I was reading a mystery novel set in the UK in the late 60s. People entering a pub, and not wanting alcohol would order orange juice. Is this common? In the US IME someone wanting a non-alcoholic drink in a bar will order a soda (or pop depending on where exactly you are).
OJ is common, as would be Coke, mineral water, lime & soda (unbelievably cheap in some pubs, extortionate in others) and OJ + lemonade (that’s lemon soda rather than the cloudy US style lemonade).
One juice of the orange, if you will be so good. - Charlie Chan
Growing up in the 60’s you seldom drank pop. Once or twice a week at most was common, and that book you read was from that period.
What the others said - plus, in the context of the OP, the common use of orange juice as a rather clunkly & cliched device to signify sobriety/abstention/policeman on duy/etc.
Bingo! In the novel an on-duty cop and an alcoholic were the ones to order OJ, and it was clunky indeed! Thanks all. Back to your lifts and lorries filled with petrol. 
A lift filled with petrol sounds rather dangerous, if you ask me 
OJ in a British pub in the late 60’s? That sounds a little unlikely. Orange squash, now - much more likely.
What would a non-alcohol kind of guy order in a UK pub nowadays ? Ginger Beer?
President Bush ordered a non-alcoholic beer when he vistied a pub with Blair on his state visit to Britain.
And referring to it as OJ even more unlikely (even now)
In the book they referred to it as either “an orange juice” or just “an orange”.
Orange whip? Orange whip? Orange whip?
Four orange whips!
I was in a boozer this very afternoon where a punter asked for an orange juice and was met with the immortal phrase, “Sorry; no orange juice”. Seven different types of real ale (it’s Wetherspoons’ Autumn Beer Festival) but no effing orange juice. I ask you.
If you’re thinking of freshly-squeezed, then yes. Any but the meanest and most contemptable spit-and-sawdust would have had bottles of Britvic or Schweppes orange juice, though, even in the late 60s.
Agreed; it would have been a small glass bottle of (what used to be) orange juice - although the product is actually quite far removed from the juice of fresh oranges.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that very few households in the UK have a juice press for making fresh orange juice (even fewer actually use the press they were bought as a gift); going back about ten years, it would be true to say that the number of households with juice presses would be almost nil.
‘Orange Juice’ in the UK most commonly refers to a drink that has been reconstituted from concentrate at a factory and is sold in 1 litre UHT/longlife tetra cartons. Frozen concentrate is generally not available; chilled ‘freshly squeezed’ juice in plastic bottles is widely available, but is still regarded as a somewhat expensive or premium item.
So the term ‘orange juice’ means, right now to the average Brit on the street, the reconstituted longlife type. Back in the 60s, the term would have meant the small BritVic bottles.
Britvic sell “Orange 55”, which is supposed to contain 55% orange juice.
Yes, Britvic 55 was launched as a premixed juice drink, but before that (and alongside of it) they sold a range of bottled juices that were just juice in a bottle - the orange was the worst of these, bearing very little resemblance to actual orange juice.
Well, little old teetotal me drinks lemonade (again, not the cloudy American stuff, the clear, sparkling stuff we have over here), by the pint. Acquaintances of mine, who are, say, driving, will have coke most often. Sometimes they’ll have a blackcurrant/orange/lime squash (coz it’s cheaper than coke).
Me, I love sugar. Mmmmmm… sugar…
Go back another ten years, and I might agree with you. I know for sure I bought my sister juice press as part of her wedding present thirteen years ago, and that they were popular and widely available items at the time.
Moreover, while a 60s household may not have had a juice press, most would have had a lemon squeezer like this, so they could have squeezed oranges if they liked. As I recall, though, most people bought oranges to eat, rather than for juice.
Could someone define punter? I’ve never known for certain what this means. The dictionary gives “gambler” as well as someone punting a ball. Is it a slang term synonymous with “bloke”?