His name was Hugh Donald McIntosh. An Australia-born entrepreneur, he had been a fight promoter, theatrical producer and newspaper magnate. By 1935, however, he was bankrupt. Attempts to resurrect his fortune included an angora rabbit farm and a cake shop. Now, the man they called ‘Huge Deal’ McIntosh had a better idea: milk.
On 1 August 1935 he opened the first British milk bar on London’s Fleet Street. Called the Black and White Bar, it offered 50 different non-alcoholic drinks: malted milks, yeast milks, fruit phosphates, shakes, milk cocktails. The latter had dramatic names like Bandit’s Prize and Blackstocking that belied their benignity – even if you dared to add a dash of nutmeg.
An Edinburgh reporter visited. He found it, to his surprise, ‘filled with men (yes, real he-men, not milksops or women)’. Was McIntosh onto something? He dreamt big: there would be 500 bars, he said.
But the idea was easy to copy. Local papers were suddenly full of them, from Belfast to Birmingham to Fife. It was ‘the craze of the age’, an advertisement in the South Shields Gazette reported.
In some places the craze lasted. Teddy Boys were still congregating in milk bars in the mid-1950s. But McIntosh didn’t live to see it. His own venture collapsed in November 1938. He died, broke, four years later.