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English language (monolingual) [Non-PRO] Art/Literary - General / Conversation / Greetings / Letters
English term or phrase:two-and-six or three-and-six dinner
"Angela [an Italian young woman who lives in London in post-war years] also worked on some evenings as a waitress in the Italian restaurant not far from Earls Court station; she served two-and-six or three-and-six dinners. I had dinner there a few times...
the novel is british, and the setting is post-war london... does the numbers refer to the number of people being served, or something else? i couldn't figure
Explanation: This refers to the old British currency of pounds, shillings and pence (12 old pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound). So two and six was two and half shillings, and three and six was three and a half shillings. Equivalent respectively to 12-1/2 and 17-1/2 new pence (though prices have gone up a lot since those days!).
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I remember buying cod and chips in 1968, in Manchester for 1/8d, so Tony's pot of jam must have been top of the range. Of course, in Manchester the evening meal was "tea". Yes, whether the midday meal is lunch or dinner is very much about class and about whether it is the main meal of the day. Supper is a lighter meal than dinner, so you could have either supper or dinner in the evening and either lunch or dinner at mid-day.
We also had to learn our 1/3d, 1/8d, 3/4d and 2/6d times tables at school and it was useful to be able to divide a pound by 3, 8, 12 or even 16. You could also count coins by touch without looking at them because they were all such different shapes and sizes.
... don't let's forget that up until about the same time, the FR currency was also based on the 'livre' — it used to be the 'Tours pound' (of silver); so in fact, there was a lot more unity of currency (and indeed, other meausrmeents, like the foot, once, yard, ...) across Europe before the French Revolution came along and tried to introduce 'logic' into everyday life!
It gave me enormous pleasure to discover, when I came to study Spanish history, that in the old Kingdom of Aragon (in whose territory I now live) the basic currency units were the libra, the sueldo (from solidus, also the source of shilling) and the dinero; there were 240 dineros in a libra, 12 dineros to the sueldo, and 20 sueldos to the libra. This lasted until the early eighteenth century, when the Bourbons arrived from France and abolished it all.
I would guess that dinner in this text refers to the midday meal. I grew up in a middle class home in a South London suburb, and I clearly remember that in my childhood we called the midday meal dinner and the evening meal supper. And we certainly had school dinners, policed by dinner ladies, not lunches. I don't think "lunch" started to be widely used in my world until the seventies. I presume formal evening meals were called dinners back then (you would have had Rotary Club dinners, for example), but at home we had supper.
I think this was a class thing; in my working-class home, we talked of dinner at noon, tea and/or supper in the evening, and if we were lucky, our meal might have been followed by 'pudding' or 'afters'. As in many cultures where physical work was involved, the noon-time dinner was the main meal of the day.
But in more middle-class circles, one would take lunch(eon), afternoon tea, and then dress for dinner — and here, the evening meal was probably the highlight of the day.
I note that my Belgian friends refer to 'dîner' at midday too.
Oh dear me yes ** nostalgic sigh ** I too loved thru'p'ny bits — when I was very small, I went on a CND march (just after the Aldermarston rally), I was very proud with my little placard, and a passer-by gave me a lovely golden 3d bit; I was so disappointed when I realized it wasn't for me, but to go in my collecting tin ;-(
I loved those old names too: tanner, bob, florin, half-crown (and indeed crown), guinea...
@ Diana: what do you mean by "Why is it called 3d?" — are you querying the use of 'd' as an abbreviation for 'pence'? If so, it's because the original stood for 'denarius', the Roman coin that was equivalent to the later 'penny' (and cf. FR 'deniers'); the £sd actually stood for 'libræ, solidi, denarii' (or something very close to that, it's 40 years since I did Latin!)
Why is it called 3d ? I'm sure I knew once. And when is a dinner at lunchtime and when at suppertime? Here in this text it is the evening meal (what I would have called supper back in the 60s in Greater London).
