Help Yourself to a Sandwich

I haven’t seen a man carrying a sandwich board for years. Perhaps it’s because I live in a small village, not a big city. A man walking through our village in a sandwich board from the pub to the bowling green and back might be lucky if he saw four people, but a high percentage of that small number might turn their heads - say 75 per cent: the other one might be busy pushing a wheelbarrow or looking over a hedge. A sandwich board man in the centre of Manchester might walk the same distance and pass through a milling crowd of five hundred, but he only needs a ten per cent turn of heads to get his message across to fifty potential readers.

All of which philosophising and arithmetical hypothesing arises because I was wondering what to put in a sandwich. John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich in the late eighteenth century, had the reputation of being a gambler who was so hooked to the gaming table that instead of going out to get a proper lunch, would ask someone to fetch him two slices of bread wrapped round a slice of ham. No sandwich bars in those days, though today a good one may offer a choice of twenty or more fillings. Every single sandwich bar in the world takes its generic name from this eighteenth century earl.

But John Montagu, 4th E of S, was not just a rake. He had a long career in politics: he sat in the House of Lords, served as an officer in the army, served also as a diplomat and ambassador abroad, became a member of the Admiralty Board, Master of Trinity House, Receiver of the Revenues of Ireland, Postmaster-General, and eventually First Lord of the Admiralty. True, he was not a great success in this last post, but we can see that he must have been a busy man, and we wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he resorted to dining off slices of ham and bread in the office. But surely he can’t have spent as much time in the casino as his reputation suggests.

But how came his family by the title ? The first Earl was Edward Montagu (1625-72), firmly pro-Cromwell in his earlier days, but Admiral of the Fleet (with Samuel Pepys as his secretary) at the time of the Restoration. He was instrumental in setting the scene for the return of Charles II, and was rewarded with the title Earl of Portsmouth, later amended to Earl of Sandwich (who suggested the change, I wonder ? We might be eating cheese and pickle portsmouths). Sandwich in Kent was one of the Cinque Ports.

The earliest link in this semantic chain must be the origin of the place-name ‘Sandwich’. The first element ‘sand’ means what it says. The second element ‘wich’ signified in the early middle ages a commercial or market centre (compare Norwich and Ipswich and Dunwich). Presumably Sandwich was named for its sea-shore trade.

Help yourself to a sandwich