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Who really said it

You May Tell the Butcher's Wife That Lady Peel Has Finished

Attributed to Beatrice Lillie 1894–1989 · Canadian-born British revue star, Lady Peel by marriage
Attributed In copyright

Lillie printed this exact sentence in her 1972 autobiography Every Other Inch a Lady, recalling a hairdressing appointment at Elizabeth Arden’s and an audible sniff from a Mrs. Armour of the Chicago meat-packing family. But the anecdote was already circulating in print in December 1931, in Walter Winchell’s column, with a different setting and a different punchline — so the wording everyone quotes rests on a first-person memory set down four decades after the story first appeared. Quote Investigator ↗ concludes an incident probably did happen and that Lillie’s own account is the single most important telling, while noting that the details vary at every retelling.

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

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“You May Tell the Butcher's Wife That Lady Peel Has Finished” attributed to Beatrice Lillie; the wording is hers in Every Other Inch a Lady (Doubleday, 1972), p. 56, but the anecdote was already in print, with a different punchline, in Walter Winchell's column of 18 December 1931.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Beatrice Lillie and Doubleday & Company, publisher of the 1972 autobiography). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Beatrice Lillie — Canadian-born British comic actress and revue singer. Theme: "You May Tell the Butcher's Wife That Lady Peel Has Finished". 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.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "You May Tell the Butcher's Wife That Lady Peel Has Finished". 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 the wording comes from

Source of this wording
Every Other Inch a Lady
Published
Doubleday & Company, Garden City, N.Y., 1972 — the passage at page 56
Earliest known printing
Walter Winchell, “On Broadway,” The Scranton Republican, 18 December 1931 — different setting, different punchline
Status
Attributed — a first-person account written decades after the event, with no contemporaneous record of the remark

A few minutes later the svelte, well-groomed star appeared. Ignoring Mrs. Armour completely, she addressed her icy parting remark to the manager: “You may tell the butcher’s wife that Lady Peele has finished.” The Daily Tar Heel, 6 March 1935

This 1935 college-paper column — which credits the story second-hand to an “Ed Moyer” and misspells the title as “Peele” — is the earliest freely readable printing of the modern wording. Lillie’s own 1972 memoir gives the same sentence with the spelling corrected, but sets it at Elizabeth Arden’s rather than a Chicago beauty shop.

Digitized newspaper page
The Daily Tar Heel, 6 March 1935, page 2
Quote Investigator: the 1931–1972 chronology

How we verified this

  • 18 December 1931 — the first known telling, in Walter Winchell’s syndicated column: a Chicago dress-shop fitting, an unnamed “stock yard prince”’s wife, and the exit line “Tell the butcher’s wife that Lady Peel has been fitted and she may go in now,” as transcribed by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 6 March 1935 — the modern wording surfaces in a Chapel Hill student paper ↗, now in a Chicago beauty shop, naming Mrs. Ogden Armour and spelling the title “Lady Peele.”
  • 1944 — Bennett Cerf’s bestselling Try and Stop Me ↗ carries the story to a mass audience with a Mrs. Swift next on the appointment calendar at a Chicago modiste’s instead.
  • 1972 — Lillie tells it herself in Every Other Inch a Lady ↗, at Elizabeth Arden’s during the run of Set to Music; the passage is at page 56, verified on paper by QI ↗.
In copyright

The wording quoted here comes from Lillie’s autobiography (Doubleday, 1972), which is in copyright. The earlier variants appear in 1930s newspaper and magazine columns whose US copyright status depends on renewal and has not been checked. A single quip may be too short to carry copyright on its own; the safe classification for this wording is in-copyright.

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 keeps getting changed

The speaker is not really in dispute — almost every telling names Beatrice Lillie. What moves, from one printing to the next, is who she was aiming at, where it happened, and how the line actually ended.

Mrs. Swift wrong name

Bennett Cerf’s million-selling 1944 collection Try and Stop Me put a woman who had “married into the Swift hierarchy” next on the appointment calendar at a Chicago modiste’s and ended the line “Tell that butcher’s wife that Lady Peel has finished now” — a different packing dynasty from the one Lillie herself named, as Quote Investigator transcribes ↗.

Mrs. Ogden Armour named late

Armour is the name in Lillie’s 1972 memoir and in a 6 March 1935 newspaper column ↗ that passes the story along second-hand. The earliest printing, in 1931, names nobody at all — only “the wife of a stock yard prince.”

An unnamed English actress anonymised

When The Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran the story in 1933 it withheld both names, printing the punchline as “Tell the butcher’s wife than Lady _____ is finished!” — a reminder of how freely the anecdote travelled before it settled on Lillie (QI ↗).

