WEST MARTON DAIRIES (2)
Posted: 18 Feb 2026, 02:52
WEST MARTON DAIRIES (2)
Written 24 January 2001
Forgive me for indulging myself but I want to tell you more about West Marton and my time working there. Looking back, I was very lucky because I managed to become an accepted part of something that has largely faded away now, small village culture where everyone knew everybody else and we made our own entertainment.
Every village has a joker, Marton had more than one but the kingpin was Harry Addyman. Harry spent his life with his pigs boiling up kitchen waste and mixing it with pig meal and waste milk from the dairy. Marshall’s had a wagon which went round all the restaurants and school canteens and picked up the waste food which was fed to the pigs. They did the same thing at Bradley near Skipton but on a larger scale and a regular job was to take a tanker load of skim to Bradley first thing in the morning.
We hear a lot nowadays about the dangers of recycling food but I always thought that this use of kitchen waste for pig feeding was a good thing. At Bradley Marshall's had a big round vat that probably held about 1500 gallons. It was heated by steam coils and had a large motor driven agitator in it. They used to put skim milk in and then the kitchen waste and top it up with pig meal. The steam was turned on and the agitator started and the whole lot soon became a mass of boiling porridge that smelt good enough to eat. It was piped down to the pigs while it was warm and they went mad for it. Bradley’s pigs were kept in really good conditions and were spotlessly clean. Many’s the morning I’ve gone into the slaughterhouse there and got some pig liver warm from the pig and called in at home on the way back for the best breakfast a bloke could have.
Back to Marton and Harry Addyman. He was always up to some sort of mischief. I haven’t the faintest idea why he did it but one morning we were all surprised to see ducks waddling round the village with union jacks on their backs! I have an idea that Harry was helping Clifford and Ruth Ashworth at Bale Farm to celebrate their wedding anniversary! Harry was always ready for a crack at the top of the yard and we had many a good laugh. Then one day we got word he was poorly, he had a lump under his tongue and it turned out to be cancer, he was dead very soon after that and we were all so sorry, it was like a member of the family dying. The funeral was at the church at East Marton and there are two things that stick in my mind about it.
The first thing is that on the day I got changed into my best suit and when I went round to my mate’s house to pick him up his dog bit me! We decided that it was because it had never seen me out of a boiler suit before! I know this will sound crazy but at one point several of us drivers did over five years without a day off! Dairying was a seven day a week job and we were poor. The next thing I remember about Harry’s funeral is that we got there early and took seats in the church. It wasn’t until we came outside for the interment that we realised that there were more people there than the church could hold. I’ve never seen as many expensive cars in one place in my life. I doubt if Harry ever bought a friend in his life but he certainly had a large and well-heeled attendance at his funeral. There was a wake afterwards but we had to get changed and get back to work.
It’s just struck me that I ought to explain how we got milk from the farms to the dairy for the benefit of the younger ones. Nowadays milk is collected in bulk from the farms by road tanker but in the fifties and sixties it was all brought in in kits. Now a bit of a word about milk cans here, for some reason a lot of people called them churns, and still do. This is wrong, a churn is the machine used to turn cream into butter by agitating it until the milk fat separates out into a lump of butter. The cans we collected from the farms were either called cans or kits. In those days we used 12 gallon (55ltr) galvanised steel kits which weighed 46lbs empty (21kg) and 168lbs (77kg) full. The old railway kits, used for transporting milk by rail, were 17 gallons or 15 gallons and the later aluminium kits held 10 gallons.
The cows were milked twice a day, night and morning and we picked the milk up at the farm from about seven in the morning onwards lifting both the night and morning milkings. The amount of milk didn’t vary much day to day and we knew roughly how many kits each farm could make so we could plan the rounds efficiently. We started out from the dairy with a full load of clean kits and swapped the same number of empty kits for the full ones and of course put them on the wagon in the space left after throwing the empties off. The kits were identified by a label on each which had the farmer's name on.
