MILK SHAKE UP 02

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Stanley
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MILK SHAKE UP 02

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MILK SHAKE UP 02

By 1930 it seems as though Sir Amos Nelson had given charge of the creamery at West Marton to his grandson Gilbert, Colin Barrett who worked at the dairy during the war once told me he could remember seeing old billheads for ‘Gilbert Dairies’ but the enterprise was always known as West Marton Dairies.

In 1933 the government decided to bring some order into the production and distribution of milk and formed the Milk Marketing Board. Financed by a small levy on each gallon of milk handled, The board was a non-profit organisation which had the power to control production and distribution of liquid milk and make sure that the maximum quantity was sent for bottling and the remainder sold for processing at a lower price. The price the farmers received was the monthly average of all sales less a small amount for transport and other essential expenses. It’s fair to say that the MMB was regarded with great suspicion in the early days but as it settled into its work the farmers began to realise that they had an assured market at a fair price. As one farmer said to me many years later after the Board's responsibilities effectively ended in 1994 with deregulation of the British milk market following the Agriculture Act 1993, the greatest service the MMB did for the farmers was to put a bottom in the market and give them security. The Board carried on administering some residual functions until 2002 when, with the sale of its processing plants operating under the Dairy Crest trademark it ceased to have any function. From 1994 onwards the farmers were at the mercy of a privatised industry bent on extracting the maximum profit.

In 1933 this was of course all in the future and under the new MMB regime, small dairies like West Marton benefited from the stability in the market as much as the farmers. The dairy became a profitable business and gradually grew over the years. The biggest change was that it moved away from processing and concentrated on bottling milk for the retail market. It functioned in this way for the next thirty years and supplied bottled milk from Bradford to Burnley to central refrigerated depots from which the retailers picked up their supplies each morning either dealing with West Marton directly or in one case at Colne via a private distributor, Holt’s Dairies.

West Marton was a busy village. From seven in the morning until four in the afternoon there was a constant stream of flat wagons and tankers bringing milk into the dairy from farms as far away as Chaigley and West Bradford beyond Clitheroe and taking bottled milk out to the various depots. Any shortage in supply for the bottling was made up by private contractors contracted to the MMB bringing bulk milk in, or in times of surplus, tanking milk out. In later years when I worked there West Marton had its own fleet of five tankers and did most of this work in-house.

It’s perhaps worth mentioning here that you may have noticed I talk about ‘milk kits’, in some places they were called ‘cans’. These are the galvanised iron twelve gallon tins in which the milk was transported from the farm to the dairy. Many people mistakenly call them ‘churns’ but a churn was the machine used to convert cream into butter by agitating it. In the early days of rail transport the kits were either conical seventeen gallons or straight sided fifteen gallons. In my days of milk pick up with Harrison Brothers who were contracted to the dairy the kits were galvanised twelve gallons, the kit weighed 48lbs (22kg) and the milk weighed approximately 120lbs (55kg). A total of 168lbs (77kg), as it happened this was exactly what I weighed and we picked up about 300 kits in a normal day, mostly off a raised milk stand but often off the floor. Such weights would be illegal nowadays and you may not believe it but I used to be able to pick a full kit off the floor and throw it into the middle of the wagon. Young and daft! No wonder that by the age of 23 I had a permanently damaged back. On one memorable day when we were short of drivers I picked up over 500 kits. In the latter years of kit milk the industry went over to ten gallon aluminium kits which were an improvement as far as lifting them was concerned.

This wasn’t the end of our day’s work because by noon we had switched over and took bottled milk out to dairies in Bradford, Skipton and Keighley. West Marton’s own transport didn’t do any collections from farms but carried all the bottled milk out into Barlick and beyond.

One little bit of farming history for you. If you remember I mentioned the farms beyond Clitheroe that we collected milk from. This was an exceptional distance, usually milk went to the closest dairy. This run came about because West Marton had bought Davey’s Dairy at Moorside in Bradford which had an association going back many years with a firm called Fattorini’s in Bradford that made ice cream. West Marton inherited the farms at Clitheroe which for years had contracted their milk directly to Fattorini’s. I think I’m right in saying that the ice cream firm bought the farms eventually in order to ensure the best quality milk for their business and these later became Co-operative Society farms.

When Colonel Roundell set up the creamery in West Marton in 1900 they were making cream and cheese and this meant that there was a by-product; skimmed milk from the separating of milk for cream and whey from the cheese-making process. This wasn’t wasted. The Roundells set up a large piggery at the top of the dairy yard and used the skim and whey to feed pigs. In later years this enterprise was taken over by a large pig-feeder at Bradley, Marshalls. It was still in production in the late 1950s and the resident pigman then was Harry Addyman who’s wife ran the village shop. In those days we tanked a lot of skim milk out to the piggery at Bradley. Marshalls had a large collection round going to hotels, industrial and school canteens collecting swill or food waste, which they mixed with barley meal and skimmed milk and boiled up into a wonderful porridge which was pumped into the feeding troughs in the piggery. I have to tell you that I have never seen happier, better-fed or healthier pigs in my life that the ones at Bradley. They had their own slaughter house and many a time we would be given fresh pig liver which was wonderful for breakfast. In 2001, as a knee-jerk reaction to the outbreak of foot and mouth disease the EU banned the feeding of swill to pigs, it all had to go to either incineration or landfill. This is terribly wasteful way of dealing with a valuable by-product and the sooner we come to our senses and allow its use again the better.

Image

Stanley’s wagon at West Marton with a load of milk from the farms waiting to be tipped.

SCG/14 June 2009
1180 words.
Stanley Challenger Graham
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Re: MILK SHAKE UP 02

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Bumped
Stanley Challenger Graham
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"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
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Stanley
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Re: MILK SHAKE UP 02

Post by Stanley »

More retreaded 2012.... My point about pig swill is as valid as ever. In a world that is getting short of food we throw thousands of tons of valuable animal feed away annually. It is disgraceful. All that is needed is efficient regulation of the swill feeders.
Stanley Challenger Graham
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scg1936 at talktalk.net

"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
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