Clock Tower, Brighton
The Clock Tower is a free-standing clock tower in the centre of Brighton, part of the English city of Brighton and Hove. Built in 1888 in commemoration of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, the distinctive structure included innovative structural features and became a landmark in the popular and fashionable seaside resort; the city's residents "retain a nostalgic affection" for it though opinion is divided as to the tower's architectural merit. English Heritage has listed the clock tower at Grade II for its architectural and historical importance; the small fishing village of Brighthelmston was transformed into a fashionable seaside resort and thriving commercial centre after local doctor Richard Russell's treatise explaining the health-giving effects of drinking and bathing in seawater became a fad in the late 18th century. Royal patronage ensued—the Prince Regent moved into a farmhouse which became the lavish Royal Pavilion—and speculative residential and commercial development, encouraged by transport improvements, attracted large numbers of day-trippers and new residents throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
By the 1780s, North Street had become established as an important shopping street, its status as the commercial heart of Brighton grew over the next century. It first developed as a route in the 14th century, when it formed the medieval village's northern boundary, ran from west to east from the end of the main route from London towards the Royal Pavilion and the seafront. West Street, the ancient western boundary of the settlement, ran southwards towards the beach and seafront; the western section of North Street was renamed Western Road in the 1830s to match the rest of that road, built as an access route to the high-class Brunswick Town estate but became the town's main shopping street by the 1860s. The roads were widened in the second half of the 19th century, by 1880 the junction of North Street, Western Road, West Street and Queen's Road was a major landmark with a small, old waiting shelter in the middle; the site was ideal for redevelopment, in 1881 a competition was held for a replacement building.
Architects Henry Branch and Thomas Simpson were recorded as the winners, but their plans were never executed and the site stood vacant until 1888. Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 1887, many towns built Jubilee clock towers to commemorate the occasion. A local advertising contractor, James Willing, decided to commission one for Brighton, he donated £2,000. The town organised an architectural competition, won by a London-based architect, John Johnson; the tower was completed at the start of 1888 and was unveiled on 20 January 1888 on Willing's 70th birthday. Local inventor Magnus Volk—responsible for Britain's oldest surviving electric railway, an eccentric sea-based railway line, a pioneering electric car and Brighton's first telephone link—designed a time ball for the clock tower soon after it opened; the hydraulically operated copper sphere moved up and down a 16-foot metal mast every hour, based on electrical signals transmitted from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. The feature was disabled after a few years.
The tower was the focal point of several bursts of anti-Victorian sentiment in Brighton in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The tower is acknowledged as one of Brighton's main landmarks, it has been described as "the hub of modern Brighton"; the "nostalgic affection" felt by the city's population towards the structure, the difficulty of demolishing or removing it without great expense, have ensured its survival despite demands for its destruction. Criticism by architectural historians has sometimes been intense, although others have praised the tower. Nikolaus Pevsner and Ian Nairn dismissed it as "worthless", it has been likened to "a giant salt-cellar"; the Clock Tower was listed at Grade II by English Heritage on 26 August 1999. This status is given to "nationally important buildings of special interest"; as of February 2001, it was one of 1,124 Grade II-listed buildings and structures, 1,218 listed buildings of all grades, in the city of Brighton and Hove. The Clock Tower is a Classical-style structure with Baroque touches.
It rises to 75 feet, the mast for Volk's time ball adds a further 16 feet. The four clock faces have a diameter of 5 feet. James Willing and 1887 are inscribed on the clock faces; the square base is of pink granite. On each side, the tapering columns rise part way up the shaft and are topped by pediments with open bases, below, elaborately carved scrollwork and a protuberance designed to resemble the gunwale of a ship. Incised lettering on each ship indicates where they are pointing: clockwise from north, they show to the station, to kemp town, to the sea and to hove. Below these, each side has an arched recess containing a medallion-style mosaic portrait of a member of the Royal F
Edward Oxford
Edward Oxford was the first of eight people who tried to assassinate Queen Victoria. After Oxford was arrested and charged with treason, a jury found that Oxford was not guilty by reason of insanity and he was detained at Her Majesty's pleasure in the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum and in Broadmoor Hospital. Given conditional release for transportation to a British colony, he lived out the remainder of his life in Australia. Edward was born in Birmingham in 1822, the third of Hannah Marklew and George Oxford's seven children, his father, a gold chaser, died. His mother was able to find work and support the family, which meant Edward was able to attend school both in Birmingham and the Lambeth area of London, where the family moved when he was about 10; when Oxford left school, he first took bar work with his aunt in Hounslow in other public houses as a pot boy, or waiter. At the time of the attack he was eighteen years old and living with his mother and sister in lodgings in Camberwell, having quit his job at the Hog-in-the-Pound in Oxford Street.
