PETER HITCHENS: I can see why some individuals resent plummy English voices like mine, however we’ll be sorry when they’re now not heard

Parodists strive to imitate my plummy English voice, one of the last to remain outside captivity, but it is beyond their range. They never lived in a world where it was normal, and so only hear parts of it.

I confess that, when in the US, I turn it up a bit, as that country is still (rightly) secretly ashamed of what it has done to the English language. 

I might also do so in Oxbridge debates where I suspect it still whispers a coded message to some of my listeners. That message is that an accent like mine is evidence of authority and knowledge, which it is not really.

This is probably a mistake, as I have lost the vote (though not the argument) at almost all the Oxford or Cambridge Union debates I have taken part in. 

Once upon a time, the tones of John Snagge and Alvar Lidell were a guarantee of reliability and trustworthiness. But in the 21st century, the plummy man is always wrong. And that is why I shall soon be not just marginalised, but extinct.

So I am puzzled by the claim of that fine actress, Erin Doherty, that the accent she adopted when she played Princess Anne in the TV series The Crown helped her get better service in coffee bars. 

‘I remember ordering coffees in a Princess Anne voice,’ she says, ‘and it was massively different, which was interesting. Without being stereotypical, it got me my way quicker. My coffee was in my hand.’

When Peter Hitchens is in the US, he turns his plummy voice up a bit, as that country is still (rightly) secretly ashamed of what it has done to the English language

Erin Doherty claims that the accent she adopted when she played Princess Anne in the TV series The Crown helped her get better service in coffee bars 

This seems unlikely. Apart from anything else, most coffee shops in modern England are staffed by people from Eastern Europe, who can’t tell posh from Essex. She says: ‘There’s an authority to voices like that. And whether we like it or not, you respond differently.’

Well, I would say there used to be. But for a long time now the Received Pronunciation (RP) voice has been under slow, merciless attack. For many people it symbolises the entitlement of the privately educated.

And I have interesting research which suggests it has been in retreat for many decades. First, listen to recordings of the late Queen early in her reign when she spoke of ‘hets and hendbegs’. 

Or listen to the tones of upper-crust actors in 1950s films, such as Terry-Thomas in I’m All Right Jack. Nobody has talked like that for half a century.

After my naval officer father died in 1987, my uncle unearthed some ancient spools of old-fashioned tape recordings from the early 1960s, in which my father had sent Christmas messages to our cousins then in South Africa. 

The way he pronounced the name ‘Janet’ could have come out of a Movietone news commentary on the 1938 Munich Agreement. 

But in more recent years he had stopped talking like that, deepening his voice to blunt its cut-glass edges.

It was only when I heard the tapes that I realised how much he had de-plummified his speech as the social revolution of the 1960s gathered pace. 

The great irony was that he had grown up speaking broad Hampshire, a lovely accent now vanished (though I also found a recording of my grandfather speaking it).

But he had lost his Portsmouth burr once he began life in His Majesty’s Navy, where officers and their wives were expected to speak as Noel Coward and Celia Johnson do in the film In Which We Serve.

When I watch it now I can once again hear my late mother’s voice in Celia Johnson’s gorgeous tones. My own accent, when I was a small boy at prep school in the 1950s, would have been enough to get me strangled in South Shields, and I can now sympathise with the person who would have strangled me.

How could we possibly have talked like that? Yet we did, and I recall hearing a straggler from this age calling across a cricket field for his ‘deddy’ as recently as 1979.

My current way of speaking is mild compared with what it was when I was eight. Even so, when I first came to live in London in the 1970s, and began to use the buses and Tubes late at night, I quickly realised that it was wise to keep my voice down at such times and in such places. What began with mockery might end in real trouble.

The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw said: ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman hate or despise him’

A friend of mine was once actually warned by a police officer to reduce his volume, after committing a bit of unwise plumminess at Camden Town Tube station.

It would have been no good pointing out that his father had been a trade union leader, though he had been. It was the voice, not the pedigree, that caused the trouble.

The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, exempt from these rules, rightly said: ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.’

Snobbery has been a terrible curse in this country. And if the toning down of accents helps to get rid of snobbery, then that is a good thing.

But we might also be losing something important. There is a beauty and depth in the RP accent, whether it is someone reading the news or playing Hamlet on the stage. 

It is not the only beautiful version of English, but those who attack it seem to be the same people who want to modernise everything else, urging the adoption of babytalk versions of the Bible and Shakespeare, and indulging new forms of speech such as the worrying Multicultural London English (MLE), which I am told may eventually drive existing spoken English out of use. Examples: ‘peng’ means good and ‘thing’ is pronounced ‘ting’.

Professor Paul Kerswill, Emeritus Professor of Sociolinguistics at my old university, York, has predicted: ‘It’s a never-ending cycle. Slang and dialects inevitably feed into the mainstream, and become mainstream. We will see MLE become mainstream in the years ahead.’

The Guardian newspaper is keen, saying: ‘MLE is a dialect that has developed organically in the UK. It’s as British as red-faced Cockneys, or bowler-hatted bankers, or whatever other cartoon nostalgia you are imagining. It’s different, but different doesn’t always mean worse.’

You’ll have to look it up, but it is not just another language. I won’t try to describe it in detail here. It carries a subversive message in its style and rhythm, quite distinct from the ordered, sober English we once spoke.

Social revolutions often have that effect, and not everyone thinks it is good. Russian exiles, returning to Moscow after decades away, found that Communism had rotted their language. One told me that before the Bolsheviks, Russian had sounded ‘like bells’, full of remembered poetry and music. But the brutality of Communism had turned it, by comparison, into a brusque, impatient and ugly tongue, a definite decline.

I fear the same here. Much as I can see why some people resent and dislike voices like mine, I think we will be sorry when they are no longer heard.