The song is full of working class
cockney rhyming slang and
idiomatic phrasing. The song tells the story of Bill and his wife who, with a lodger, live down an alleyway off the street (which were usually passages lined with crowded
tenements), near the
Old Kent Road, one of the poorest districts in
London. They are visited by a
toff, a well-dressed man, who must have been a gentleman because he took his topper (
top hat) off in the presence of the narrator's missus (wife). The man's speech however betrays that he is lower class himself when he informs the lady that her uncle Tom has 'popped off', slang for died. He says this is not a 'sell' i.e. it's the truth not a story, and that she has been left a little donkey
shay (a small, light, horse-drawn carriage). The refrain describes the reaction of the neighbours to the news of the couple's good fortune. "Wot cher!" was a Cockney greeting—a contraction of "What cheer", used as a greeting since the Middle Ages. To "knock em" is an idiomatic phrase, to knock them on the head i.e. to stun them. The song goes on to describe the initial unreliability of the
moke (slang for donkey) and the way the couple use it to impress the neighbourhood by doing the "grand", behaving in a grandiose way as if they were "
carriage folk", a family who could afford to own their own carriage, and who might drive a "
four-in-'and", a carriage with four horses, in
Rotten Row, one of the most fashionable horse rides in London. A "cove" is a low-class fellow. A "Dutch" is a wife, being cockney rhyming slang for "Duchess of Fife" which rhymes with "wife". She says "I 'ates a
Bus because it's low!", in order to tease her lodger, meaning she now considers the bus to be low-class and beneath her. ==Lyrics==