What is posh?

DD's best friend,whose father was very high up in the Kenyan government, said that it was years before she realised that most children weren't driven to school in a Mercedes with a flag on the bonnet

My favourite posh people were a titled Lady who used to stride into the room and shake hands saying "Hello! I'n Jonet the spelling mistake!" (her father got her name wrong when he registered the birth) and a lovely family with a beautiful old home, that had been in the family since the Norman conquest, who happily rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in helping their staff when they were entertaining and treated everyone as an equal. Actually they weren't posh at all - they were normal.

All my furniture is second-hand, so I suppose that makes me very posh indeed!
My late aunt had been head parlour-maid in a titled house in London between the wars. She was regarded as posh, and as the arbiter of how things should be done. She always had pastry forks and matching china instead of odd cups and saucers like the rest of the family!
I can remember that she would tick us off if we behaved 'common', and would say 'It's not PROPER!' if we neglected our table manners.
Poor aunt,and her sisters, including my late mother, had been brought up in the most grinding poverty during the 1920's. They all went into service, and the grand houses that they worked in must have seemed like another world.
They were all fortunate in that they went to good houses where servants were treated very well, so they returned home to see their parents much better nourished and more warmly clad than when they had left. Many other girls had bad experiences and were worked half to death and poorly fed.
I don't know what POSH really means - I suppose it's all about perception. If you have nothing, then anyone who is comfortably off would appear posh, but I suppose that having to think about it at all means that we must be 'rather common' as my dear aunt would have said!

We had one very prominent international cricketer in the family round about 1900, who stood for Parliament in the nineteen twenties. My father and uncles and aunts were roped in to stuff letterboxes with campaigning material because he was "family" - but I have since discovered that his branch diverged from ours way back when the money diverged too, about 500 years ago. Memories of family branches and twigs persist for a long time!

I remember asking my Dad if any of our family had been famous.
He said your GGGGGGF+ was hung drawn and quartered

Elegran, family rumour has it that my GGF spent his share on the horses.

For "them" read "his many sons and daughters"

If only my ancestor way back about 1600 had been born to his uncle, not his father! As it was, he did inherit quite a lot, but made a will leaving a house to each of them, and distributed his money around them all, and then they in turn had large families too and spent it all.

We wiz robbed, anno!

If only my maternal GGF hadn't been the second son of a second son of a prosperous landed family! I do have one piece of ancestral furniture which my senior DGD fancies, so I hope it will go on down the generations.

How I loved my Silver Cross prams, I was so proud pushing my daughters out in them.
That's another thing the people with old money do, pass down the old prams. No fancy modern buggies for them.

I was told never to use the word posh as it indicated you had an inferiority complex or were envious. I don't like the word and think it is very dated. Although I suppose "upmarket" is a new word of classification.
The Duchess of Cambridge's Mother, Carole,sat in a Silver Cross pram outside her Mother's council house. Her Mother was considered posh by the neighbours but it was the start of big things to come! Look to the stars; never down to the gutter.

jackie

My parents' (particularly my father's) aim in life was to climb the social ladder and adopt many posh things. We had a jardinière! We also had a loggia, a sunlounge and a croquet lawn!

They never gave up their working class tea, though - thick, well brewed and with milk. Couldn't get on with Chinese or the finer Indian teas.

I met a lady once who told me that she'd never learnt to drive as it hadn't crossed her mind that a time would come when she didn't have a chauffeur!

I thought my aunty and uncle were posh because they had a soda syphon lol

When I was about six, my uncle (by marriage) took me to visit his brothers house I was impressed when told that the stand with flowers in on the landing was a 'jardiniere'.... Is that posh, I wonder?

VQ same here , except it was Geordie and GPO english.
I think it was all about social classes - my Mum came from a middle class, rather snobbish family. I suppose they were 'posh'. Dad's family was more working class, more down to earth. Definitely not posh.

Mam insisted that I learned to speak GPO English and not 'ull. Fine at home but enough to get me called posh at school so I spoke 'ull at school and GPO at home.

I think if they called the sitting room and the snug the drawing room and the morning room they were posh

My mum used to call us kid's bedroom (in a terraced house) "The Nursery"

I had a school friend who came from a very wealthy family. They had a grand piano in their enormous drawing room. They had a number of servants. The maids wore uniform black dresses and white pinnies.

Next to the drawing room was the morning room where the lady of the house could take morning coffee while the servants cleaned the drawing room. I thought at the time (1950s) that they were posh but now I'm not sure. Did they just have a lot of money?

I must be posh as we've had a playroom since the children were little. In our old house it was made by converting all the out buildings Eg coalhouse, outside loo and garden store. In this house we still have a room called the playroom.

We had a downstairs playroom when the DC were small.

It was aka as 'dining room' when we had visitors but first we had to have a good tidy up.

I knew someone who used to do Michael Heseltine's mother's hair.
Mrs H Senior was very nice apparently; his father had done well and owned a factory but both sides had come from very humble beginnings.
Michael always looks 'posh' though, doesn't he

I wonder why Victoria Beckham was called Posh Spice?
I think she came from a well-off family, dad had his own business (electronic engineering).
Beckham (Posh Spice) attended St. Mary's High School in Cheshunt, where she was embarrassed by her family's wealth and often begged her father not to drop her off outside the school in their Rolls Royce

I think posh is relative. My current workmates think I'm posh because I went to university and have a larger vocabulary than they do but I remeber befriending a lady at a mother and toddler who was terribly self effacing and shy.
One of the first things she asked me was did we have an upstairs or a downstairs playroom and what was my opinion on the relative merits of each.
I was struck dumb with astonishment because, for me and most of my friends, the idea of a room soley for the children to play in and not having to clear toys away in the family sitting room each evening was a luxury beyond imagining!
Turned out her father had been Lloyds, "name" who had lost most of the family money and she, in consequence, was now having to live in, "drastically reduced circumstances" in a house roughly three times the size of mine!
She was lovely though, just desperately wanting to, "fit in" with the local mums and make a life for herself and her DD. When I laughed and told her that I didn't have a playroom at all and neither, to my knowledge, did most of the other mums at the group she flushed beetroot red and apologised profusely, hoping I didn't think she was trying to be, "grand". She was just trying to be coversational and break the ice as it were!
I liked her but, unfortunately, most of the others shunned her as being, "not like us" and the poor thing eventually had a breakdown and moved away from the area. A sad example of inverse snobbery.