Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

Military Command: Send Three and Fourpence. We're Going to a Dance

Not a genuine First World War signal — an anonymous joke Anonymous Unattributed · earliest known printing 15 October 1914
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

No sender, unit, date or receiving headquarters has ever been attached to this message. The earliest printing anyone has located is an unsigned filler item headed “Altered in Transit” in the London periodical The Temperance Caterer of 15 October 1914 — where the garbled punchline is “ham-shanks,” not a dance — and the familiar dance-and-fourpence pairing surfaces in a New Zealand newspaper in February 1916. Quote Investigator, which traced the whole family of retellings from 1914 to 1943, allows that some relay exercise may lie underneath, but concludes that “the cleverness of many of these anecdotes suggests fabrication.”

Last verified 7 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“Military Command: Send Three and Fourpence. We're Going to a Dance” Anonymous — "Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance" is not a documented First World War signal. No sender, unit or date has ever been named. The earliest known printing is an unsigned joke, "Altered in Transit," in The Temperance Caterer (London), 15 October 1914; the "dance" wording first appears in the Marlborough Express (New Zealand), 22 February 1916. Traced by Quote Investigator. Via Quotle.info. · Verbatim: “Send reinforcements, we're going to advance. — Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance.”

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the themes of truth, leadership and failure. Theme: "Military Command: Send Three and Fourpence. We're Going to a Dance". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Military Command: Send Three and Fourpence. We're Going to a Dance". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where it actually comes from

Earliest known printing
“Altered in Transit,” The Temperance Caterer (London), 15 October 1914, p. 78
Earliest “dance” version
Marlborough Express (Blenheim, New Zealand), 22 February 1916, p. 5
In a soldier’s memoir
Harold Baldwin, Holding the Line (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1918), p. 128
Attribution
Anonymous — no named sender, unit, date or headquarters in any known source

One of the methods of communicating from one officer to another in the trenches of the present great war is to give the message to one of the privates and tell him to pass the word along the line until it reached its destination… Lieutenant A., in charge of one end of the British line told the private in front to pass the word along to Lieutenant B.: “We are going to advance, can you send us reinforcements?” When Lieutenant B. received the message it was like this: “We are going to a dance, can you lend us three and fourpence?” Marlborough Express, 22 February 1916

The earliest pairing of “a dance” with “three and fourpence” that Quote Investigator located, transcribed from the Marlborough Express of 22 February 1916. Note what is missing: the officers are “Lieutenant A.” and “Lieutenant B.,” there is no unit, and there is no date of the supposed incident.

Digitised memoir, 1918 — an early variant
Harold Baldwin, Holding the Line, page 128
Quote Investigator’s full chronology, 1914 to 1943

The paper trail, 1914 to 1943

  • 15 October 1914 — London. The earliest printing found is a filler item headed “Altered in Transit” in The Temperance Caterer: a brigadier on manoeuvres at Aldershot passes “Enemy advancing from the left flank. Send reinforcements,” and the far end of the line receives “Enemy advancing with ham-shanks. Send three and fourpence!” Quote Investigator ↗
  • 22 February 1916 — New Zealand. The two halves of the modern line finally appear together, in the Marlborough Express ↗ of Blenheim, and the setting has moved from a parade ground to the trenches: “We are going to a dance, can you lend us three and fourpence?”
  • 1918 — a memoir, in hard covers. Sergeant Harold Baldwin of the 1st Division, Canadian Expeditionary Force, tells it as non-fiction from his own runner training: the message left as “Am held up by barbed wire entanglements; send reinforcements to my right” and arrived as “Am surrounded by wild Italians; lend me three- and fourpence till to-night.” Holding the Line, p. 128 ↗
  • 1925–1943 — the joke keeps travelling. A syndicated humour column has Colonel Lang’s trousers sent out to be pressed in July 1925; Boys’ Life converts the sum to “three or four cents” in April 1938; and by March 1943 a CBS correspondent is telling it from Cairo as a Second World War story. the later citations ↗

There is no identifiable author or work to attach rights to. The wording is an anonymous joke that mutated across newspapers, magazines and broadcasts, and the tidy modern one-liner matches none of the documented period texts exactly. The individual early printings quoted here — the 1914 Temperance Caterer filler, the 1916 Marlborough Express note and Harold Baldwin’s Holding the Line (1918) — were all published well before 1931 and are out of copyright in the United States, but that says nothing about the catchphrase itself, whose origin is unknown.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What’s wrong with the story as told

It is almost always presented as a real signal — an officer in the line asking for reinforcements, a headquarters receiving a request for pocket money. Four things in that telling do not survive contact with the sources.

