SOPHIA MONEY- COUTTS MODERN MANNERS Meghan must learn to love afternoon tea

It wouldn’t do the Duchess any harm to be a bit less Californian and more Victoria sponge and jam, with lashings of butter

Inever met the 7th Duchess of Bedford but I feel certain we would have been friends. Alas, she died in 1857. Portraits show a pale-skinned woman with a fondness for feathery hats, but she looks slight for one who invented the afternoon habit of teatime.

It was Anna (she would have liked me to called her Anna) who complained in 1840 of a “sinking feeling” every day at 4pm. I am no doctor but I suspect it’s the same “sinking feeling” that propels me to the corner shop for a Twirl at a similar hour. Anna was peckish, but supper was still an agonising distance away, held at 8pm. To remedy this, Anna asked a servant to carry a tray of Darjeeling tea, bread and butter and cake to her room every afternoon.

Teatime was born. Anna’s friends started dropping in for tea and cake and it became a social event in her private room. Sometimes there were sandwiches, after the Earl of Sandwich had the radical idea of putting a filling between two slices of bread a few decades earlier. Don’t say the aristocracy never did anything for you.

Anna was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, a useful patron and another woman who wasn’t shy of a bit of cake, and so teatime developed rapidly and became fashionable among toffs. English silversmiths, linen makers and china manufacturers started churning out elaborate fripperies for the table – sugar bowls, cream jugs, Herend cups and saucers, lace tablecloths. The food became grander. Mrs Beeton recommended a menu that included foie gras and cress sandwiches, tongue sandwiches, cucumber sandwiches, bread and butter, Madeira cake, plum cake, almond cake, crystallised fruits, petit fours, sweet biscuits, tea, coffee, claret and sherry. It makes my daily Twirl habit feel quite abstemious.

I only mention this because of the Duchess of Sussex’s tea. A make-up artist called Daniel dropped in on Kensington Palace last weekend and Instagrammed a photograph of their table, which caused uproar – there was a pot of tea but no milk, four bits of toast spread with gunky avocado and four chocolate truffles. Needless to say, the Soho Home teacups have since sold out and one newspaper has criticised the Duchess for swallowing a teatime snack that could be fuelling murder and drought in Mexico, such is the demand for avocados.

I have no intel on the avocado situation in South America and I don’t care what cups she drinks her tea from. But I do think Meghan should try harder with her teatime spread. OK, the truffles were from Sandringham. Points for tactfulness. But I do think, at a time when she’s been subject to press snarkiness and gossip, it would do no harm at all to be less Californian about tea. Chuck a Victoria sponge into the picture. Maybe a few crumpets. Find a jar of sticky, homemade jam and line that up next to the plate of garibaldis. There needs to be milk, there needs to be butter.

My mother still winces whenever she talks of the time I was three and not allowed to eat any chocolate cake until I’d finished my bread and butter. Apparently I sat at the table, tears rolling down my cheeks as I chomped my way through the Hovis. It was hardly conscription, but I feel it’s informed my character and that Anna, Duchess of Bedford, would have approved. Teatime is a fundamental tenet of Britishness. Meghan must embrace it. She needs to try a tongue sandwich.