The Milkman Cometh

by Stella Hood (nee Gough) 

My father had this milk round because he hadn't got very good health. The doctor said he ought to have an outside job. So he got this milkround at 33 Vernon Street

His days started by getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning. His first job was to go down and get his pony and float which was stabled at the bottom of King William Street., next to the brook. He would bring the pony and get the churns, no bottles in those days. He would load them onto the float and set out to the outlying farm to pick up the milk himself. One churn was full, which he was to swap over with an empty churn, come back to the house and probably have a bit of breakfast then, and start out. 

It would take you quite five, six hours, because it was more personal in those days. You knocked on the door and they would come to the door with a jug, and he'd have a chat, in fact he could have a cup of tea at every house if he wanted one, because he knew everybody.  They'd perhaps have a pint or quart in the jug. If they weren't in, you'd just go in and help yourself to the jug, no doors were ever locked in those days. 

He used to go out as far as Foleshill Road, Drapers Fields, which I suppose some people remember, Leicester Row, Leicester Street, all round there, from one end of Harnall Lane to the other. Then when he got back home, he was off to take the pony down, feed it and put it away, put the cart away, back home again and have a bit of dinner.

Mother would have the copper boiling, no heated water of course, he would then start on washing his churns and the buckets out into the doorway. They would take him perhaps an hour. Then the next job was sitting doing his books, finding out how much people owed him and who'd paid and who hadn't. And that was his day. 

He did that for about fifteen year. It did his health good in the early days, but because there was no cover, because you were out in the open all the time, whatever the weather, you got soaking wet. 

In later years he went to a motor bike with a box on the side, then later again he had to get rid of that because he wasn't doing very well and he finished up having a bike with two buckets on the handlebars. Then the bottles started to come in, and if you couldn't afford to buy the bottles, well, that was you finished. He did buy some bottles, and then the big dairies started taking over the small dairies and the bottles, they got smashed, and he had to buy some more, and it gradually meant that it wasn't paying him. He took ill and my mother had to carry on doing it. I think most people around Hillfields would remember little Mrs. Gough going round with a bucket on the side of her bike, selling the milk. 

Mother used to make her own ice cream, and it was ice cream not what you get now. She made it from custard powder with pure milk, that you used to get straight from the farms, it wasn't pasteurized in those days. We used to sell it in the shop, it wasn't exactly a shop, we did have a counter. You never had cornets in those days, it was ice pies or wafers. They were a penny, ice pies were about halfpenny. I've never tasted ice cream like it since.

Reproduced with kind permission of the Hillfields History Group. This story was first published in the group's third publication of Hillfields in their Own Words.

This page was last updated 29/03/03

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