Etymology of the phrase "Half-a-crown tea"

[Another2Cats]

I'm not too sure if this is the correct place to ask this question - maybe you can redirect me if it isn't?

The OP on a recent thread made a comment that reminded me of growing up in the 1970s.

She had said:

"...I don't feel like cooking in this heat and didn't think many people ate hot meals through the summer I know I didn't growing up "

I replied that

"The only time I recall not having a hot meal in the evening was on some Sundays (after we'd had Sunday lunch) that my mum would serve up what she would call a "half-a-crown tea". This would be sandwiches, a bit of cake and some fancy biscuits like chocolate fingers."

When I was young I thought nothing about this phrase but, later on, I wondered if a "half-a-crown tea" back in the day was sort of like a cheap version of the posh "afternoon tea" that high end hotels do.

Following this interchange on MN, I did a quick search for this phrase and came up with a reference from the Northern Echo about a football player, by the name of Tommy Johnson, born in 1946 ( a similar age to my mum) which I think must date to the 1960s:

Tommy was a former Boro junior – “Five shillings train fare, half-a-crown tea money” – who’d played in the Football League for Darlington

https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/4202837.teenager-drinkhalls-got-it-all-to-come/

and then also this old article from "The Essex Newsman" 9 Aug 1919, page 2, column 5 (ps. on the front page I love that it says "Circulated in Immense Numbers throughout the County"). At that time, it seems that half-a-crown was quite expensive.

The article concerns some boys from a "training school" (young boys and girls were sent there from workhouses and orphanages):

HALF-CROWN TEAS

Complaints of high Charges at Chelmsford.

Complaints have reached the office of the Essex County Chronicle during the week that the band boys of the Poplar Training School, Hutton, who were playing in the Chelmsford Recreation Ground during the Bank Holiday, were charged 2s 6d a head for tea at the refreshment pavilion in the Recreation Ground. The boys numbered about 30.

[...]

Asked what the tea consisted of, Mr Osborne said, "Fish paste sandwiches, bread and butter - only the best butter used - fancy and ordinary pastries, and cake, all they could eat, and tea, all they could drink.

They asked me if I could do the tea, and I said "Yes". Nothing was said about the price. That is my charge for a tea of that kind - 2s 6d per head. Had they told me they wanted only a shilling or an eighteenpenny tea I would not have done it on a Bank Holiday

So, my question, does anyone here have any experience of an "afternoon tea" type of thing being referred to as a "half-a-crown tea"?

Does anyone have any leads as to the etymology?

Never heard of that, but when I was growing up, half a crown in a birthday card was riches!

I was born in the sixties and I've never heard that phrase, sorry. Maybe it was more a family saying rather than the era?

Agree with pp though. Half a crown was a small fortune back then.

When I was at junior school, 2/6 was my dinner money for the whole week!

Never heard it but my Mother used to talk about going to Lyon’s tea houses in the 1930’s and during the war.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Lyons_and_Co. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Lyons_and_Co.]]]]

I don’t think it will especially be anything to do with that but they were a big chain back in the day. It just sprung to mind. Good luck with the search.

Do you think it could be the opposite of a cheap version of afternoon tea i.e quite a swanky tea? I would have thought half a crown would have been quite a high end charge for a tea in 1919, as indicated by the complaints in that article! Maybe it stuck as shorthand for a posh tea?

I don’t think it is a ‘phrase’ as such, just your mother using it as her own individual shorthand for a particular type of light meal she associated with a particular cost at a teashop. The Northern Echo reference is just to how much Middlesbrough junior players got ‘paid’ (train fare to away games and enough money to buy themselves a standard teashop tea afterwards) whenever this man who was of an age to be a physio in the 80s was playing at junior level.

And the other one is, as you say, from several decades earlier, and about a complaint that a mass tea served to a training school group on a recreation ground was too expensive at half a crown, with the proprietor indignantly saying that no one had asked him in advance for a price per head, and that he wouldn’t have agreed to a lesser cost per head because it was a bank holiday and he needed to get in extra help.

I think this was just your mother’s way of saying ‘a type of meal I associate with the standard fare at teashops that cost this amount’.

My mother used to serve something similar on a Sunday evening, with a tablecloth over the coffee table in the living room, tea, sandwiches and cake (very rarely cheese on toast) all in front of Last of the Summer Wine or similar.

But I have never heard the expression.

My grandmother would always ask how big a slice of cake we wanted by asking if we wanted a 'tuppence slice or a thruppence?'. I would be interested to know if that was a thing back in the day - that you could choose to have a large or a small slice of cake in a tea house, and they would cost varying amounts?

I’m actually always fascinated by references to tea shops in ‘first half of the 20thc’ novels, because it appears you were typically brought a selection of cakes and only paid for what you ate, which must have involved staff being eagle-eyed and good at mental arithmetic, but also involved the cake you didn’t eat ending up, possibly numerous times, on someone else’s table. No idea if you could specify cake slice size, but I suppose it’s perfectly possible!

In Dorothy L Sayers novels, people are always saying ‘I’ll put the saucer over your cup’ when someone has to rush off without finishing a cup of coffee, which must have involved a lot of stone-cold dregs.

If someone from our working class family began to try to talk posh it was said they’d got a half a crown accent

Yes, this is exactly what I was going to say. Obviously if you type a phrase into a search engine you will get hits in which the target words come up together, but your examples don't point to one particular usage, in which they are a recognised way of referring to a certain kind of meal out.
Sounds like it was just the going rate, at one period, for tea with sandwiches/cakes

I agree with this. If half a crown was considered a lot of money, I'd say it meant that she was serving up a special tea rather than it being the going rate

Yes, I agree.

Lyon's Corner House? I'll google.

When going for elevenses with my aunties in the 1950s I definitely remember the cake stands with several cakes on them. You pointed to which you wanted, but if the stand was left on your table you could have more than one, I suppose, and cough near them, too. There was a discussion of this, once, on Mumsnet Books, because someone had been reading just such a novel set in the 20s or 30s. The cakes were smaller in those days. This has nothing to do with half crown teas - sorry.

@upinaballoon . I'd forgotten about elevenses as we never hear it used these days . For those who don't know, having elevenses was eating a mid morning snack to tide you over till lunch 😜. A lovely expression !

Most days I have my elevenses at about ten.

I'm not familiar with the phrase, but I think I'm the past food was often sold in sizes or grades that referred to their price. The article refers to a half crown tea, an eighteenpenny and a shilling tea, so presumably the half crown tea was pretty luxurious!

I have certainly seen references to an eightpenny loaf, which was presumably bigger and/or better than a sixpenny loaf. And I remember buying penny chews as a child (though strangely they didn't cost a penny)!

You must at one time have been able to buy "half a pound of tuppenny rice". I wonder whether there was also the option of penny rice or thruppenny rice!