In an extract from his new book, Philip Norman looks back to an age when a drink made from pears could be described as 'Genuine Champagne Perry'.
My first taste of glamour was Babycham. I was ten when it appeared in 1953. No one in the pub trade, my family's business, had seen such a peculiar product. It came in a tiny, dark-brown bottle with a sky-blue label and a cap with matching foil. Inside was a pale-gold fizzy drink that looked like Champagne, tasted vaguely like it, and was described with the wonderful freedom of advertising in those days as 'Genuine Champagne Perry'.
Its trademark was a baby deer, with spindly legs, protruding eyes, two underdeveloped horns, and an outsize blue bow around its neck. In its first cinema and TV ads, this smiling creature pranced through the air on a cloud of stardust to land on the open palm of an elegant mannequin. "I'd love a Babycham," she exclaimed in tones both demure and suggestive, implying that, as well as sipping the bubbly nectar, she would lavish kisses, hugs and who knew what else on her horny little visitor.
Babycham brought an early splash of feminism into the male-dominated pubs of postwar Britain. Back then, respectable women weren't supposed to visit bars or even drink, so the choice of tipples available to them was meagre. Women of the world like my father's girlfriend, Miss Salsbury, drank gin and orange, gin and 'French' (an iceless dry Martini) or gin and 'It' (Italian vermouth). Inexperienced girls drank port and lemon or Carlsberg, about the only lager available, prettified by a dash of lime. Elderly ladies drank stout, but only for medicinal purposes, which they underlined by calling it 'milk stout' and taking it in tiny sips. Wine barely existed outside expensive restaurants. Babycham was the first drink a woman could order without feeling like a tart or a crone. For dowdy Fifties womanhood, it was a heady sip of the high life, which most knew only from films and magazines.
This elixir was created by a Somerset cider-making family called Showering, of Shepton Mallet. My Grandma Norman was also from Somerset and was distantly related to the Showerings. When I was nine, she took me on a coach trip through the West Country, where we visited our cider-making kinfolk. The firm was run by three brothers, who'd built themselves grand red-brick houses in a row, with one at the end for their aged mother. We were invited to tea with this matriarch and, later, shown round the factory, where I collected dozens of scarlet bottle-tops from its wet stone floor.
That very day, according to Grandma Norman, the brothers were discussing how to make a drink from fermented pear juice. The idea of 'Genuine Champagne Perry' was a brilliant illusion that told no lie. 'Perry' was an old word for pear cider; the 'cham' in Babycham wasn't from Champagne, but signified the chamois that was its mascot; and Champagne in those days was sufficiently unprotected as a brand for the self-contradictory tag-line to bring no protest from Moët et Chandon.
Our tenuous link with the Showerings was one of my father's few assets as a seaside showman. When he ran Ryde Pier Pavilion later in the Fifties, he had constant difficulties over supplies of such essentials as ice-cream wafers and beer (usually as a result of his reluctance to pay bills). But with Babycham there was never a problem. One call would bring an express delivery. I can see myself now, on my knees in my dirty white barman's jacket, stacking the bottles next to the Schweppes tonic water, tomato juices and bitter lemons.
We never heard directly from the Showerings. As the summers went on and my father's business plunged deeper into trouble, I nurtured unspoken hopes that as our cousins, however distant, they might rally to our aid. But, far off in Somerset, they could not have realised how bad things really were. Nonetheless, they were a benign presence in my teenage life, and the increasing success of their elixir became one of my few sources of triumph.
Their promotional material was the most extensive of all the breweries and drinks companies we dealt with, and some of the bounty their sales reps showered on my father he would pass on to me. I had Babycham pencils, pens, jotters and key-rings. Once he gave me with a yellow plastic statuette of the chamois, about two-feet high, that was intended for display among the bottles behind the bar. He intimated that the statuettes were much sought after and I should feel greatly honoured. I did.
Extract taken from 'Babycham Night' (Macmillan, £15.99).