Soft Drinks In Childhood

Sorry for hijacking the thread about crab with my reminiscences about Dandelion and Burdock.

I set myself thinking, in case you wondered what the whirling noise was.

I developed my taste for D & B at Gran's house. Undoubtedly when she was young and very probably when I was young this contained genuine dandelion and burdock.

I can also remember getting bottles of concentrated orange juice at the clinic (along with cod liver oil) which was fairly sour and obviously made from Real Oranges with little to no added sugar. 

I also had Rose Hip Syrup which was made from Real Rose Hips, though AFAICR with obscene amounts of sugar. Schoolkids living near the factories were paid to go out and gather them.

Then there was Rose's Lime Juice, PLJ (Pure Lemon Juice), Robinson's Barley Water, Ribena (blackcurrant juice) and no end of branded orange squash, all added to water to make up a fruit drink. People down the road made their own ginger beer from real ginger.

I think it was probably in the early sixties that we first started to get "orange cordial" and the like which tasted like the contents of a chemistry set. Some probably came direct from a petrochemical refinery and passed no oranges on the way.

Coke and Pepsi and the likes of Irn Bru were around then and probably also completely synthetic. We regarded them as things to drink when you couldn't get a proper drink. Schweppes too although initially like the others they came in reusable bottles which you returned for pennies. Single use bottles came next, followed by Tetrapak and other cartons maybe in the seventies.

People used to have "soda syphons" which produced fizzy water blown out by a compressed CO2 cartridge, you could add that instead of tap water.

I think this was around the time that "food scientists" started concocting things with the appearance of food and drink with no actual food or drink content, and adding hordes of sugar to it to disguise the flavour. It was pre - "low fat" anyway.

Later there was a return to actual fruit juice, either in wide mouthed bottles or cartons, but all with added sugar, and increasingly with some form of sweetener, sometimes both.

Stuff like Sunny Delight and Tab and Tango followed, with the might of marketing muscle behind them, most of them passed me by completely.

In a similar vein there was Palmolive soap which was actually made from palm oil and olive oil, though I don't think there were any pears in Pears Soap, or sunlight in Sunlight Soap. That was the time of massive expansion of the likes of Lever Brothers and Proctor and Gamble, mainly on the backs of byproducts from the petrochemical industry.

Only just caught up with this post ...

It's good to reminisce ... I seem to recall that Sunny D turned many a yellowy / orange shade. Was it banned I can not recall??

When growing up Pears and Wrights Coal Tar soap was a favourite in our household ... and whatever happened to soap on a rope?

Now it's shower stuff for men and women alike, plus kids own brands.

In this modern day it is soap dispensers which seem to be more popular.

All the best Jan

PS Have I now hi-jacked a thread ... well I have also talked about drinks !!!

I have a distant family connection to Pears Soap, the director Tom Barratt was one of the early creators of Marketing, but at least he was drawing attention to what was already a good product rather than selling shit as shinola like the Freud family.

Yes I still buy Coal Tar Soap, there are not a few products that haven't changed much over the decades. It probably doesn't contain coal tar any more though but it smells much the same. I think Pears is still available too but the contents have changed, at least I've seen it available for export markets.

There's an order of magnitude less pollution from coal, and vehicles have become much cleaner and more fuel efficient, but their current pollutants are more subtle and of course there are several orders of magnitude more of them around.

Agrochemicals are also slung around with much less abandon than in the sixties, and are far less persistent in the environment. Theoretically they are also far less toxic but little is known about the consequences of exposure to mixtures of them on modern food.

Then the increasing use of drugs leads to them being excreted and passing through sewage treatment to end up in our drinking water, plus of course plastics are a major feature of modern life. Once there was bakelite and formica and that was about it.

I think a huge factor may turn out to be breeding plants for high yield - especially in depleted soils they have fewer micronutrients (at least our local farmers still use hordes of manure) and they are bred for "pest resistance" ie. toxicity, but no-one has told them humans aren't actually pests and shouldn't be poisoned.

"It begins with a blessing
and it ends with a curse
making life easy
by making it worse"

Soft Machine/Kevin Ayers, c. 1968

... looking back on older posts, reading this and recently visiting my dear dad - he has always liked this soap


I think it is also available in a dispenser but he prefers the bar of soap.

Also on his side was a jug of this - it was well diluted


I think Robinsons have been around quite a few years ... 1930's I believe

All the best Jan

The best museum I ever went to was by mistake.

