With Wimbledon looming, Paul Dring serves up the story of a smashing soft drink.
Is there nothing sacred in sport these days? The fa Cup is now sponsored by an insurance company; county cricket teams play in gaudy costumes under implausible names such as Spitfires, Sharks and Dynamos; even the Olympics - the bastion of the amateur ideal - bear the logos of soft drinks and chocolate bars which, one presumes, do not form the basis of the average athlete's diet.
Thankfully, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club are sticklers for tradition. So, as ever, this month's Wimbledon championships will be played on grass, the competitors will be clad (mostly) in white, and will slake their thirsts with Robinsons lemon barley water - the drink that is as much a part of the British summer as mulled wine is of Christmas.
Robinsons' has a lengthy association with health and fitness. When Robinson and Belville launched its Patent Barley in 1823, it was sold as a powder, which, when mixed into water, was taken to combat fevers and kidney complaints. Its link with tennis dates from 1934, when Eric Smedley Hodgson, one of the company's medical reps, took it upon himself to visit Wimbledon and make up a refreshing drink for the players from water, barley, lemon juice and sugar.
The first bottled lemon barley was produced the next year to a similar recipe - followed by lime in 1937, orange in 1939, and rhubarb in 1942. Perhaps the company's most intriguing product was from the Fifties: 'fizzers' were straws filled with fruit flavours which had to be blown into milk or water to make a drink.
Although fizzers did not survive, lemon barley water has gone from strength to strength. Indeed, it's a fair bet that the refreshing summertime tipple that was such a favourite of Britain's last Wimbledon mens' champion, Fred Perry, will be appreciated by its next. And who can tell when that will be?