DAIRY MATTERS

[Stanley]

DAIRY MATTERS

7 December 2004

Every morning when I take Jack the Lurcher for his Victory Park burn-up I pass the old gasworks yard. Being an engineer, I’ve always wondered why there was usually a motor running on the other side of the wall. I went in there this morning because as I was passing at about 11am I saw the top of a wagon. Sure enough, it was unloading crates of bottled milk into a refrigerated container sat in the yard.
All right, so what’s so interesting about that? The point is that the wagon was from Dairyline, a company based in Eccles near Manchester and what the driver was delivering was bottled and packaged milk for the milk chaps and retailers in the town. I talked to the driver who used to work at Lancashire Dairies, just behind Strangeways Gaol in Manchester. He could remember the West Marton Tankers coming in with milk for them, this was the dairy where the rabbi used to bless my milk to make it Kosher. He told me that LD had gone out of business and as part of his redundancy package after 15 years work they had paid for him to do an HGV course and lo and behold the first job he got was delivering milk for Dairyline.
I told him he was following a long tradition. West Marton Dairies used to just the same thing, deliver milk to a refrigerator in Barlick for the retailers. Up to about 1965 it was the small building that stands behind the railings now in Gissing and Lonsdale’s yard at Havre Park. This fridge became too small and a new one was installed in the out-barn that stands at the bottom of Vicarage Road.
So, by being nosey I solved a little mystery and uncovered a chain of coincidences. It’s a small world and there is a continuous link between what I was doing in 1970 and that small refrigerated box in the gasworks yard. These linkages are there and the exciting thing for me about local history is finding them, being surprised and reporting them. A small dairy matter but it can be chalked up as plus point for the day.

7 December 2004