A genuine First World War signal Unsupported

No sender, unit, date or receiving headquarters has ever been produced. What survives is a chain of newspaper and magazine retellings whose details change every time. Quote Investigator, having traced them from 1914 to 1943, allows there may be some founding incident but concludes that “the cleverness of many of these anecdotes suggests fabrication” and that some variants were consciously built by altering earlier ones. Quote Investigator ↗

The tidy modern couplet Later polish

The 1914 original pairs “Send reinforcements” with “Enemy advancing with ham-shanks. Send three and fourpence!” The dance appears in 1916 as “We are going to a dance, can you lend us three and fourpence?” The symmetrical one-liner in circulation today matches neither exactly. the documented texts ↗

Aldershot, Salisbury, the trenches, a Canadian training field, a Scout camp Drift

Every retelling relocates it: brigade manoeuvres at Aldershot in 1914; “Kipling’s million” drilling at Salisbury in the Boston Globe of 6 January 1915; the trenches by February 1916; a Canadian runner relay in 1918; an American message-passing game in Boys’ Life in 1938. A story that fits everywhere fits nowhere in particular. the chronology ↗

The Second World War Relocated

By 28 March 1943 the Pittsburgh Press was reporting a CBS broadcast from Cairo in which the same exchange is told as a story of that war, with a colonel demanding to know what all this is about a dance. Quote Investigator ↗

The prefix “Military Command:” Modern framing

Those words are a research headline, not part of any period text — they head Quote Investigator’s write-up, which is titled “Quote Origin: Military Command: Send Three and Fourpence. We’re Going to a Dance.” None of the 1914–1943 sources quoted there frames the line that way. the article ↗

The oldest thing anybody has found is an unsigned joke in a London periodical of 15 October 1914 — and even there the punchline is ham-shanks, not a dance. Quote Investigator, 26 August 2011 ↗

Context

Why a joke this old refuses to die

The gag lands because the problem underneath it was real. When telephone cable was cut by shellfire — as it was at the Battle of Neuve-Chapelle ↗ on 10–13 March 1915, where the British telephone system proved vulnerable to German artillery-fire — a message had to travel by human relay, and every relay is a fresh chance to mishear. Sergeant Harold Baldwin, who tells one of the earliest versions, explains in the same breath that company runners were formed after Neuve Chapelle ↗ precisely because that engagement had shown what happens when the wires go.

So the anecdote never had to be true to be useful, and that is exactly what has kept it alive: it is the cleanest one-sentence demonstration of message decay anybody has ever come up with. It has been repurposed as a training-room parable, a management column opener and an after-dinner line for more than a century — usually with an air of documentary certainty that the actual paper trail does not support.

“Am surrounded by wild Italians; lend me three- and fourpence till to-night.”

Read the full story

The two halves of the modern couplet arrive separately. “Send three and fourpence” is present from the very first printing in 1914, where it answers a request for reinforcements against an enemy advancing “with ham-shanks.” The dance only joins it in 1916. The neat symmetry everyone quotes — advance/a dance, reinforcements/three and fourpence — is a later polish, not the original.

The currency dates it and localises it. Three shillings and fourpence only scans as a sum of money in pre-decimal Britain, which is why American retellings had to translate: Boys’ Life was asking for “three or four cents” by April 1938.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Truth Leadership Failure

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: Send Three and Fourpencequoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Traces every documented version from the 1914 first printing to a 1943 CBS broadcast, with page-level citations.
Holding the Line (1918), full textarchive.org

Sergeant Harold Baldwin’s Canadian Expeditionary Force memoir; the message-relay anecdote is on page 128.
Boys’ Life, April 1938books.google.com

The Boy Scouts of America issue that Quote Investigator cites for the Americanised “three or four cents” retelling.
Marlborough Expressen.wikipedia.org

The Blenheim, New Zealand daily that carried the earliest known “dance” version, on 22 February 1916.
Chinese whispersen.wikipedia.org

The message-distortion game this story is always used to illustrate — notably, the encyclopedia article itself does not carry the anecdote.
Battle of Neuve-Chapelleen.wikipedia.org

The March 1915 action in which British telephone lines failed — the real communications problem that runner relays were meant to answer.

The author

So who did say it?

Anonymous

Unattributed · British military humour, first printed 15 October 1914

Nobody has ever been named — not the officer who sent it, not the headquarters that received it, not the wit who invented it. The line belongs to the class of jokes newspapers printed as filler about the New Armies of 1914–18, passed on as fact and reshaped by whoever was telling it. That is why the punchline is ham-shanks in a London paper in 1914, a dance in New Zealand in 1916, and wild Italians in a Canadian sergeant’s memoir in 1918.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented printing

“Altered in Transit,” The Temperance Caterer (London), October 15, 1914, 78; earliest “dance” version in Marlborough Express (Blenheim, New Zealand), February 22, 1916, 5; both cited in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Military Command: Send Three and Fourpence. We’re Going to a Dance,” August 26, 2011.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Military Command: Send Three and Fourpence. We're Going to a Dance’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/military-command-send-three-and-fourpence-were-going-to-a/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied