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In reference to donkeys’ diet, the expression donkey’s breakfast designates:
1-: (originally in sailors’ slang) a straw mattress;
2-: a straw hat.
The expression donkey’s breakfast occurs, for example, in the following from the Evening Post (Bristol, England) of Thursday 4th December 1997 [page 34, column 5]—Weston refers to Weston-super-Mare, a seaside town in the county of Somerset, England:
Ass facts
● Jerusalem ponies—donkeys. A Weston nickname drawn from the biblical story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey
● Making an ass of yourself—looking foolish
● Donkey engine—a small power plant
● Donkey jacket—a jacket with leather reinforced shoulders for heavy labour
● Donkey work—drudgery
● Talk the hind legs off a donkey—waffle endlessly
● Donkey’s breakfast—sailor’s nickname for a straw filled mattress
● Donkey riding—another maritime term preserved in a sea shanty: a raunchy song about activities on a mattress
● Donkey’s years—a very long time (an intriguing one, this—it’s either a short form of “as long as a donkey’s ears” OR it comes from the belief, expressed by Sam Weller in Dicken’s Pickwick Papers, that nobody ever saw a dead donkey: ie they must be long lived.)
These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the expression donkey’s breakfast that I have found:
1-: a straw mattress:
1.1-: From Advice to emigrants, in From the Clyde to Nova Scotia. A journal of the voyage of the De Kane, published in The Glasgow Sentinel and Scottish Banner (Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland) of Saturday 2nd June 1866 [page 1, column 1]:
With regard to bedding, besides a straw mattress, or as sailors call it, a donkey’s breakfast, a good pillow, such as one has been accustomed to in ‘the old country,’ will tend greatly to comfort.
1.2-: From Down by the Sea, by ‘The Ancient Mariner’, published in The Record. A Weekly Local Journal for the Districts of Emerald Hill and Sandridge (Emerald Hill, Victoria, Australia) of Thursday 17th September 1868 [page 4, column 1]:
Whenever the “Great Britain” is in we of the seaport […] are pretty busy. […] There is a liveliness in our shops. Opossum rugs flaunt more loosely in the wind, and those peculiar only-understood-by-ship-travellers, triangular washing-stand and toilette tables are displayed in a more forcibly prominent manner; the portable couch, upon which the improvident and fatigued British seaman deposits himself for four hours at a stretch, or upon which the sea-sick or sick of the sea passenger tosses himself in that maladest of all maladies, sea-sickness, seem more elastic and less entitled to the soubriquet of ‘a donkey’s breakfast,’ &c. All certainly does appear more lively, more couleur de rose, when Captain Gray arrives.
1.3-: From a letter to the Editor, by Alexander S. Macmillan, dated Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Friday 18th June 1869, published in the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland, England) of Saturday 3rd July 1869 [page 4, column 7]—in this letter, Alexander S. Macmillan, who had been employed in the passenger-carrying trade between the ports of New York and Liverpool, gave advice to emigrants to the USA:
For the passage, it is only necessary to bring a tin-plate, spoon, knife and fork, hook-pot * or other drinking mug. Provide yourself with “a donkey’s breakfast bed,” which you may obtain anywhere in Liverpool for half-a-crown. You may then consider yourself equipped for the voyage.
* The noun hook-pot was defined as follows in Sailors’ Language. A Collection of Sea-terms and their Definitions (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1883), by the British author William Clark Russell (1844-1911) [page 69]:
A kind of can with a hook for hanging to the edge of a bunk, &c., in which sailors bring their tea from the galley.
1.4-: From Emigration from the Clyde, published in the North British Daily Mail (Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland) of Saturday 8th October 1870 [page 2, column 7]—the following describes how Irish emigrants on board a little steamer from Derry were transferred to an Atlantic steamer off the coast of Ireland:
The operation of transferring the whole of them from the little to the great steamer does not take long, the hands of the latter showing practised activity in aiding the half bewildered ones in the temporary bestowal of their baggage, their trunks, boxes, bundles, et hoc genus omne, not forgetting the indispensable little, narrow straw or hay-stuffed bed, which the sailors rather contemptuously call “the donkey’s breakfast”—and certainly, with no more than moderate appetite, a hungry quadruped of the kind would speedily dispose of its contents.
1.5-: From For England Ho!, by ‘Kelp’, published in The Record. A Weekly Local Journal for the Districts of Emerald Hill and Sandridge (Emerald Hill, Victoria, Australia) of Thursday 19th January 1871 [page 3, column 3]:
At the wharf in Melbourne […] lies a very unpicturesque hulk, with a much damaged nose, a very sheer hulk, with but few of the attributes of a ship about her—she is incapable of locomotion—and a smart little steam-tug lies alongside her ready to tow her down as soon as her loading is completed; by about 10 a.m. cautious passengers begin [to] arrive by cab, dray, or otherwise—however they may vary in personnel they are marvellously similiar [sic] as to baggage: each big box is accompanied by the same cheap 6×2 “donkey’s breakfast,” as Jack terms the passenger’s bed, and nearly the same nondescript tin utensils from J. S. Davidson’s well-known ‘passengers’ outfitting establishment, Elizabeth-street, Melbourne.
2-: a straw hat:
2.1-: From an account of a police-court case, published in The Illawarra Mercury (Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia) of Saturday 13th September 1884 [page 2, column 4]:
For the defence, Phillip Hancock deposed: I remember Saturday, the 6th instant; was in company with Murray Ewan; we were walking along the road; saw someone leaning against the fence; Joe Hartley asked me who it was; I said, “Oh, that’s one of the traps;” Rogers came over to me and asked me what I meant; I told him I meant no harm, and if I had done anything wrong I would apologise; Rogers said to Murray Ewan, “Take that b—— donkey’s breakfast off your head;” Rogers wanted to fight me for a “belly-full.”
2.2-: From The Central Glamorgan Gazette. And General, Commercial, and Agricultural Advertiser (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan, Wales) of Friday 22nd May 1891 [page 5, column 2]:
No month of the year has probably had to bear the burden of so much muse (God save the mark), lavished in its praise as the month of May, and it naturally tries hard to deserve all the kind things said of it. But it has failed miserably failed [sic] in this year of grace 1891, with the exception of a week of deceitful and transient warmth, to be anything but a cold English December, with the fickleness of April added. Boreas has supplanted Zephyr, and in coalition with Pluto has dashed many nice little plans for the Whitsun holidays to the ground. The umbrella and mackintosh have been in greater requisition than “the donkey’s breakfast,” and the summer plaid. The light and gauzy garments and bright clean prints of which the drapers sell ever so many thousand yards at this time of the year, to be donned by budding girlhood, have to remain in enforced obscurity a while longer, and everybody is beginning to consult the weather almanack and the weather glass.
2.3-: From Ipswich County Court, published in The Ipswich Journal, and Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, and Cambridgeshire Advertiser (Ipswich, Suffolk, England) of Saturday 15th August 1891 [page 6, column 4]:
The plaintiff […] sued William Henry Day, the foreman of the shop, […] for assaulting and beating him, on the 26th June.—It appears that the defendant, on going into the shop after dinner, was wearing a straw hat. The plaintiff, on seeing him, said “Here comes the donkey’s breakfast.” Defendant took no notice of this, but when he was passing, plaintiff hit the stick which defendant was carrying on his shoulder, and knocked his hat off. The defendant then turned round and struck the plaintiff three blows on the arm with the thick end of his stick.
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