Chris Harris
No, this is culturally a paraphrase referencing the brilliant actor’s industrial drinking: going to an off licence for a bottle of whisky.’ But maybe not completely off subject.
“Gone for a Burton” is one of those wonderfully British expressions that sounds almost cheerful until you discover what it originally meant, because although today we tend to use it when something has broken, disappeared, failed completely or been ruined, the phrase seems to have begun life during the Second World War as RAF slang for somebody who had been killed or was missing in action. It is a phrase more known to the older generation, certainly my stepchildren had never heard of it, another in the long list of phrases, bands, politicians and footballers who we can’t believe they have never heard of.
A television might go for a Burton, a carefully arranged plan might go for a Burton, or your chances of getting home before midnight might go for a Burton after somebody suggests one more drink, but during the war the expression carried a much darker meaning and was used as a euphemism for an airman who had failed to return.
The earliest printed examples appear in 1941, by which time the phrase was already being explained as RAF slang for being killed, although exactly where the word “Burton” came from has never been established beyond doubt.
The most attractive explanation involves beer, because Burton upon Trent had long been one of Britain’s great brewing centres and “a Burton” could refer to a glass of Burton ale. One wartime account suggested that if an airman was absent, his friends might jokingly say that he had “gone for a Burton”, as though he had simply slipped away for a drink, and RAF humour then turned this harmless excuse into a euphemism for somebody who was never coming back.
There is an even darker variation on the same idea, because an aircraft that crashed into the sea had, quite literally, gone into “the drink”, so the phrase may have combined the idea of the sea with the idea of going for a beer. It is a wonderfully neat explanation, but unfortunately there is no conclusive evidence that this is definitely how the phrase began.
Other theories have appeared over the years, including a connection with Montague Burton, the enormous British tailoring company, an old naval pulley system known as a “Burton” or “Spanish Burton”, and even a suggestion that the phrase commemorated an RAF pilot named Burton who had been killed early in the war. None of these explanations has ever been proved conclusively, although the beer theory remains the one most often repeated.
What we do know is that the phrase spread very quickly, and by the middle of the war it was familiar enough to be explained outside Britain as an example of RAF slang for an aviator who had been killed on operations.
After the war, however, the meaning softened considerably, and people increasingly began to use it for objects, plans and situations rather than dead airmen, so that a gearbox, television, business deal or carefully organised weekend could all “go for a Burton” without anyone thinking particularly deeply about the wartime origins of the phrase.
That change in meaning is probably one reason the expression survived for so long, because it became a useful bit of British understatement for describing something that had gone badly wrong without making too much fuss about it. The meanings of so many phrases and idioms either evolve or die.
The phrase is less common now which is why it sounds distinctly old-fashioned to younger people, but that is also part of its charm, because like so many traditional British expressions it manages to make something fairly disastrous sound almost casual.
