Like ole Billyo

Read More

On the Phrase Finder website (www.phrases.org.uk), Gary Martin discusses "like billy-o" as a still-used "extreme standard of comparison; for example, 'It rained like billy-o; we were all soaked through'.” Martin considers and dismisses a possible inspiration for the phrase in Joseph Billio, a Puritan minister who preached passionate sermons in the 1690s at the United Reformed Methodist church in Market Hill, Maldon, Essex. Although a wall plaque in Maldon claims that these fire-and-brimstone sermons gave rise to the saying, Martin concludes that it must have arisen elsewhere: "It didn’t become common until long after Billio’s death and disappearance into obscurity (had you heard of him before?) and doesn’t appear in print for almost 200 years after Billio died." The first printed record of the phrase, he observes, can be found in a US newspaper, The Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, in March 1882: “He lay on his side for about two hours, roaring like billy-hoo with the pain, as weak as a mouse.” A closer analogue ("oh," not "hoo") appears in a UK newspaper, The North-Eastern Daily Gazette, in August 1885: "It’s my umbrella I’ll be lavin’ at home and shure it’ll rain like billy-oh!"

The use of the phrase to describe intense rainstorms in two of Martin's examples strongly suggests that Joyce may be using it in this sense, and if so then his two sentences make up a coherent unit: "That was some storm! We don't have any umbrellas or galoshes in the group, do we?" Another possibility, though, is that someone in the group is saying that they should proceed with all haste to Burke's pub. Declan Kiberd notes that the phrase is "Dublin slang for 'very fast'." Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner agree, citing Eric Partridge to the effect that "like Billy-ho" means "with great vigour or speed."

On the same authority they note that "Billy-o" could refer to the Devil, drawing the inference that "Someone gives the order to move like the Devil." The name Billy apparently came to be applied to the devil in the middle of the 19th century because goats started being called billy-goats in this time and Satan was sometimes represented with a goat's head or body in the same era. Joyce's insertion of the epithet "ole" perhaps supports this reading: Old Billy, Old Nick, the Old Serpent of Revelation 12:9.

Whether or not Satan is involved, taking the phrase to mean "very fast" raises further questions, and other posters on the Phrase Finder website have addressed them. On 8 October 2004 a writer identified only as Shae observed that "Billyo entered the English language in the late 19th century after the Rainhill steam locomotive trials between Liverpool and Manchester. These had gripped the public's imagination. Engineer George Stephenson's Puffing Billy gave rise to the expressions 'running (or puffing) like Billy-o'. The Puffing Billy type of 'infernal combustion engine', belching steam, smoke and fire, must have appeared Dante-esque to spectators in an era of horsepower and hence its association with hell. So billyo became a general pseudonym for things hellish and useful in genteel or young company, where something could be said to 'hurt like billyo' or one could invite someone to 'go to billyo' without corrupting or offending." James Briggs responded to Shae's post later the same day, adding that calling Stephenson's engine "Puffing Billy"  may have been suggested by the "billypot"––"a can or pot used to boil water over an open fire."

The Rainhill Trials, held in October 1829, were designed to test the theory that steam engines mounted on railway cars could do a better job of hauling freight along rails recently laid between Liverpool and Manchester than stationary steam engines pulling cars by cables. The men who had proposed that theory, George and Robert Stephenson, entered a locomotive called the Rocket in the contest and it alone completed the weeklong trials. Robert later remarked that "the trials at Rainhill seem to have sent people railway mad." If this mania for locomotive technology did give rise to the expression "like Billy-o," it is not hard to imagine the image of a burning, puffing, spouting, furiously fast (25-30 miles per hour!) machine eventually lending its metaphorical force to things like rainstorms––or, possibly, in Joyce's case, to a pack of young men barreling down the street. If Joyce was aware of the railway context, it forms a fascinating bookend to the loudly whistling steam fire-engine that he features near the end of this concluding section of Oxen.

A final point to note about these two sentences is that they are distinguished by largely English idioms. Slote and his collaborators, again citing Partridge, observe that "fambly" is "Cockney pronunciation" for family. Along with the brollies, the gumboots, and Puffing Billy, they suggest a dip into distinctively English dialect.