At a dinner for Commonwealth dignitaries one evening, Winston Churchill was approached by the chief of protocol and quietly informed that one of the distinguished guests had slipped a silver salt shaker into his pocket.

At the end of the meal, Churchill gingerly slipped up to the offender and produced the matching pepper shaker from his own pocket. "Oh, dear," he said, "we were seen. Perhaps we had both better put them back."

[In its first decade of operation London's Quaglino's restaurant "lost" 25,000 of its Sir Terence Conran-designed Q-shaped ashtrays. It later offered an amnesty to patrons who had "inadvertently allowed one of our iconic 'Q' shaped ashtrays to slip into your pockets".]