Who is Norah Anyway? And Why is She So Bloody?

Bloody Norah, of course, is an expletive, a curse, albeit a pretty tame one. Along with Gorden Bennet, Norah has gone down in language history. There are variations – flipping Norah, flaming Norah – but we’re going to focus on the bloody variety. The question is, did she ever really exist? And if she did, who was she?

A Maid’s Tale

My absolute favourite explanation for this is a story about a wealthy duke and his maid, Norah. In the seventeenth century, the Duke of Wodingtonshire happened upon Norah and the body of a servant, someone she had killed. She was – and this is my favourite bit – repeatedly slapping the body with a stick of celery. Yes, a stick of celery. Some say she even killed said servant with the celery itself, but I can’t quite get my head around that. When the duke found her, he shouted something along the lines of, “Oh, you’re all bloody, Norah!” (Far fetched? Yeah…)

Anyway, the duke banished her to the cellar for three years as punishment and when he let her out, he sent her to work in the stables, keeping them clean and whatnot. That’s when it happened again, only this time she killed her fellow servant with a dented kettle. The duke, perhaps a man with the unluckiest timing, walked in at the opportune moment again and this time declared, “Bloody Norah!” Naturally, as one would in such a situation, the duke grabbed a horseshoe and attempted to kill Norah, but she fought back, escaping and leaving him bruised and battered. As she ran away, he muttered to himself, “Bloody Norah.”

Now this, of course, made for a great dinner table tale, and so the duke found himself repeating the story whenever he was in company. Whenever he mentioned her, he would refer to her as, of course, Bloody Norah. Later, as dementia took him, he would mumble incoherently about bloody Norah, and the townsfolk picked it up as a sign of respect.

Poppycock

Alas, as much as I want it to be true, I’m pretty certain it’s not. There is not, nor has there ever been, a Duke of Wodingtonshire (at least not according to my admittedly low level of research). Search for the duke and all that comes up are references to Norah. And let’s be honest, killing someone with a stick of celery? It’s a good story, but it’s not realistic. Besides, the only attribution I can find for the story’s origin in Ronnie from Essex, which doesn’t tell us a lot, does it? Whoever Ronnie is, though, fair play to him for having such a vivid imagination and for getting his story so ingrained in the history of this saying that I’ve found it repeated again and again and again.

Cockney horror

So what are the other options? I couldn’t find a great many, to be honest, but the most often cited is that it’s a distortion of the Cockney slang phrase, flaming horror. How? As time mangles words, flaming lost its g and horror lost its h, and when said in a Cockney accent, it (apparently) becomes flaminorror, which (apparently) sounds like flaming Norah. I suppose that would explain the variant of Bloody Norah, but it doesn’t explain how flamin became bloody, even without the g. And besides, as John Flemming says in his blog, it sounds more Dick Van Dyke than actual Cockney.

What else?

I get kinda stuck from here on in. I can’t find any reference to the phrase on the Online Etymology Dictionary, nor on Phrase Finder, nor on the Stack Exchange. I’d suggest we’re never going to know the truth, which is a shame – but it that does give us extra reason to believe Ronnie from Essex’s excellent and witty story of the duke and his bloody maid.