What Is The Origin Of (247)?…
Money for old rope
I have been shining the spotlight on scams and fraudsters for long enough to realise that many people cannot resist the lure of money for old rope. By this phrase we mean doing something that is rewarding but involves little effort. But where does it come from?
I had thought that it was a reference to oakum which was used to caulk wooden sailing ships and made from the fibre of old rope which had been untwisted. But the earliest recorded usages of the phrase, in print at least, date to as late as the 1920s, an era when the wooden ship was well and truly a thing of the past.
Perhaps the earliest example is to be found in The Daily Mail on February 15, 1927 in a report from the Driffield Fishing Club, although the subject was a race between two puppies, Mercenary Mary and Leaps Rigg, with bookies and punters in attendance. “It took the Bookies some time, however, before they could get their bags tight on the Mary money for…very little…well, money for old rope”.
A report of a poetry competition from the Yorkshire Evening Post of December 11, 1929 recorded an easy victory for Billy Wimple; “This was rank failure, and to Billy Wimple, his exultant rival, the contest seemed money for old rope”. And James Curtis, in his 1936 novel Gilt Kid, felt able to use it without feeling the need for any explanation, suggesting that it was a term that was well understood; “he would spin her a fanny about marriage laws, tie the poor kid up. It ought to be money for old rope”.
Although our phrase is undoubtedly a fairly modern construction, there was an older phrase where the end of an old rope was used as a comparator to suggest that you didn’t care for something or value it. The earliest example is to be found in William Congreve’s comedy, Love for love, from 1695 in which a character, Ben, described as a young man “half home-bred, and half Sea-bred, remarks, “as for your love or your liking, I don’t value it of a Rope’s end”. That Ben had a nautical background doesn’t necessarily mean that this particular phrase owed its origin to the matelot community but they did use ropes. The end of a rope, especially an old one, is of far less use than the rope itself.
Susanna Centilivre, in her play A Bickerstaff’s burying: or, work for the upholders, from 1796 has a variant of Congreve’s phrase, intriguingly put in the mouth of a sailor character; “I care not a Rope’s-end if she does”. Perhaps more conclusive evidence of a nautical origin comes from a rather picaresque vignette of everyday life as it played out in the streets of London in the 1830s.
A report from the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette on October 16, 1834 recorded a case that troubled the magistrates at Bow Street. Perhaps they picked it up because it was a slow news day in Wiltshire or saw it as a salutary warning to its country readership of the perils that lurked in the cesspit of human depravity that was London, who knows? An old sailor, Patrick O’Bryan, was foolish enough to give a woman half a crown to purchase some gin for himself, in the expectation that he would get some change. In this he was sorely mistaken, the woman downing the gin and running off with the change before being apprehended by the old Bill.
That O’Bryan was wont to pepper his speech with phrases reeking of the life on an ocean wave is established when he describes the woman escape thus; “[she] shot away with all sails set like a smuggling lugger chased by a King’s cutter”. He was also a kindly soul and pleaded to the magistrate to let the unfortunate miscreant off and whilst confirming she had committed the crime, said “she certainly did, but I don’t value the money an old rope’s end”.
What we can deduce from all of this is that whilst money for old rope is a relative modern creation, there is a legacy of part of an old rope denoting something cheap, trivial, worthless since the eighteenth century, which, in turn, may owe it s origin to the nautical world.
