44. Horlicks, Ovaltine or Milo ?

Key words/phrases: The evening drinks ritual, James & William Horlicks, Ovomaltine, Ovaltine, Dr Georg & Dr Albert Wander, Milo, New South Wales, Darent Valley Hospital Dartford, Dartford Salt Marshes

No. 44

The question “Horlicks, Ovaltine or Milo ?” was routinely heard at around 8.00 p.m. on most of wards at Joyce Green Hospital wasn’t it ? It was the opening question posed to bed-bound patients by the person or persons doing ‘the evening drinks’ round once the nurses had “taken the report” from the day staff.

Usually it was the Nursing Auxiliary on the night shift or the student or pupil nurse who was on duty who coordinated this labour of love but if the ward was particularly busy and the nursing staff were working flat-out to get the evening medicine round completed and plus those in bed comfortable for the night, this ritual was often awarded to a couple of recovering patients who knew the ropes.

But who ever served the ‘evening drinks’ this time-honoured ritual was an important part of evening ward life wasn’t it ? The process of being offered and then consuming a warm drink and the simultaneous giving and receiving of yet more encouraging words probably assumed even more importance than when the same ritual was performed at home. But how did Horlicks, Ovaltine or Milo achieve such a high profile on the ward beverage-menu ?

Yes of course there were usually other hot drinks on offer from the same trolley, such as tea, cocoa, hot milk etc but somewhere along the line someone must have decided that these three products should feature fairly prominently on the list of soothing drinks ? Or was it that English citizens we were already used to consuming these at home and so therefore their appearance elsewhere was taken for granted ?

Horlicks was created in 1837 by two English brothers James and William Horlicks who had immigrated to the USA. James was a pharmacist and he and his brother joined forces to manufacture this malted milk drink as an artificial infant food. It soon came to be appreciated by a wider and older audience - perhaps being served to invalids and the sick next – and then in 1906 James returned to oversee the opening of a new Horlicks factory in Slough. Commercial advertising history books certainly record the fact that the Horlicks Company first used the “night starvation” theory in 1931 in order to promote their product.

Ovaltine was originally called Ovomaltine (from ova, the Latin word for egg linked to the name of the other major ingredient, malt). It was created by a father and son team, Dr Georg and Dr Albert Wander and was first exported to England in 1909 but it was a misspelling hiccup during the UK trademark registration process that led to it coming to be called Ovaltine in the British Isles.

The last of these three drinks to appear on the scene was Milo, a milk beverage containing chocolate and malt. It was created in New South Wales, Australia in 1934 and is named after Milo of Croton, the Greek hero who was endowed with exceptional strength.

Do you remember the layer of congealed Milo and hot milk skin that seemed to form on the surface of the liquid when hot milk was added to those gritty, powdery granules ?

The perfect technique for producing a ‘perfect cup’ of one or other of these drinks was something that some practitioners had and others didn’t, nevertheless the soothing, calming potion was usually accepted with good grace by the ‘poorly’ person waiting to get off to sleep.

Authoritative opinion always was - and still seems to be - divided about whether the benefits of warm, milky evening drinks are physiological or merely psychological, nonetheless the received wisdom that drinks of this nature really do help to promote calmness, relaxation and sleepiness still seems to be given out regularly.

Perhaps milk drinks are still a feature of the evening routine on the wards of the Darent Valley Hospital in Dartford? In any case I’m sure that the nurses there still do everything in their power to help those in their care to prepare to sleep each evening but it seems to me that only those people who worked at Joyce Green Hospital can recall what it was like serving Horlicks, Ovaltine or Milo to patients who sheltered in their warm wards on cold wintery nights and protected from the winds blowing from across the River Thames or from across the Dartford Salt Marshes.