Crispinisms 1: British English and usage from the 1950s

Since I'm reading Edmund Crispin's anthology Beware of the Trains, I thought I'd share some of his vocabulary.

A whistle blew; jolting slightly, the big posters on the hoardings took themselves off rearwards....

hoardings - In the US, the act of a person who hoards, or a temporary fence enclosing a construction site.

In British English, it's a billboard.

"to have a dekko" - slang for, "to take a look". According to The Free Dictionary: [from Hindi dekho! look! from dekhnā to see]

Crispin, like most British authors, also uses the occasional French phrase. (The following is from a story that was written in the late 1940s or early 1950s:

He was perhaps fifty-five; small, as policemen go, and of a compact build which the neatness of his clothes accentuated. The close-cropped greying hair, the pink affable face, the soldierly bearing, the bulge of the cigar-case in the breast pocket and the shining brown shoes--these things suggested the more malleable sort of German petit bourgeois; to see him close at hand, however, was to see the grey eyes-bland, intelligent, sceptical-which effectively belied your first, superficial impression, showing the iron under the velvet.

What's a petit bourgeois? Well, according to dictionary.com, it's "a person who belongs to the petite bourgeoisie."

Thanks, loads.

So, what's a the petite bourgeoisie? "the portion of the bourgeoisie having the least wealth and lowest social status; the lower middle class."

And the bourgeoisie?

(in Marxist theory) the class that, in contrast to the proletariat or wage-earning class, is primarily concerned with property values.

or
1. a member of the middle class.
2. a person whose political, economic, and social opinions are believed to be determined mainly by concern for property values and conventional respectability.
3. a shopkeeper or merchant.

It's pronounced: boor-zhwah, by the way, and is a derivative of burgess, which evolved from the German word for city.