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AKAP wrote:I was always told that there was no such thing as a silly question. (ie the questioner doesen't know the answer and therefore needs to ask the question).
On that point I don't know the answer either. Where does the term kiff come from?
Brew room presumably refers to the fact that you "brew" a cup of tea. Although I can't remember anyone using this terminology at CH.
I think this is a bit like the pronunciation of 'scone'. It splits families.
One parent 'makes' a pot of tea, one 'brews' it and in our house you 'mash' it. Mash being a Yorkshire expression.
"If a man speaks, and there isn't a woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"
Yep, kiff was an early-twentieth-century slang term for marijuana (a term very much used in the 1920s). I'd always assumed that tea was called kiff at CH because of the age-old notion of the tea being drugged in some way in boarding schools, prisons, the army etc.
Kiff tasted pretty weird, didn't it? Not like regular tea at all. (Mind you, the water tasted pretty weird too.) Maybe kiff was a mix of tea, lawn-clippings, dried mud off the soles of rugger boots and fag-ash provided by Basil Gregory (by the ton).
Don't think I ever tasted the Horsham kiff, but I did once see the tea being made in the Kitchens in Hertford - after which nothing it tasted like could surprise me - it was amazing we actually drank the stuff !
Hertford - 5s/2s - 63-70
" I wish I were what I was when I wanted to be what I am now..."
Brew rooms, where one could make tea or coffee or toast, covered with flab of course. Installed when the houses were modernised in the '60s.
Kiff iis tea served, naturally, in a kiff bowl!
Happy christmas!
Most of the brew room used to be smeared with flab. Lovely!
There's a turn up for the books, a CH pupil asking questions about CH! This, of course, has led me to a further question. What is flab?
Up north we use the term 'brew' all the time. 'Make me a brew', or 'brew up', 'gagging for a brew' etc etc.
Brew rooms were for making tea and toast in. They arrived when the houses were modernised whilst I was there. Along with toyces(q.v.). And no-one could be bothered to use a knife to spread the flab on the toast. Conesquentlt, all you did was tear off a bit of the paper covering and ran the 'bar' of flab over the toast. That is why the brew room was liberally smeared with flab.
What fun it all was!
Whilst at art school after the CH experience, I remember my father quietly asking me if cannabis was the same as kiff. When I told him it was, he said: "Well, just keep on smoking it, then. It was the only thing that kept us happy in Egypt in the war".
Euterpe13 wrote:Don't think I ever tasted the Horsham kiff, but I did once see the tea being made in the Kitchens in Hertford - after which nothing it tasted like could surprise me - it was amazing we actually drank the stuff !
Hertford tea was grey with a greenish tinge. I used to take 4 teaspoonfulsof sugar in it to makeit palateable. At home I didn't take sugar and don't to this day.
"If a man speaks, and there isn't a woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"
AKAP wrote:I was always told that there was no such thing as a silly question. (ie the questioner doesen't know the answer and therefore needs to ask the question).
On that point I don't know the answer either. Where does the term kiff come from?
Brew room presumably refers to the fact that you "brew" a cup of tea. Although I can't remember anyone using this terminology at CH.
Nyort wrote:The 'Brew Room', that is present in a few houses - where did this term come from?
Kiff - what is kiff, and where did the name come from?
A quote from Christ's Hospital by G.A.T. Allan Revised by J E Morpurgo published 1984:
"....`kiff`, a nauseating concoction of tea, coffee or cocoa pre-mixed with milk and sugar, was poured into "kiff-bowls" from cans."....
From my memories of the stuff I cannot better that description.
More from the same book:
...."Housey slang, Christ's Hospital's arcane language, has been slipping into obsolescence these last 80 years and is now close to being obsolete. Who now, even among Old Blues, would recognise a brother-crug as a fellow Blue? And are there many now in the School who customarily use the word crug in it's other sense - the sense that was commonplace even 30 years ago - as meaning bread. Kiff for coffee, tea or cocoa slipped from general usage when the School abandoned kiff-bowls (managed according to C.H. etiquette with one hand) and took to genteel tea-cups. Spadge ( to walk in the gait once peculiar to Grecians, or, by some eccentric process of association, to be friendly with a boy from another House) was already 50 years ago, a word bandied only in the Preparatory School. Flab (butter), gag (meat); all have vanished.".......
Brew rooms, where one could make tea or coffee or toast, covered with flab of course. Installed when the houses were modernised in the '60s.
Kiff iis tea served, naturally, in a kiff bowl!
Happy christmas!
Most of the brew room used to be smeared with flab. Lovely!
There's a turn up for the books, a CH pupil asking questions about CH! This, of course, has led me to a further question. What is flab?
Up north we use the term 'brew' all the time. 'Make me a brew', or 'brew up', 'gagging for a brew' etc etc.
Flab = margarine
Kiff bowl - imagine a 9 inch diameter white pottery hollow sphere, cut it across at 40% height (ie not quite in half), flatten the base slightly and you have a kiff bowl.
brew = mash = stew = make tea depending on where you were brought up. That word is one of the classic signs of origin.
I don't know the origin of the word and I wonder how many remember "spadging" which term and practice died out whilst I was there.
What happens if a politician drowns in a river? That is pollution.
What happens if all of them drown? That is solution!!!
i can remember spadge - seemed innocent enough at the time. Kiff poured from huge metal jugs and served by the trades. Flab - butter in my day - not wrapped but in hand hashioned spiky disks!
I certainly remember "spadging," which as you say was two boys walking closely together. I also remember being told by Mr Littlefield, who taught German, that he believed that the word could have been derived from the German verb spazieren = to walk.
I have also read the discussion above of the origins of "kiff." I think that to relate it to the Moroccan word "kif" or hashish is a little fanciful. I also remember the stories that Army tea was laced with some substance to repress our sexual desires, the substance concerned being popularly reckoned to be bromide. I believe that it was actually an old wive's tale and even if something was added it was certainly totally unsuccessfull - but that's another story! I believe that the origins of the Housie word "kiff" are lost in the history of the school and of its time in London. Incidentally, I believe that the word "kiff" was applied solely to the liquid supposed to be tea and that coffee, which was served only at Sunday breakfast in the earlty 1950s, was always known by its proper name - although it still had to be drunk from a "kiff-bowl."
Just to add to the discussion, there was a word "fotch" which was to strike another boy (usually much smaller) around the side of the head. This very unpleasant custom had more or less died out by the time I arrived, but I heard the word used on several occasions as a threat - but never carried out.
