school-dinner lady
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: school-dinner ladies
Senses: examples: text: KNOWSLEY’S school-dinner ladies are to hold a one-day token strike, on Friday, as part of a dispute over cuts in their working hours.
ref: 1977 November 23, Mark Thomas, “School Dinner Ladies to Strike in Cuts Row”, in Liverpool Echo, number 30,414, page 7:
text: WILTSHIRE County Council was today accused of hoodwinking workers in the school-dinner ladies’ redundancy row.
ref: 1980 June 21, Chris Hewett, “Council accused of hoodwink”, in Evening Post, number 14,843, page 1:
text: The school-dinner ladies of Britain do not make for militant Socialists.
ref: 1981 October 4, Robert Taylor, “No Bennite concessions”, in The Observer, number 9919, page 15:
text: Four school-dinner ladies sacked by labour-controlled Walsall council for refusing to join a trade union under a closed-shop agreement will not be reinstated although an industrial tribunal in Birmingham ruled they were unfairly dismissed and should be reinstated.
ref: 1982 March 9, “Sacking Confirmed”, in The Daily Telegraph, number 39419, page 2:
text: NINE school-dinner ladies sacked by Somerset county council will ask an industrial tribunal in Bristol next week to rule that they were unfairly dismissed.
ref: 1983 November 17, “Sacked dinner ladies go to law”, in Evening Post, number 15,617, page 57:
text: The Tory city council is going beyond all boundaries of civilised behaviour by sacking school-dinner ladies and re-employing them only on dictated terms.
ref: 1984 March 8, David Sutton, “Class hatred”, in Birmingham Evening Mail, page 7:
text: How would our school-dinner lady react to being branded dinners?
ref: 1984 July 21, “Why not call her madam?”, in Birmingham Evening Mail, page 6:
text: RULINGS of unfair dismissal won by 18 school-dinner ladies who refused to take a pay cut were upheld by the Court of Appeal today.
ref: 1984 November 1, “Dinner ladies win pay cut battle”, in The Standard, page 9:
text: So come on all you lighthouse keepers, school-dinner ladies and lion tamers, send for your applications forms from: Busman’s Holiday, Granada Television, Manchester M60 9EA.
ref: 1986 January 18, “Weekend TV Post: Roll up for a Busman’s Holiday…”, in Lynne St Claire, editor, Evening Post, number 33,403, page 9:
text: Her own home is on a modern private estate on the edge of Birmingham, where she reckons most of the wives work as school-dinner ladies nearby or, like herself, as cleaners.
ref: 1987, Beatrix Campbell, Iron Ladies: Why Do Women Vote Tory?, Hachette, →ISBN:
text: Gasfitters, accountants, Burton shop staff, Wimpy crews and West End school-dinner ladies will all be red-nosing like mad.
ref: 1988 February 5, “Better to be red . . .”, in Evening Standard, page 23:
text: THE CLOTHES SHOW. Including make-up advice from Barbara Daly for a group of Yorkshire school-dinner ladies.
ref: 1989 October 8, The People, number 5,614, page 22:
text: The action is set in a high-rise flat in the theatre’s own borough of Newham, the home of Mary Atkins, a school-dinner lady, and her husband George, a hospital plumber, devoted Kinnockite and pillar of the local Labour Party.
ref: 1990 March 17, Charles Spencer, “The poll tax farce”, in The Daily Telegraph, number 41,905, page XIII:
text: A hotel in Scarborough it had been; three days of lust with a divorced school-dinner lady. School-dinner ladies hadn’t been like that in Rebus’s day … or maybe he just hadn’t been paying attention.
ref: 1992, Ian Rankin, A Good Hanging and Other Stories, Orion, published 1999, →ISBN, page 30:
text: THIRTY school-dinner ladies in Blyth have been presented with certificates after completing a four-week food hygiene course organised by Northumberland County Council’s catering arm, Northumberland Contracting.