Since his mother had returned to Birmingham on a regular trip to see family over a month before, Oxford was, in effect, living alone at the time of the event. On 4 May 1840, he bought a pair of pistols for £2, as well as a gunpowder flask, began practising in various shooting galleries in Leicester Square, the Strand and the West End. A week before the attack, he went into a Lambeth shop owned by a former schoolmate named Gray and bought fifty copper percussion caps, enquired where he could buy some bullets and three-pennies' worth of gunpowder. Gray sold him the powder, told him where he could find the ammunition. On the evening of 9 June he showed several witnesses. At about 4:00 PM on 10 June 1840, Oxford took up a position on a footpath at Constitution Hill, near Buckingham Palace; the Queen, four months pregnant with her first child, was accustomed to riding out in a phaeton, or low, open horse-drawn carriage, with her husband, Prince Albert in the late afternoon or early evening, with no other escort than two outriders.
When the royal couple appeared some two hours and drew level with him, he fired both pistols in succession, missing both times. He was seized by onlookers and disarmed. Oxford made no attempt to hide his actions declaring: "It was I, it was me that did it."He was arrested and charged with treason for attempting to assassinate the sovereign. When he was taken into custody at the police station he asked; when he was asked if the pistols had been loaded, he said. After his arrest, his lodgings were searched and a locked box was found containing a sword and scabbard, two pistol-bags, powder, a bullet-mould, five lead balls, some of the percussion caps bought from Gray, the intricate rules and proceedings of an imaginary military society called "Young England", complete with a list of made-up officers and correspondence. Members were to be armed with a brace of a sword, a rifle and a dagger. Oxford's trial at the Old Bailey was postponed until 9 July, after a thorough investigation was made of both his background and his possible motives.
In spite of his earlier admissions, no bullets could be found at the scene, so that the Crown could not prove that the pistols were, in fact and that he could have harmed anyone. Oxford claimed that the guns contained only gunpowder. Oxford appeared to be oblivious for most of the proceedings; the prosecution presented much eyewitness evidence, while the defence case consisted of various family members and friends who testified that Oxford had always seemed of unsound mind, that both his grandfather and father were alcoholics who had exhibited signs of mental illness. This carried a great deal of weight, as it was thought during this time that both drink and hereditary influence were strong causal factors for insanity. Oxford's mother testified her late husband had been violent and intimidating, that her son was not only prone to fits of hysterical laughter and emitting strange noises, he had been obsessed with firearms since he was a child. Various eminent pathologists and physicians testified that due to "brain disease" or other factors, such as the shape of his head, Oxford was either a mental imbecile or incapable of controlling himself.
The following day, the jury acquitted Oxford, declaring him to be "not guilty by reason of insanity". Like all such prisoners, he was sentenced to be detained "until Her Majesty's pleasure be known". In effect, this was an indefinite sentence, the source of the asylum term "pleasure men". Oxford was sent to the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Bethlem, where he remained as a model patient for the next twenty-four years. During that time he occupied himself by drawing and learning to play the violin, he learnt French and Italian to a degree of fluency, acquired some knowledge of Spanish and Latin, was employed as a painter and decorator within the confines of the hospital. When he was transferred to Broadmoor Hospital in 1864, the notes taken on his arrival describe him as "apparently sane", he still claimed the pistols he fired at the Queen were not loaded with anything other than powder, that his attack was fuelled not by a desire to injure her, but purely by a desire for notoriety. Oxford continued to be order
Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford
Anna Maria Russell, Duchess of Bedford was a lifelong friend of Queen Victoria, whom she served as a Lady of the Bedchamber between 1837 and 1841. She was the originator of the British meal "afternoon tea."Anna was the daughter of Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl of Harrington, Jane Fleming. She was the wife of Francis Russell, 7th Duke of Bedford, sister-in-law to the Prime Minister John Russell, she was the mother of William Russell, 8th Duke of Bedford. She became Duchess of Bedford in 1839; the Duchess and her husband entertained the Queen at their country house Woburn Abbey in 1841. The Duchess was the chief mourner at the funeral of The Princess Augusta Sophia in 1840; the Duchess became involved in a scandal regarding Lady Flora Hastings. When Lady Flora complained of abdominal pain, the court physician stated that she was pregnant; as Lady Flora was unmarried this suspicion was covered up, but the Duchess and Baroness Lehzen who disliked her spread the rumour anyway, naming Sir John Conroy as the father.
When she was diagnosed with cancer of which she died shortly afterward, the Duchess, Baroness Lehzen and the Queen herself, who had believed the rumour, came under severe public criticism for blemishing the reputation of an innocent woman. The Duchess is best remembered as the creator of afternoon tea whilst visiting the 5th Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle in the mid-1840s. During the 18th century, dinner came to be served and in the day until, by the early 19th century, the normal time was between 7:00 and 8:30 p.m. An extra meal called luncheon had been created to fill the midday gap between breakfast and dinner, but as this new meal was light, the long afternoon with no refreshment at all left people feeling hungry, she found a light meal of tea and cakes or sandwiches was the perfect balance. The Duchess found taking an afternoon snack to be such a perfect refreshment that she soon began inviting her friends to join her. Afternoon tea became an established and convivial repast in many middle and upper class households.
She died in 1857 and is buried in the Bedford chapel at Chenies in Buckinghamshire
Royal visits to Manchester and Salford during the reign of Queen Victoria
Royal visits to Manchester and the surrounding areas in the nineteenth century signify important achievements in the city's history and offer an insight into the development of the area during this period. Moreover, Manchester's response to such visits, the preparations and public displays of loyalty to the crown, challenge the perceived political history of Victorian Manchester, famed for its Liberalist notions, Free Trade and the radical position of parties such as the Chartists. Queen Victoria's accession to the throne in 1837 was a turbulent time for Manchester, as it had been in the previous century. Manchester had been divided politically and the Industrial Revolution had created new men at all levels, including the lower social orders and dissatisfaction with the 1832 Reform Act had provoked widespread agitation among the working classes; as Victoria came to the throne, so Chartism came to the masses and in Manchester this manifested itself in the Manchester Political Union who sponsored a massive rally at Kersal Moor in Salford.
The party concerned with the working people, supported the general strikes of 1842, known as Plug Plot, in which thousands of mill workers protested against wage cuts, but shortly afterwards the Chartist movement declined. At the same time the town's cultural diversity had continued to widen, as an influx of Irish immigrants had entered the town and in the 1880s, Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Russia settled in Manchester. Both nationalities were representative of everything the English working man, at this time, was not, a point emphasised by Tory politics, whilst not advocating extreme sectarian attitudes, maintained that the Monarch and the Church of England were at the heart of the Englishman's national identity. Furthermore, attitudes towards the Monarchy were improving, as the public saw Queen Victoria as a better example of the constitutional monarch, not involving herself in politics, when combined with Prince Albert's philanthropic activities, in the late 1840s, with education and housing for the poor, resulted in a shift in public opinion and the popularity of the Royal family increased.
The Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 had enabled many working men to vote, from which "popular Toryism" emerged and needless to say the party's ethos of constitution and Church attracted the working classes, which despite nineteenth-century England's shift towards a secularised state manifested itself in open displays of loyalty to the Crown. This was the first visit of a monarch to the region for a century and a half and both Manchester and Salford went to great lengths to host a memorable event; the escort for the royal party included a Guard of Honour of the Yeoman Cavalry who accompanied them as far as Cross lane, the boundary between Pendleton and Salford. However, at this point, the cavalry were dismissed "for fear of disturbances, as Peterloo was still fresh in the minds of the people." 1851 had been a significant year for Prince Albert with the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London, an event with which he had direct involvement and one which celebrated industry and technology, an important connection with Manchester.
They stayed at Worsley New Hall as guests of the Earl of Ellesmere. On 10 October the Queen and Prince Albert left Worsley Hall and the procession took them through Salford to Peel Park, where a suggested 80,000 Sunday school children performed the National Anthem, a moment, argued as the most celebrated of the visit for its mass public appeal, as well as religious and educational significance: "One of the great moral features of Manchester – of the manufacturing districts – is the extent to which the Sunday-School system is carried… educating thousands who would otherwise have grown up in utter and deplorable ignorance" The Queen responded with an address in which she expressed her ‘great pleasure…seeing the attention, paid to the education of the rising generation in Manchester and Salford’. From Peel Park the royal procession continued into Manchester and the combined spectator figure recorded for both boroughs was 800, 000, which the Times described as, ‘a population new on the soil mixed laborious, accustomed to hear all sides of political questions and to decide them on Utilitarian principles’.
This practical, down-to-earth stereotype of the people of Manchester was, by the 1850s visible as the warehouse, representative of the town’s trading success and the advances of industry and technology, close to the heart of Prince Albert, were at the centre of the its achievements. In May 1857 Prince Albert arrived in Manchester, one month before the Queen, to open the Art Treasures Exhibition and inaugurate one of the first portrait statues to be erected of Queen Victoria during her reign; the statue in Peel Park commemorated the Royal visit to Salford in 1851 and the aforementioned success of the 80, 000 strong, Sunday schools' performance of the National Anthem. Like 1851 the visit attracted large crowds and Manchester was awash with colour, as the Standard and Royal Arms flags decorating the majestic Watts Warehouse celebrated the city's civic pride and dedication to the crown. On 21 May the Queen visited to perform the official opening of the Manchester Ship Canal; the Ship Canal took seven years to build and stretched for 35 miles, creating the city's link to the open sea and independent shipping.
The Queen knighted the mayor of Salford, William Henry Bailey and the lord mayor of Manchester, Anthony Marshall at the opening of the Canal. In the ru
Affair
An affair is a sexual relationship, romantic friendship, or passionate attachment between two people without the attached person's significant other knowing. A romantic affair called an affair of the heart, may refer to sexual liaisons among unwed or wedded parties, or to various forms of nonmonogamy. Unlike a casual relationship, a physical and emotional relationship between two people who may have sex without expecting a more formal romantic relationship, an affair is by its nature romantic; the term "affair" may describe part of an agreement within an open marriage or open relationship, such as swinging, dating, or polyamory, in which some forms of sex with one's non-primary partner are permitted and other forms are not. Participants in open relationships, including unmarried couples and polyamorous families, may consider sanctioned affairs the norm, but when a non-sanctioned affair occurs, it is described as infidelity and may be experienced as adultery, or a betrayal both of trust and integrity though to most people it would not be considered "illicit".
When a romantic affair lacks both overt and covert sexual behavior and yet exhibits intense or enduring emotional intimacy it may be referred to as an emotional affair, platonic love, or a romantic friendship. Extramarital affairs are relationships outside of marriage where an illicit romantic or sexual relationship or a romantic friendship or passionate attachment occurs. An affair that continues in one form or another for years as one of the partners to that affair passes through marriage and remarriage, could be considered the primary relationship and the marriages secondary to it. Several people claim the reason of extra marital affair as their unsuccessful marriage and that both spouses failed to please each other; this may be serial polygamy or other forms of nonmonogamy. The ability to pursue serial and clandestine extramarital affairs while safeguarding other secrets and conflict of interest inherent in the practice, requires skill in deception and duplicitous negotiation. To hide one affair requires a degree of skill or malicious gaslighting.
All these behaviors are more called lying. Deception can be defined as the "covert manipulation of perception to alter thoughts, feelings, or beliefs"; the presence of deception may indicate the degree to which the deceiver has breached fundamental conditions of fidelity, of reciprocal vulnerability and of transparency. Sometimes these assumed pre-conditions of a committed intimate relationship. Individuals having affairs with married men or women can be prosecuted for adultery in some jurisdictions and can be sued by the jilted spouses in others, or named as'co-respondent' in divorce proceedings; as of 2009, eight U. S. states permitted such alienation of affections lawsuits. The appearance of computer-mediated communication introduces a new type of communication and a new type of "affair". There are various kinds of computer-mediated communication that differ in some significant aspects: one-to-one or group communication formats, interrelating with anonymous or identified people, communicating in synchronous or asynchronous formats.
Online affairs combine features of remote relationships. Ben Ze'ef argues that an online affair is a unique kind of affair—termed "detached attachment", or just "detachment"—that includes opposing features whose presence in a face-to-face affair would be paradoxical. Like direct, face-to-face affairs, online affairs can be spontaneous and casual and show intensive personal involvement. However, online affairs can be more of a planned discourse than spontaneous talk. People participating in online affairs may be strangers to each other in the sense that they have never met each other. However, they are close to each other since they share intimate information. In online affairs, people try to enjoy the benefits of both close and remote affairs, while avoiding their flaws. People enjoy the valued products of close affairs while paying the low cost of remote affairs; as one woman wrote:'He told me that he can not provide me with what I would want and I would always respond with: "I'm not asking anything from you, but enjoy your company"'.
Affair of the diamond necklace Hamilton–Reynolds sex scandal Harden–Eulenburg affair Haijby affair Iris Robinson Scandal Lavon Affair The Lewinsky Scandal The Makropulos Affair Munsinger Affair Profumo Affair Spiegel scandal Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal John Edwards extramarital affair Mark Sanford disappearance and extramarital affair Tiger Woods infidelity scandal Ashley Madison Courtly love Crime of passion Family therapy On-again, off-again relationship Polysexuality Scandal Love triangle Schmitt, D. P. et al.. Patterns and universals of mate poaching across 53 nations: The effects of sex and personality on romantically attracting another person's partner. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 560–584. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, "Infidelity"
Coronation of Queen Victoria
The coronation of Queen Victoria took place on Thursday, 28 June 1838, just over a year after she succeeded to the throne of the United Kingdom at the age of 18. The ceremony was held in Westminster Abbey after a public procession through the streets from Buckingham Palace, to which the queen returned as part of a second procession. Planning for the coronation, led by prime minister Lord Melbourne, began at Cabinet level in March 1838. In the face of various objections from numerous parties, the Cabinet announced on Saturday, 7 April, that the coronation would be at the end of the parliamentary session in June, it was budgeted at £70,000, more than double the cost of the "cut-price" 1831 coronation but less than the £240,000 spent when George IV was crowned in July 1821. A key element of the plan was presentation of the event to a wider public. By 1838, the newly built railways were able to deliver huge numbers of people into London and it has been estimated that some 400,000 visitors arrived to swell the crowds who thronged the streets while the two processions took place and filled the parks where catering and entertainment were provided.
Hyde Park was the scene including a balloon ascent. The fair was extended by popular demand to four. Green Park featured a firework display the night after the ceremony; the event took place in fine weather and was considered a great success by the press and wider public, though those inside the Abbey witnessed a good deal of mishap and confusion due to lack of rehearsal. In the country at large, there was considerable Radical opposition to the coronation in northern England. Queen Victoria succeeded her uncle King William IV on 20 June 1837, her first prime minister was Lord Melbourne. Until 1867, the Demise of the Crown automatically triggered the dissolution of parliament and a general election was therefore necessary with voting between 24 July and 18 August; the result was a victory for Melbourne whose existing Whig Party government was returned to power for four more years. Their majority over the opposition Conservative Party was reduced from 112 seats to thirty. Melbourne was the leading player in the planning and implementation of Victoria's coronation.
Melbourne's Cabinet began formal discussion of the subject of the coronation in March 1838. A major factor in the planning was this being the first coronation held since the passing of the Reform Act 1832, which the government recognised as radically reshaping the monarchy. In terms of the ceremony itself, the extension of the franchise meant that some 500 Members of Parliament would be invited to attend in addition to the peerage. A greater consideration was the need to somehow involve the general public and Melbourne championed the centuries old custom of a public procession through the streets. There had been a procession in 1831 but a much longer route was planned for 1838 including a new startpoint at Buckingham Palace. Earlier processions had run from the Tower of London to the Abbey. Victoria's procession would be the longest since that of Charles II in April 1661. Scaffolding for spectators would be built all along the route; this was achieved according to contemporary reports, including one saying there was "scarcely a vacant spot along the whole, unoccupied with galleries or scaffolding".
The diarist Charles Greville commented that the principal object of the government plan was to amuse and interest the ordinary working people. He concluded that the "great merit" of the coronation was that so much had been done for the people. In terms of cost, the government was torn between the extremes of George IV's lavish coronation in 1821 and the "cut-price" event, dubbed the "Half-Crown-ation", held for William IV in 1831, they decided to allow a budget of £70,000. Therefore, the cost of Victoria's coronation represented a compromise between two extremes of £240,000 and £30,000; the government's plans for the coronation attracted considerable criticism from its opponents. For different reasons, both Tories and Radicals objected to the coronation being turned into a day of popular celebration, to be seen by as wide a public as possible; the Tory objections made beforehand, were that the government's plans to put much of the spending into the long public procession detracted from the traditional dignity of the ceremonies at Westminster, which would be "shorn of majesty by Benthamite utilitarianism".
The Radical left, including the Chartist movement, anti-monarchist, thought the whole occasion far too expensive. A dubious perception that prevailed was the identification of the new monarch with the Whig party; this would be a problem through the early years of Victoria's reign, leading to the so-called Bedchamber Crisis in 1839 over what were the political appointments of her ladies-in-waiting. In addition, the Whig party had exploited Victoria's name in its election campaign, suggesting that a monarch from a new generation would mean the progress of reform. William IV and his wife, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, had strong Tory sympathies, while Victoria's mother and namesake was known to favour the Whigs, it was assumed, to some extent that Victoria herself had been brought up to hold similar views. This was reflected in popular ballads sold on the streets, one of which had Victoria saying: The government's decision to dispense with certain traditions was seen as snub by the Tory aristocracy.
The omissions included an exclusive banquet at Westminster Hall and medieval rituals like a monarchical champion throwing down a gauntlet. In the House of Lords, complaints were made about the processions because a young girl (Victori
Tea (meal)
Tea has long been used as an umbrella term for several different meals. Isabella Beeton, whose books on home economics were read in the 19th century, describes afternoon teas of various kinds, provides menus for the old-fashioned tea, the at-home tea, the family tea, the high tea. Teatime is the time at which the tea meal is eaten, late afternoon to early evening, being the equivalent of merienda. Tea as a meal is associated with Great Britain and some Commonwealth countries. Afternoon tea is a light meal eaten between 3.30 pm and 5 pm. Observance of the custom originated amongst the wealthy social classes in England in the 1840s, her Grace Anna Maria, Duchess of Bedford, is credited as transforming afternoon tea in England into a late-afternoon meal whilst visiting Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire. By the end of the nineteenth century, afternoon tea developed to its current form and was observed by both the upper and middle classes, it had become ubiquitous in the isolated village in the fictionalised memoir Lark Rise to Candleford, where a cottager lays out what she calls a "visitor's tea" for their landlady: "the table was laid… there were the best tea things with a fat pink rose on the side of each cup.
For the more privileged, afternoon tea was accompanied by thinly-sliced bread and butter, delicate sandwiches and cakes and pastries. Scones may be served; the sandwiches are crustless, cut into small segments, either as triangles or fingers, pressed thin. This style of elegant and dainty tea sandwich may be made with egg salad, tuna salad or peanut butter and jelly. Biscuits are not served. Nowadays, a formal afternoon tea is more of a special occasion, taken as a treat in a hotel; the food is served on a tiered stand. Afternoon tea as a treat may be supplemented with a glass of a similar alcoholic drink; this is a more recent innovation. A less formal establishment is known as a tearoom, similar to a coffeehouse; these used to be common in the UK, but these establishments have declined in popularity since the Second World War. A. B. C. Tea shops and Lyons Corner Houses were successful chains of such establishments, played a role in opening up possibilities for Victorian women. A list of significant tea houses in Britain gives more examples.
The custom of taking afternoon tea with bread or pastry was common in some continental European areas long before the emergence of the practice in England, though such customs are not known in English-speaking countries. For example, Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière wrote in 1804 of afternoon tea in Switzerland. A tea party is a social gathering around this meal – not to be confused with the Boston Tea Party, a mid-December 1773 incident at the beginning of the American Revolution, or the 21st century political movement named after it; this snack is associated with the West Country, i.e. Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, it consists of scones, clotted cream, strawberry jam, plus, of course, tea to drink. Some venues will provide butter instead of clotted cream. In Australia, this is referred to as Devonshire Tea. High Tea is a name for the evening meal associated with the working class and is eaten between 5 pm and 7 pm. In most of the United Kingdom people in these areas traditionally call their midday meal dinner and their evening meal tea, whereas the upper social classes would call the midday meal lunch or luncheon and the evening meal dinner or supper.
This differentiation in usage is one of the classic social markers of English. However, in most of the south of England, the midday meal is universally called "lunch", with "dinner" being the evening meal, regardless of social class. High tea consists of a hot dish, followed by cakes and bread and jam. There will be cold cuts of meat, such as ham salad; the term was first used around 1825, "high" tea is taken on a high table. A stereotypical expression "You'll have had your tea" is used to parody people from Edinburgh as being rather shortcoming with hospitality. A BBC Radio 4 comedy series of this name was made by Barry Cryer. Not a a chance to "down tools" and relax from work for 10 -- 15 minutes; this may occur mid-afternoon. It may involve coffee, inevitably, biscuits. Once upon a time, the drinks were served by the workplace's tea lady, a position, now defunct; the British and Irish habit of dunking biscuits in tea has been exported around the globe. In Australia and New Zealand, any short break for tea in the afternoon is referred to as "afternoon tea".
As a result, the term "high tea" is used to describe the more formal affair that the English would call "afternoon tea". In Australia, the evening meal is still called tea whereas the midday meal is now called lunch
