Ploughman's Lunch - Origins and Etymology

Origins and Etymology

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates this phrase back to at least 1837, in the book Memoirs of the life of Sir Walter Scott by John G. Lockhart, but this stray early use may have meant merely the sum of its parts, "a lunch for a ploughman". Until recently, the OED's next citation was only from 1970, indicating a long period of time when the expression was virtually unknown.

Lexicographer Edwin Radford in To Coin a Phrase (1974) attributes the current usage to Richard Trehane, chairman of the English Country Cheese Council. Nigel Rees also concluded current usage to be 1970s marketing.

In 2005, research by Victoria Coren and others for the Wordhunt project in conjunction with the first series of Balderdash and Piffle on the BBC (first broadcast at the beginning of 2006) traced the origin of the phrase to 1960. The documentary evidence was minutes of meetings of the English Country Cheese Council, and contemporaneous advertising matter. The BBC concluded that "the Ploughman's Lunch was invented as a marketing ploy to sell British cheese in pubs".

It has since been traced back slightly further. An edition of a magazine published by the Brewers' Society called A Monthly Bulletin from July 1956 describes activities of the Cheese Bureau, which it says "exists for the admirable purpose of popularising cheese and, as a corollary, the public house lunch of bread, beer, cheese and pickle. This traditional combination was broken by rationing; the Cheese Bureau hopes, by demonstrating the natural affinity of the two parties, to effect a remarriage". This implies that a "traditional combination" of bread, beer, cheese and pickle was popular before rationing in the United Kingdom (which followed World War II), albeit without the butter. Author Adrian Bell at the time said: "There's a pub quite close to where I live where ... all you need say is, 'Ploughboy's Lunch, Harry, please'. And in a matter of minutes a tray is handed across the counter to you on which is a good square hunk of bread, a lump of butter and a wedge of cheese, and pickled onions, along with your pint of beer".

Only one year later, in June 1957, another edition of the same publication referred to a ploughman's lunch using exactly that name, and said that it consisted of "cottage bread, cheese, lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, cold sausages and, of course, beer".

The Glasgow newspaper The Bulletin from 15 April 1958 and The Times from 29 April 1958 refer to a ploughman's lunch consisting of bread, cheese and pickle.

The 1983 film The Ploughman's Lunch, from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, has a subtext that is "the way countries and people re-write their own history to suit the needs of the present". The title is a reference to the way the supposed traditional meal was apparently used as way to get people to eat meals in pubs.