They sang every Sunday night

Like many of the posts in Other Men's Flowers, this one is of little interest to Americans or anyone born after the Reichstag was set on fire.

With Christmas approaching, it is time to put an end to the obsession with modern sleaze which characterises this blog and to return to a simpler and less sophisticated era.

Many organisations now defunct sprang up in the 1930s. There was one which at its peak in 1939 had five million adherents in the UK. The exact number may never be known, for its secrets were guarded with extraordinary rigour; it had its own passwords and codes, and signs by which its members might recognise one another.
It even had its own anthem:
We are the Ovaltineys, little girls and boys,
Make your request we'll not refuse you,
We are there just to amuse you,
Would you like a song or story?
Will you share our joys?
At work and play we’re more than keen,
No merrier children can be seen
Because we all drink Ovaltine,
We're happy girls and boys.

You can hear the tune—and many others of the same period and in the same genre—played HERE, or a whole 1937 Radio Luxembourg broadcast HERE. How innocent were our pleasures!

I was a keen member, and in another popular organisation for young people which flourished at the same time (not based in the UK) I might well have reached the rank of Gefolgschaftsführer, or even Hauptgefolgschaftsführer. As it was, I was merely a Silver Star Member. To reach this height you had to enlist three more members, a sort of pyramid selling operation. All you got for this effort was the rather pathetic badge which you could swank about with, but I remember the honour fondly as my first taste of the privileges of rank. And, come to think of it, the last.

[The way in which children nowadays are brainwashed by advertising into influencing their parents’ purchasing habits is crude and ineffective compared with this scheme, perhaps one of the most brilliant marketing ideas ever. It was intended to promote the sale of a malted milk drink (containing barley and malt extract, dried skimmed milk, sugar, whey powder, glucose syrup, vegetable fat, full cream milk powder, fat reduced cocoa, caseinates, egg powder, emulsifier, stabilisers, flavouring and vitamins), which was invented in 1904 by a Swiss chemist: it succeeded to the extent that ten million jars used to be sold in the UK every year. It was withdrawn here in 2001 but apparently is still in demand in S.E. Asia.]