Friends took me to the Waterways Museum on Gloucester Dock, but it was distinctly mediocre (it may have improved since, I don't know).

Opposite was the Robert Opie Museum Of Packaging. The guy had collected things like all the different generations of milk bottles, coke bottles, and products like Robin Starch you may remember from childhood.

I took my mother who was equally entranced as there were things she remembered from her own childhood, like pop bottles with a marble for a stopper.

Sadly the museum closed long ago, but sometimes on films and historical TV programmes you will see a reference to the Robert Opie Collection, who supply props.

I've been thinking about how non-food items changed as well, soap. shampoo, makeup etc. now have laundry lists of unpronounceable ingredients. As for room odorisers, anyone else remember the original Airwick? It was a dark green glass bottle with a thick wick attached to the cap that you pulled up. It was supposed to absorb smells but made the room honk like disinfectant.

Furniture polish was beeswax. Plastic was bakelite or formica. Not nearly so much stuff outgassing into the room.

On the downside of course, we had DDT and creosote.

I guess we just have to get used to the idea that everything has changed, and not always for the better ... although some may not necessarily agree.

I know the topic thread is called soft drinks in childhood ... but I'm going to talk about phones.    

For many years when growing up we didn't have a phone ... neither did any of our family members. Family get-togethers were arranged via letters, and in fact letter writing was quite a big part of life.

Talking to the grandchildren recently they couldn't understand that as a child I didn't have a phone let alone a mobile one. But Grandma how did you talk to people?

Good question ... the family certainly talked to each other, and we played with our friends ... we enjoyed face to face meetings not phone calls, text and skype.

Oh goodness haven't times changed, and what will it be like in 10, 20, 50 years ?

What a mind boggling thought  

Enjoy your evening - well it is Tuesday evening as I type this.

All the best Jan

I remember as a kid we actually had a payphone in our house ! We had to find 2p piece to make a call and we had pips and everything ! As a kid I remember being quite embarrassed when my friends would wonder what that pip noise was but I learned to disguise it with coughing fits :-)

mo1905 wrote:I remember as a kid we actually had a payphone in our house ! We had to find 2p piece to make a call and we had pips and everything ! As a kid I remember being quite embarrassed when my friends would wonder what that pip noise was but I learned to disguise it with coughing fits :-)

This reminded me ...
We didn't have a pay phone as such, but my parents bought a wooden coin box and we always had to put a coin or two into the box whenever we made a phone call ... certainly made us aware not to chat too long on the phone

This wooden coin box had these words on the side 'Phone from here whenever you will - but don't forget who pays the bill!'

All the best Jan

We had a phone when I was little. I don't know if my parents had it installed or if it was already in the house when they bought it, but from the number there were less than 4000 phones in the town. When my gran had a phone there were less than 400 in her village.

Yes I remember payphones in houses, sometimes with a sign on the wall "you may phone from here". I went without for many years, and would walk round (or catch a bus, or later drive) to see people, and if they were out I'd go on to visit someone else in the vicinity. If they were out too I'd drop in a pub. Then sometimes I'd get home and find a note that the people I was visiting had dropped by but I was out . . .

I've been online for over 20 years now but only bought a mobile a bit over a decade ago. I still have the same one - made of iron, and only needs charging about once a week! 90% of the time it is on voicemail. I think it's a reaction to having spent so much of my working life on the phone. We also had a Telex long before faxes. You wrote what you wanted to send and a secretary would do it for you.

We was out today driving through a town in slow moving traffic, it was amazing to see how many people had a phone in their hand talking, at least half we reckoned. It makes me wonder what these people would do, if the cell-net system went down for a week.

Evem my CAR has Bluetooth, so you can plug in your phone and work it from buttons on the steering wheel. Well not mine, but . . .

 . . . in retrospect this would have been invaluable when I was a trucker, but somehow we survived without it, or GPS (I still keep maps in the car)

chris c wrote:Evem my CAR has Bluetooth, so you can plug in your phone and work it from buttons on the steering wheel. Well not mine, but . . .

 . . . in retrospect this would have been invaluable when I was a trucker, but somehow we survived without it, or GPS (I still keep maps in the car)

I've got Ford sync with voice activation brilliant piece of kit even reads my text messages

Brilliant! So you can find out how to claim PPI Insurance while bombing down the motorway . . .