the commissioners decided on a northern route, across the Menai Straits, and, as we have seen, eventually got Thomas Telford to build it.

High tides in the winter of 1812 breached the cob. Hundreds of local men turned out to carry material to fill the gap, and the embankment was saved. But the disaster closed the cob for two years, and placed Madocks in serious financial trouble. He received welcome and unexpected support from the poet Shelley, who was passing through Wales at the time and looking for a place to escape the attentions of the authorities, who were concerned about his radical political views. Shelley was hugely enthusiastic about the Tremadog project, which he saw as a bold experiment in forming a new social community, so he decided to stay in the area and fund-raise on Madocks’ behalf. He lived in a cottage in the grounds of Madocks’ house. Much of his long philosophical poem ‘Queen Mab’ was written there.

The collaboration didn’t last long. One night in February 1813, Shelley claimed that an attempt had been made on his life, and he immediately left the area. The event – if it was not simply hallucination – has attracted endless speculation. Was it a government-inspired assassination attempt? Had his radical views upset local businessmen? Some think it was a clever scheme by local shepherds to drive him away. They had become upset at Shelley’s practice of shooting any injured sheep which he encountered on his mountain walks. So one story goes.

Madocks’ house, Plas Tan-yr-Allt, is now a hotel. The rooms are named after Madocks’ guests. One is called Shelley’s Theatre.

Madocks was saved by the development of the new slate quarries at Blaenau Ffestiniog, which used his embankment to export the slate via a nearby harbour, which was called Port Madoc – modern Porthmadog. A railway line was later built along the cob, alongside the road. It’sa splendid tourist attraction today.

Cobs turn up in all kinds of places. There’s another one on Anglesey, linking Holy Island to the Anglesey mainland. I suppose the most famous one in Britain is at Lyme Regis in Dorset, because it figured in Jane Austen’s novels and also starred in the film The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Cob – or cobb, as it is sometimes spelled – is a curious word. It has a remarkable range of senses, some dating back to the fifteenth century. At one time or another it has referred to a well-built man, a type of gull, a herring, a male swan, a stout horse, and a spider (think of cobweb). Small haystacks, loaves of bread, certain types of nut, the tops of maize shoots, and even testicles have also been called cobs, as have Spanish dollars (the famous ‘pieces of eight’), lumps of building material for walls, and small rounded stones for roadways, more commonly called cobble stones.

Which is where Lyme Regis comes in, for the cob there was originally made out of cobble stones.

The OED editors must have spent some time puzzling over this set of senses, but without coming to any definite conclusion. Are the meanings all related to each other, or do they have different points of origin? There seem to be three semantic themes involved. The notion of ‘large in size’ is there in such cases as the large men, swans, and horses – and probably also the pieces of eight, which were bigger than the average coin. The notion of ‘head’ or ‘top’ (compare German Kopf) is there in gulls and spiders and maize shoots. The notion of ‘something rounded or forming a roundish lump’ is there in most of the others.

It’s hard to disentangle these notions in many instances. Was it the male swan’s size relative to the female, or the rounded shape of its head, which caused it to be called a cob? And then there are the more abstract or figurative uses of the word, many of which are still found in dialects. To give someone a cob can mean to hit them. To have a cob on is to be in a bad mood. To get a cob on is to become sulky. I remember using those last two in Liverpool, where I lived as a teenager. But are these related to the other senses? Nobody knows.

At the end of the Porthmadog cob, on the left if you’re driving towards Portmeirion, is a small house where until recently you had to pay a 5p toll per car – an unusual practice, to say the least, on a British A-class road. It’s a legacy of William Madocks’ original toll, which helped rescue him from financial difficulty. But it is no more. The road was nationalized by the Welsh Assembly in 2005.

The opening paragraph of the old toll-board is a Roget’s Thesaurus of early-nineteenth-century vehicle names: