Square meals didn’t start in Nelson’s navy – but you could get one in a gold-rush town

I never dare go with my husband to any restaurant that uses square plates or he will play up the horrors of these ceramic items, huffing and puffing and pretending that he can’t stow his knife and fork without their falling off. When the subject attracted the attention of readers of the Daily Telegraph recently, one of them wrote in to say that square wooden plates were ‘standard issue in ships of the line in Nelson’s day’. Sailors were fed a hot meat meal every day, he pointed out, and ‘the practice led to the expression “a square meal”, meaning a good one’.

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Hardeep Singh

What’s the real reason Labour is reluctant to hold a grooming gangs inquiry?

This is a nice idea, but there is no evidence for it. Even Admiral W.H. Smyth in his Sailor’s Word-Book (1867), a proselytising attempt to claim naval origins for words and phrase, does not go so far.