Yes, older people particularly went on converting and feeling outraged by the result for some time after 1971, I remember. The same thing happened in Spain when the euro came in, and with good reason: I remember the price of a coffee in many bars jumped from 100 pesetas to a euro (166 ptas) almost overnight. Older people still quite often convert back to pesetas, particularly with property prices (where you thought in millions, colloquially called "kilos" in Spanish in the old days).
You're right about the pence of course: now you say it, two and three/nine/eleven do sound right. Odd, though, that it's more natural to omit "pence" in some cases than in others. I suppose it's probably because three, six and nine are quarters of a shilling. "Two and six" sounds so natural that "two and sixpence" almost seems a bit false.
I just missed the farthing as legal tender, but there were still farthings around and I hoarded all those that came my way (as boys do). I loved the wren. But I was particularly fond of threepenny bits: so chunky and golden and idiosyncratically shaped, and I liked the portcullis.
One of my former partners used to run a local 'tea shoppe', and shortly after decimalization, he was scandalized to note that a large white coffee was now 35p — "D'you realize that's 7/6d??!!" He'd be turning in his grave now if he knew that current prices are around £2 – £3!!! Admittedly the coffee is usually better these days!
Well found! Funnily enough, I was going to mention Lyons, as in the 30s my Mum used to get lunch ther for a shilling, and that included live background music!
Yes, we certainly did say 'two-and-nine', though as you say, the other pence seem to beg the addition of the pence; it sounds odd to me not to say 'two and tuppence / fourpence / fivepence / sevenpence. But oddly enough, 'two and three / six / nine / eleven' all sound fine! Remember the old '19 and 11' (19/11d), to avoid saying 'a pound' — just like '£3.99' today!
I'm happy to say I'm (just!) old enough to remember farthings, with the jenny wren on them.
Here's a J. Lyons price list from 1940; the page claims that these prices "apply generally also to the post WWII period". I'd say you could put together a pretty acceptable meal for two and six:
A cup of tea here ("The Best in the World") costs 2½d. According to this same site (on the history of J. Lyons), "a large cup of tea at a Lyons Teashop cost 2.1/2d (old pennies) in the 1950s". So it hadn't gone up since 1940. http://www.kzwp.com/lyons/teashops.htm
I'm old enough to remember pre-decimal currency very well, though not 1940s meal prices!
One linguistic point I've been pondering is whether "two (or three) and six", without "pence", was just used for sixpence. I mean, we certainly said "two and six", but I'm not at all sure we said "two and four" or "two and nine", for example; I think we would always have said "two and fourpence" or "two and ninepence", but it was a long time ago and I'm not sure any more. What do others think about this?
My parents moved to the South of England from London in 1952, the house they wanted to but then cost £600; by 1962, it cost £6,000; and by 1972, it had reached £60,000. Of course, property inflation over that period didn't exactly track the general cost of living.
One of my earliest cost-of-living memories was a ½ lb pot of Roberston's strawberry jam in our local International Stores that cost 1/3¼d — that would have been around 1962, I guess; so in just 10 years or so, a small pot of jam had reached half the cost of a full meal!
The other way round, I've always dreamed of being washed ashore on a dessert island ;-)
I would say these prices were about average, as you say, for a bog-standard English caff of that period. Since most EN meals would have been only 2 courses, your suggestion that the 3/6d meal maybe includes and extra course seems plausible to me; though since 'starters' weren't especially common in those days, I'd say likely to be soup or somesuch.
In 1960 you could buy a candy bar for three pence that now costs me a Euro. So the dinner would cost 10 candy bars or 10 Euros which is a cheapish dinner now but add in another 10-15 years of inflation and I don't think 2/6 (another way of writing two and six) would have been that cheap.
If you look at http://www.unstatistical.com/?p=34 inflation was not high between 1948 and 1960 so I'm roughly estimating that these were 12 and 15 Euro dinners.
Not unreasonable for a fixed price menu at a back-street restaurant. THe higher priced meal probably included soup and a desert.
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Answers
3 mins confidence: peer agreement (net): +4
two shillings and sixpence...
Explanation: It refers to the price
Terry Richards France Local time: 20:57 Native speaker of: English PRO pts in category: 120
peer agreement (net): +4