Most farms had a milk stand on the road side or in a convenient position in the yard. It was the same height as the wagon flat and the idea was that the milk was ready for you on the stand and you didn’t have to do any lifting, simply roll the empty cans off and the full ones on. Unfortunately it didn’t always work out like this. Many farms had them on the floor and a man would give you a lift on with them. However, if he wasn’t there when you arrived, you didn’t have time to hang about so you put them on off the floor by yourself. I often smile when I hear people talk about working out at the gym, we had no need of that, we were working out all the time! At one farm in particular, Stainton House, I usually had about 15 kits to load off the floor myself. I know it’s hard to believe but I used to pull the empties off, lift the full ones up and throw them into the middle of the flat. At that time, ragged off and wringing wet I weighed 12 stones, exactly the same as each kit. Those were the days!
When you reached the point where the wagon flat was full, that was the end of the round and you galloped back to the dairy as fast as you could because you had another load of cans to do before dinner. At the dairy we backed into the can dock which was the same height as the wagon and rolled the cans off in order onto a roller conveyor belt which led to the tipper. For many years this was Jack Boothman or Wry Neck as we used to call him behind his back. Jack had been a farm man for much of his life and lived in Skipton. One evening after a heavy day haymaking he went for a swim in the dam at Broughton Mill and dived in on top of a big stone and broke his neck. He crawled up the fields to Sulphur Well Cottages and they sent for the horse ambulance. He recovered but his neck was always bent to the right after that.
The milk was weighed, filtered and cooled and then stored in stainless steel tanks until needed. Part of Jack’s job was to take a quick sniff at the milk in each can before he tipped it, this was to check that it wasn’t tainted in any way. One day he tipped some Jersey milk from Cam Lane at Thornton in Craven and he must have had a head cold! The cows had been into Thornton Rock eating wild garlic and the milk tainted all the other channel island milk in the tank. Colin Barritt separated it into cream and then made butter but the taint persisted and in the end the butter had to go to Nestles for chocolate making! Fish meal in the feed could do the same thing and this was what Jack was watching out for. In fairness to him, he very seldom missed anything, he was a good man at his job.
As I said earlier, when I first worked at the dairy I was employed by Harrison Brothers of Smearber Farm, Elslack. They started off in life as coal merchants but when they got the contract to pick the farm milk up for the dairy and cart some bottled milk as well this became their major work. In later days, Jack Harrison sold out to Billy his brother and took shares in Whitewell Dairies at Accrington, later, they were bought out by Associated Dairies.
Billy Harrison was a funny little bloke. He had a very successful war and ended up as an officer in the Long Range Desert Group which was a very tough unit operating in the Western Desert. Coming back to Civvy Street after the officer’s mess was a bit of a come down for him and he got his leg pulled unmercifully about his upper-class pretensions. I never saw them but I think it was Colin Barritt that once told me that Billy was actually seen wearing spats one day! Billy lived at Thornton and amongst other faults, he liked his drink. He was drinking after hours at the Manor House in Thornton which was a ‘hotel’ in those days. Early in the morning the landlord was shepherding them out of the back door and Billy took a step sideways to avoid having his toes trodden on by the man in front. Unfortunately he was at the top of the cellar steps and fell heavily down them. His mates assumed he had passed out, took him home and left him on the kitchen floor at Ivy House. His wife Beryl (she liked to be called 'Fran') found him there the following morning with blood coming out of his ear and eye. He had a massive depressed fracture of the skull and was rushed into Preston straight away.
I talked to the surgeon afterwards and he told me that the operation to save Billy took eleven hours and it was touch and go. Billy was never the same man afterwards but survived for several years. One peculiar thing about him was that electricity didn’t seem to affect him. The old Bedford wagons we had then had petrol engines and he could stop an engine by putting his fingers on the spark plugs just like a piano player. One of his favourite tricks when he had his head under the bonnet of a wagon that was ticking over was to ask you to pass him a spanner. He would have one finger on a spark plug and when he got hold of the spanner you got the shock!
I’d better stop talking about West Marton for a while or you’ll all get bored. There’s lots more to tell and I promise I’ll come back to it later. Remember, if there are any questions or corrections you know where I am, if I can help in any way, just shout.
