All Sir Garnet
I am fascinated by idioms that once were common currency but have since slipped into obscurity. Reading Brian Flynn’s Men for Pieces (1949), I came across the phrase “everything was Sir Garnet”, which, from the context, I knew meant everything was OK but it got me wondering who Sir Garnet was and why he was immortalized or at least remembered in this phrase.
It turns out that he was one of Britain’s most famous soldiers of the second half of the 19th century, Sir Garnet Wolseley, who later became Viscount Wolseley. His long and successful military career included campaigns in Crimea, as well as the Indian Mutiny, Canada, the Gold Coast, southern Africa, Egypt, and the Sudan. He was the master of small campaigns, was a reformer who put his men first and won their respect and even was caricatured by W S Gilbert in The Pirates of Penzance (1879) as the very model of a modern major-general.
Such was his reputation and the awe in which he was held that the consensus developed that if Garnet was in charge, everything would go well. From this the phrase developed as illustrated by this quotation from Harmsworth Magazine in 1901; “They’re comin’ along,” he cried to Mackenzie, as the thud of galloping horses was heard in the rear. “If I can only do the Horatius on the bridge business till they gits ’ere, we shall be all Sir Garnet.”
It is said that the expression was so much in use that it was abbreviated into all Sigarneo or all Sigarno, although there is little recorded evidence of this. Inevitably, as soldiers returned to civilian life, they brought the phrase with them. Compton Mackenzie in Sinister Street (1914) records this exchange between two women: “Whatever are you doing, Cook?” said Nurse. “That’s all right, lovey. That’s All Sir Garnet, and don’t you make no mistake”.
That Flynn used it shortly after the Second World War with the assumption that his readers would understand the reference suggests that it did not fall into obscurity until the second half of the 20th century, despite an American publication, The Living Age, declaring it obsolete in 1916.
Curiously, it is the polar opposite of “it’s all gone Pete Tong”. So that’s all Sir Garnet, then!