ref: 1992 June 11, The Journal, number 45,360, page 4:
text: School-dinner lady Ann Harvey of Swadlincote, Derby, Olive Barton of Dronfield, Sheffield, and Phylis Carey of Shannon, Co. Clare, Eire, all win £333.33 for winning lines.
ref: 1992 November 1, “I’ve won with £½m Diamond Bingo”, in The People, page 31:
text: Frances Barber, 36, was born in Wolverhampton the daughter of a bookmaker and a school-dinner lady.
ref: 1995 September 9, “The Questionnaire”, in The Guardian, page 49:
text: Nora Jacques, who used to dole out a steady diet of meat, veg and mash, meets modern-day school-dinner lady Diane Smith
ref: 1995 September 23, The Guardian, page 95:
text: School-dinner ladies lose right-to-pension test case […] In a test case brought by 11 Lancashire school-dinner ladies, Mr Justice Robert Walker held that Lancashire County Council did not breach European law in failing to ensure that their right to belong to an occupational pension scheme carried over into their new employment with BET Catering Services.
ref: 1996 January 18, Margaret Hughes, “School-dinner ladies lose right-to-pension test case”, in The Guardian, page 16:
text: Game show in which young contestants get revenge on adults of their choice — including a school-dinner lady and an ice-skating coach.
ref: 1997 November 26, Cambridge Evening News, page 20:
text: Her late mother, a school-dinner lady, was a fervent Anglican who regularly cleaned the church.
ref: 1999 February 21, Frances Welch, “‘He’s not God All-matey, he’s God Almighty’”, in The Sunday Telegraph, number 1,967, page 4:
text: After a brief, unhappy marriage, Jean [Barker] brought up her twin boys alone, cleaning, working as a school-dinner lady, and at a social security office.
ref: 1999 September 10, “As feminist, poet and Christian, she campaigned for her community: Jean Barker”, in The Guardian, page 24:
text: Yes, there’s an element of curiosity but, at the risk of sounding like the school-dinner lady who insisted you finish your sprouts, it is hard to justify limiting yourself to a small group of animals — and then only to certain prime cuts — when there is so much hunger in the world.
ref: 2001 August 9, Angela Pertusini, “Don’t be an ass — give it a try: So the North Korean leader eats donkey — Angela Pertusini is licking her lips”, in The Daily Telegraph, number 45,459, page 19:
text: The son of a Scottish able seaman and a school-dinner lady, he [Andy Gilchrist] was born in Portsmouth.
ref: 2003 November 14, “On the grid: Union leaders”, in Alistair Duncan, compiler, Evening Standard, page 12:
text: Her first married home, when she was a school-dinner lady, had been in a terrace that had been demolished to make way for the Amersham.
ref: 2005, Gerald Seymour, Rat Run, Hodder & Stoughton, published 2014, →ISBN:
text: Meanwhile, Alison the stroppy school-dinner lady has difficulty controlling her daughter, and thinks drugs might help calm down her kid — Doc Martin has other ideas (unsurprisingly).
ref: 2007 September 24, Imogen Ridgway, “Pick of the Night”, in Evening Standard, page 40:
text: As he tucks in to his early-morning muffin, the aforementioned Walters is given to fulminating about some school-dinner lady, who used to ladle grey, lumpy mashed potato on to his tray.
ref: 2009, Terry Wogan, Where Was I?!: The World According to Wogan, Orion, →ISBN:
text: English cabbage or carrots tended to be boiled to the point of indigestibility, and once the school-dinner ladies got their hands on vegetables, they really did have all flavour and most of the colour surgically removed.
ref: 2015, David Boyle, “School Dinners”, in How to Be English, Square Peg, →ISBN:
text: I asked some of the school-dinner ladies about feminism.
ref: 2015, Bee Rowlatt, In Search of Mary, Alma Books, →ISBN:
glosses: Alternative spelling of school dinner lady.