24 January 2001
Written 24 January 2001
Forgive me for indulging myself but I want to tell you more about West Marton and my time working there. Looking back, I was very lucky because I managed to become an accepted part of something that has largely faded away now, small village culture where everyone knew everybody else and we made our own entertainment.
Every village has a joker, Marton had more than one but the kingpin was Harry Addyman. Harry spent his life with his pigs boiling up kitchen waste and mixing it with pig meal and waste milk from the dairy. Marshall’s had a wagon which went round all the restaurants and school canteens and picked up the waste food which was fed to the pigs. They did the same thing at Bradley near Skipton but on a larger scale and a regular job was to take a tanker load of skim to Bradley first thing in the morning.
We hear a lot nowadays about the dangers of recycling food but I always thought that this use of kitchen waste for pig feeding was a good thing. At Bradley Marshall's had a big round vat that probably held about 1500 gallons. It was heated by steam coils and had a large motor driven agitator in it. They used to put skim milk in and then the kitchen waste and top it up with pig meal. The steam was turned on and the agitator started and the whole lot soon became a mass of boiling porridge that smelt good enough to eat. It was piped down to the pigs while it was warm and they went mad for it. Bradley’s pigs were kept in really good conditions and were spotlessly clean. Many’s the morning I’ve gone into the slaughterhouse there and got some pig liver warm from the pig and called in at home on the way back for the best breakfast a bloke could have.
Back to Marton and Harry Addyman. He was always up to some sort of mischief. I haven’t the faintest idea why he did it but one morning we were all surprised to see ducks waddling round the village with union jacks on their backs! I have an idea that Harry was helping Clifford and Ruth Ashworth at Bale Farm to celebrate their wedding anniversary! Harry was always ready for a crack at the top of the yard and we had many a good laugh. Then one day we got word he was poorly, he had a lump under his tongue and it turned out to be cancer, he was dead very soon after that and we were all so sorry, it was like a member of the family dying. The funeral was at the church at East Marton and there are two things that stick in my mind about it.
The first thing is that on the day I got changed into my best suit and when I went round to my mate’s house to pick him up his dog bit me! We decided that it was because it had never seen me out of a boiler suit before! I know this will sound crazy but at one point several of us drivers did over five years without a day off! Dairying was a seven day a week job and we were poor. The next thing I remember about Harry’s funeral is that we got there early and took seats in the church. It wasn’t until we came outside for the interment that we realised that there were more people there than the church could hold. I’ve never seen as many expensive cars in one place in my life. I doubt if Harry ever bought a friend in his life but he certainly had a large and well-heeled attendance at his funeral. There was a wake afterwards but we had to get changed and get back to work.
It’s just struck me that I ought to explain how we got milk from the farms to the dairy for the benefit of the younger ones. Nowadays milk is collected in bulk from the farms by road tanker but in the fifties and sixties it was all brought in in kits. Now a bit of a word about milk cans here, for some reason a lot of people called them churns, and still do. This is wrong, a churn is the machine used to turn cream into butter by agitating it until the milk fat separates out into a lump of butter. The cans we collected from the farms were either called cans or kits. In those days we used 12 gallon (55ltr) galvanised steel kits which weighed 46lbs empty (21kg) and 168lbs (77kg) full. The old railway kits, used for transporting milk by rail, were 17 gallons or 15 gallons and the later aluminium kits held 10 gallons.
The cows were milked twice a day, night and morning and we picked the milk up at the farm from about seven in the morning onwards lifting both the night and morning milkings. The amount of milk didn’t vary much day to day and we knew roughly how many kits each farm could make so we could plan the rounds efficiently. We started out from the dairy with a full load of clean kits and swapped the same number of empty kits for the full ones and of course put them on the wagon in the space left after throwing the empties off. The kits were identified by a label on each which had the farmer's name on.
