In Edgar Bateman's song ‘I'm Using Sunday Language All the Week’ (1910) an East End Londoner explains to the audience his problems coping with his wife who has found a job in the West End and now insists upon proper speech at home. ‘I'll just give you an instance how I have to pick and choose / The words that your poor humble has to speak’, he sings, ‘When I'm “stoney broke” I say that I'm “financially embarrass'd” / ‘Cos I'm using Sunday language all the week’ (Scott and Bateman 1910). Bateman's song dramatises a contemporary struggle between an emergent concept of a spoken Standard English and a diversity of accent and idiom that was to be central to debates about English national identity and social change throughout the century. It was written in a period of elocutionary polemics which centred upon the virtues of a deterritorialised English voice and its role as a ‘cure for dialects’, as one educationalist termed it (Barber 1934: 25). The speech training of the private Athenaeums and elocution classes which were particularly popular in the Midlands and northern England was one expression of this aspiration to ‘the ideal of a pure English speaking nation’ (11). Its objectives and techniques also entered the curricula of state elementary education as well as the policy of the newly formed BBC in the first quarter of the century (11).