I had a bit of trouble with my ears recently—my right one decided to block up, leading to a thrilling few days of muffled conversations, shouting at the telly, and eventually, the slightly medieval experience of having it syringed. Not the most glamorous chapter of my life.

During this auditory adventure, I found myself on the phone with a client and had to ask him to speak up a bit, explaining that I was going a bit “Mutton Jeff.”

Cue confusion.

He was in his late 20s, and—quite reasonably—asked me who “Mutton Jeff” was. I paused. Good question. I told him it was a bit of rhyming slang I’d picked up somewhere along the way, probably from someone long dead or at least living in a caravan with a whippet and a Radio Times from 1983.

Enter Nobby Clarke

Thinking back, I’m fairly sure I first heard the term Mutton Jeff in the mid-1980s when I was working in the Civil Service. Every Civil Service office back then had a Nobby Clarke—ours was the genuine article.

Nobby was a walking, smoking encyclopaedia of old-school slang, puffing away like a steam train and sporting a nicotine-stained moustache, trousers with a few too many questionable stains, and the sort of inappropriate charm that would get you instantly sacked in 2025.

He was a true master of the idiom. Always going Mutton Jeff, always banging on about someone’s trouble and strife or complimenting a female colleague on her outstanding pair of thrupenny bits. You wouldn’t believe it unless you’d lived it.

If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t visit Ancient Rome or the Wild West—I’d just plonk Nobby into a modern office HR meeting and watch the sparks fly.

So Who Is Mutton Jeff?

Back in the day, I just assumed Mutton Jeff was some sort of East Anglian farmer or 17th-century butcher who traded in sheep and had ears full of wool. A rose-cheeked chap with great sideburns, an Arran jumper, and a pewter tankard of ale permanently glued to his hand.

Alas, no. There is no “Mutton Jeff.”

It’s “Mutt and Jeff”—And They Were American

The phrase actually comes from “Mutt and Jeff”, a comic strip created in 1907 by American cartoonist Bud Fisher. Mutt was a tall, skinny, gambling-obsessed bloke, and Jeff was his short, stout sidekick who escaped from a lunatic asylum (because that was apparently hilarious back then).

The strip was the first daily comic and became internationally known, including over here in Blighty. By the 1930s or ’40s, “Mutt and Jeff” were so familiar that they slipped nicely into Cockney rhyming slang as a stand-in for “deaf.” Hence: “I’m going a bit Mutt and Jeff.”

Over time, as Cockney slang often does, it was shortened—“Mutton Jeff” became the more casual (and confusing) version we hear today.

A Glorious Tradition of Talking Rubbish

Cockney rhyming slang is a brilliantly daft tradition of deliberately obscuring meaning through rhyme and then usually dropping the part that actually rhymes. It’s why “apples and pears” means stairs, but people just say “I’m going up the apples.” Makes complete sense, at least to some of us.

So next time you hear someone complain that they’re going a bit Mutton Jeff, know that they’re not talking about a bloke with a shepherd’s crook and a hearing aid. They’re just part of a long-standing linguistic tradition of making life harder for everyone—especially foreigners and anyone under 40.