Most farms had a milk stand on the road side or in a convenient position in the yard. It was the same height as the wagon flat and the idea was that the milk was ready for you on the stand and you didn’t have to do any lifting, simply roll the empty cans off and the full ones on. Unfortunately it didn’t always work out like this. Many farms had them on the floor and a man would give you a lift on with them. However, if he wasn’t there when you arrived, you didn’t have time to hang about so you put them on off the floor by yourself. I often smile when I hear people talk about working out at the gym, we had no need of that, we were working out all the time! At one farm in particular, Stainton House, I usually had about 15 kits to load off the floor myself. I know it’s hard to believe but I used to pull the empties off, lift the full ones up and throw them into the middle of the flat. At that time, ragged off and wringing wet I weighed 12 stones, exactly the same as each kit. Those were the days!
When you reached the point where the wagon flat was full, that was the end of the round and you galloped back to the dairy as fast as you could because you had another load of cans to do before dinner. At the dairy we backed into the can dock which was the same height as the wagon and rolled the cans off in order onto a roller conveyor belt which led to the tipper. For many years this was Jack Boothman or Wry Neck as we used to call him behind his back. Jack had been a farm man for much of his life and lived in Skipton. One evening after a heavy day haymaking he went for a swim in the dam at Broughton Mill and dived in on top of a big stone and broke his neck. He crawled up the fields to Sulphur Well Cottages and they sent for the horse ambulance. He recovered but his neck was always bent to the right after that.
The milk was weighed, filtered and cooled and then stored in stainless steel tanks until needed. Part of Jack’s job was to take a quick sniff at the milk in each can before he tipped it, this was to check that it wasn’t tainted in any way. One day he tipped some Jersey milk from Cam Lane at Thornton in Craven and he must have had a head cold! The cows had been into Thornton Rock eating wild garlic and the milk tainted all the other channel island milk in the tank. Colin Barritt separated it into cream and then made butter but the taint persisted and in the end the butter had to go to Nestles for chocolate making! Fish meal in the feed could do the same thing and this was what Jack was watching out for. In fairness to him, he very seldom missed anything, he was a good man at his job.
As I said earlier, when I first worked at the dairy I was employed by Harrison Brothers of Smearber Farm, Elslack. They started off in life as coal merchants but when they got the contract to pick the farm milk up for the dairy and cart some bottled milk as well this became their major work. In later days, Jack Harrison sold out to Billy his brother and took shares in Whitewell Dairies at Accrington, later, they were bought out by Associated Dairies.
Billy Harrison was a funny little bloke. He had a very successful war and ended up as an officer in the Long Range Desert Group which was a very tough unit operating in the Western Desert. Coming back to Civvy Street after the officer’s mess was a bit of a come down for him and he got his leg pulled unmercifully about his upper-class pretensions. I never saw them but I think it was Colin Barritt that once told me that Billy was actually seen wearing spats one day! Billy lived at Thornton and amongst other faults, he liked his drink. He was drinking after hours at the Manor House in Thornton which was a ‘hotel’ in those days. Early in the morning the landlord was shepherding them out of the back door and Billy took a step sideways to avoid having his toes trodden on by the man in front. Unfortunately he was at the top of the cellar steps and fell heavily down them. His mates assumed he had passed out, took him home and left him on the kitchen floor at Ivy House. His wife Beryl (she liked to be called 'Fran') found him there the following morning with blood coming out of his ear and eye. He had a massive depressed fracture of the skull and was rushed into Preston straight away.
I talked to the surgeon afterwards and he told me that the operation to save Billy took eleven hours and it was touch and go. Billy was never the same man afterwards but survived for several years. One peculiar thing about him was that electricity didn’t seem to affect him. The old Bedford wagons we had then had petrol engines and he could stop an engine by putting his fingers on the spark plugs just like a piano player. One of his favourite tricks when he had his head under the bonnet of a wagon that was ticking over was to ask you to pass him a spanner. He would have one finger on a spark plug and when he got hold of the spanner you got the shock!
I’d better stop talking about West Marton for a while or you’ll all get bored. There’s lots more to tell and I promise I’ll come back to it later. Remember, if there are any questions or corrections you know where I am, if I can help in any way, just shout.
24 January 2001