Elizabeth Arden’s salon contested

That is the memoir’s setting — Lillie writes only that she was playing in Set to Music at the Shubert Theatre and went to have her hair done at Elizabeth Arden’s; she names no city. Winchell’s 1931 version happens in a Chicago dress shop during a fitting, and the mid-1930s retellings move it to a Chicago beauty shop (chronology ↗).

The sentence quoted today is Lillie’s own, from page 56 of her 1972 autobiography. The printed record before that — traced by Quote Investigator from 1931 to 1972 ↗ — varies at every point except the joke itself.

Context

Why the line lands

The joke is a class detonation compressed into fourteen words. Beatrice Lillie was Lady Peel — she married Robert Peel in January 1920 and took the title in 1925 when he succeeded to the baronetcy, per her biography ↗. The woman on the other side of the partition had a great deal more money and no title at all, because that money came out of the Chicago stockyards. Lillie does not answer the insult; she simply re-labels the insulter, in the third person, to a member of staff.

In her 1972 telling, Lillie sets the scene at Elizabeth Arden’s while she was appearing in the Noël Coward revue Set to Music, which opened on Broadway in January 1939. The difficulty is chronological rather than moral: Quote Investigator ↗ found the story already in Walter Winchell’s column on 18 December 1931, seven years earlier, set in a Chicago dress shop and ending on a different line. Either the memoir places a real remark in the wrong evening, or the tale had already been polished by the trade press before Lillie retold it as her own.

The story reached print seven years before the evening the memoir sets it on.

How the anecdote drifted, 1931–1972

1931 — Winchell: a Chicago dress-shop fitting, an unnamed “stock yard prince”’s wife, and the exit line “Tell the butcher’s wife that Lady Peel has been fitted and she may go in now.”

1933 — The Brooklyn Daily Eagle runs it with the actress anonymised entirely: “Tell the butcher’s wife than Lady _____ is finished!”

1935 — a Chapel Hill student paper names Mrs. Ogden Armour, moves it to a Chicago beauty shop, and prints the modern wording (spelling it “Lady Peele”).

1939 — Collier’s adds a coda asking the butcher’s wife to spare a flitch of bacon until the weather clears.

1944 — Bennett Cerf’s Try and Stop Me swaps Armour for Swift; 1964 — a Maryland columnist reverses it so that Lillie is the one kept waiting; 1972 — Lillie’s own version, at Elizabeth Arden’s, with Mrs. Armour restored.

Explore

Filed under

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

Power Character

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: the full chronologyquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation, tracing the anecdote from Winchell in 1931 through Lillie's own 1972 autobiography, with every variant transcribed.
Every Other Inch a Lady (1972) — catalog recordarchive.org

Internet Archive record for Lillie's autobiography: Doubleday, Garden City NY, 1972, written with James Brough. The scan is lending-restricted.
The Daily Tar Heel, 6 March 1935, page 2newspapers.digitalnc.org

Freely digitized newspaper page whose 'Casual Correspondent' column prints the near-exact modern wording, naming Mrs. Ogden Armour.
Beatrice Lillieen.wikipedia.org

Life dates, the 1920 marriage to Robert Peel and the 1925 baronetcy that made her Lady Peel, and the January 1939 Broadway run of Set to Music.
Try and Stop Me (1944)en.wikipedia.org

Background on Bennett Cerf's million-selling anecdote collection, the book that spread the 'Mrs. Swift' version of the story.
Quote Investigator: the Beatrice Lillie categoryquoteinvestigator.com

QI's Beatrice Lillie index — as of September 2026 it holds a single entry, this same investigation, so it is a place to watch rather than a second source.

The true author, as far as the record goes

Who was Beatrice Lillie?

Beatrice Lillie

1894–1989 · Canadian-born British comic actress and revue singer

Beatrice Lillie was born in Toronto in 1894 and became one of the defining comic performers of the West End and Broadway revue, celebrated for a deadpan delivery that could puncture a room without raising its voice. She married Robert Peel in January 1920 and became Lady Peel in 1925, when he succeeded to the baronetcy — a title she used with visible relish, and which supplies the entire mechanism of this joke. She told the butcher’s-wife story herself in her 1972 autobiography, Every Other Inch a Lady, written with James Brough.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Beatrice Lillie, with John Philip and James Brough, Every Other Inch a Lady (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 56. Earliest known printing located by Quote Investigator: Walter Winchell, "On Broadway," The Scranton Republican (Scranton, PA), December 18, 1931, 5 — where the wording differs.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘You May Tell the Butcher’s Wife That Lady Peel Has Finished’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/you-may-tell-the-butchers-wife-that-lady-peel-has-finished/

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