“Betting on the Favorite,” by W.L. Sheppard. A group of men in nineteenth-century dress in the paddock of a horse racing track making bets. In the foreground, two groups of men are making bets, with one in each group, the bookie, writing in notepads. Another man is consulting a jockey. A racehorse is in the background.
17 August 2021
To welch or welsh is slang meaning to renege on a bet or agreement. The word started life as an ethnic slur, implying the Welsh people were dishonest, Welch being an older spelling variant of Welsh. As such use of the word is best avoided.
The proper name Wales and the associated adjective Welsh come to us from the Old English wealh, meaning foreigner or slave, a word that was commonly applied to the Celtic Britons the English encountered when they started arriving in what is now England in the middle of the fifth century C.E. For instance, the Peterborough Chronicle has this entry for the year 465:
AN.cccclxv. Her Hengest & Æsc gefuhton wið Walas neh Wippedesfleote & ðær ofslogon .xii. wilsce ealdormen, & heora an þegn wearð þær ofslegen þam wæs nama Wipped.
(Year 465. In this year, Hengest and Æsc fought against the Welsh near Wippedfleet [probably present-day Ebbsfleet, Kent] & there slew 12 Welsh aldermen, & of theirs a thane was slain there whose name was Wipped.)
Over the ensuing centuries, the Britons were either driven out of what is now England or absorbed into the English people and culture. The name Wealhtheow, the name of Hrothgar’s queen in the poem Beowulf, literally means “foreign slave,” hinting that she was originally booty (in both senses of the word) captured in battle. The fact that she could rise to become Hrothgar’s wife and queen, holding a degree of sway and influence over the court, shows how the Early English did not make much of such ethnic differences and how despite being “foreign” she could be easily integrated into the dominant culture. But outside of what is now England, the distinct Celtic culture and language continued to survive, and Wales and the Welsh have maintained a distinct ethnic and linguistic identity.
In Welsh, the name for Wales is Cymru, and the Welsh people are Cymry (singular masculine is Cymro, singular feminine is Cymraes). The adjective is Cymreig.
But the slang word is not nearly that old, arising in the middle of the nineteenth century in horseracing circles. The earliest I have found is from London’s The Era of 11 June 1854:
Elbow to elbow is the soi-disant proprietor of a Metropolitan betting office, who unlike a few of his honest confrères, was but too glad to emerge, under the “Act for the Suppression of Betting Offices,” from his mahogany-polished desk after the victimization of thousands of unwary clerks and apprentices in distant parts of the provinces. Yonder, with a frantic howl of delight, in the pursuit of his inveigling policy, steps the now retired hell-keeper, with his attendant imps, the croupier and the bonnett—the enlarged coachman, who was once the pride of the road and the pink of the whip club, ere the mighty iron highway had driven him to the subterfuge and welching of the betting enclosure—and scores of other questionables, cum multis aliis, that crowd and bully in the precincts which Fuller Andrews is set especially to guard.
The fact that welching is unmarked and undefined here, and in many of the other early recorded uses, indicates that the term was already fairly well known by this point, at least among racing aficionados.
A few months later welcher appears in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle of 31 December 1854 in an article about horseracing on the other side of the Channel:
We wish to instruct our pupil brother in all the better parts of our national hobby, but at the same time preclude, if possible, the vices which have assailed it in England. At present the “genus” Tout, Nobbler, Welcher, is not known upon the Continent, although somewhat of that “baleful influence” has of late intruded itself upon the unsuspecting members of the Turf.
Other early uses include this from the Sunday Times of London on 9 September 1855:
On returning to scale the owner of Frindsbury objected that both Spider and the others had gone wrong. This the other denied, and a scene of confusion ensued. A number of scamps, chiefly of the Welching fraternity, who had “stood the field,” took possession of the weighing stand, and a most disgraceful row took place before the place was cleared of them. The race, which was a wretched exhibition altogether, is in dispute.
And from the Racing Times of 3 March 1856:
The season opened under a right and cheerless sky at Lincoln, and the six shilling railway fare brought at least a hundred new faces into the ring, many of them of a very welching hue.
And again, from Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle of 6 April 1856:
“WELCHERS BEWARE!”—At the late Catterick Meeting, the clerk of the course had the above notice conspicuously posted in the Ring. In addition he also provided several able-bodied labourers, with a barrel of tar and a sack of feathers, so that any one found “welching” might be summarily chastised and branded for their offences.
So, while welch was undoubtedly older in oral use, by the 1850s it had become well established in horseracing jargon.
Sources:
“The Coming Season.” The Racing Times (London), 3 March 1856, 5. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.
“Extraordinary Circumstance.” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 6 April 1856, 4. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.
Irvine, Susan, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition 7 MS E, vol. 7 of 7. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004, 17. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 636. JSTOR.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. welch, v., welch, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2011, modified June 2021, s.v. Welsh, adj. and n., modified December 2020, welsh, v.
“The Present State of the Ring.” The Era (London), 11 June 1854, 4. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.
“Racing on the Continent.” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 31 December 1854, 5. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.
“Rochester and Chatham Races.” Sunday Times (London), 9 September 1855, 7. Gale Primary Sources: Sunday Times Historical Archive.
Image credit: W.L. Sheppard, 1870, wood engraving from a sketch by W.B. Myers. Harper’s Weekly, October 1870. Public domain image.