• Welcome to this forum . We are a worldwide group with a common interest in Birmingham and its history. While here, please follow a few simple rules. We ask that you respect other members, thank those who have helped you and please keep your contributions on-topic with the thread.

    We do hope you enjoy your visit. BHF Admin Team

Milk

Vivienne14

Vivienne14

Kentish Brummie Moderator
Staff member
Until now I didn't know that shops that sold milk had, in the past, to be registered and inspected. This shop of R Reynolds in Manor Farm Road, Tyseley shows it has a registration plaque above the doorway, just like an outdoor/off-licence. It is registered milk shop #9304. Photo c1920. Viv.
 

Attachments

  • image.jpg
    image.jpg
    194.3 KB · Views: 75
Last edited:
A question for any milkmen out there: Anyone know the origins of the name 'milk float' ? Viv.
 

Attachments

  • image.jpg
    image.jpg
    76 KB · Views: 16
Vivienne

I've had a quick look around on the web and it seems that no one knows the reason why this type of milk delivery vehicle is called a "Float", but it does seem that the name is confined to milk delivery vehicles only.
 
Vivienne14 said:
A question for any milkmen out there: Anyone know the origins of the name 'milk float' ? Viv.
Click to expand...


A float is a form of two-wheeled horse-drawn cart[SUP][1][/SUP] with a dropped axle to give an especially low loadbed.
They were intended for carrying heavy or unstable items such as milk churns.[SUP][2][/SUP] The name survives today in that of the milkfloat.
The axle passes beneath the loadbed of the cart but was cranked upwards at each side. This allows the load to be carried low, for stability and ease of loading with heavy objects such as churns or barrels. The high position of the stub axles allow large wheels, giving a smooth ride. The box body is open at the rear, with no more than a chain across for safety. Rather than a driving seat or box, they are driven from a standing position, alongside the load. Floats were drawn by a single horse or, especially in Ireland, a donkey. Wikipedia.
 
Thanks Phil and Bob. So the larger wheels made for a smoother ride - I expect then this is why it was referred to as 'float', maybe because it was akin to floating across surfaces. A couple of examples of early milk floats. Viv.
 

Attachments

  • image.jpg
    image.jpg
    162.4 KB · Views: 39
  • image.jpg
    image.jpg
    119.9 KB · Views: 38
We had one of these, essential if you had sterilised milk as they had the beer bottle-type cap. This one is a Midlands Counties opener from the 1950s.

image.jpeg

And two Birmingham Co-op (Nechells) sterra bottles from the 1940s. Viv.

image.jpeg
 
Pasteurised milk always seemed thin to me when I was little. We always had sterra as it 'went further'. Hard to believe that I used to enjoy a cuppa with it in - if I have UHT milk in tea now I find it hard to drink. Viv, I can remember the feel of those bottle openers - not quite smooth, if you know what I mean.
 
One of the small corner-shops my mother sometimes used lost its registration to sell milk. Don't know why. It didn't bother me, as I always disliked milk and was in fact allergic to 'sterra', even in coffee.

Another 'float' is the carnival type.

G
 
I know what you mean Lady P - sort of slightly hammered metal. Also I think sterra might have had a longer shelf life too - although not certain if that - but would have been a big factor if you didn't have a fridge. We didn't have one until well into the 1960s.

Lovely photo Two. Very smart horse and cart.

Big Gee - loved sterra in anything. Don't know why. I suppose it's down to what you're brought up on. We never had regular milk in our house, so sterra was all I knew.

Viv.
 
Not a Brmingham photo but remember these? 1960s milk vending machine. But how did they work in terms of keeping the milk fresh ? Were they just a large, electric plug-in fridge? Don't remember seeing any wires, although they were usually sited outside shops. Viv.
image.jpeg
 
We always had sterilised milk in our family but school milk was pasteurised. I have one of my family pics I put elsewhere on the forum. It was taken in Cavendale Ave and looking at the bottle shapes he seems to have a mix of sterilised and pasteurised milk on board.
index.php
 
Last edited:
Another interesting subject. Our milkman after the war ran a small ford 8 van, cream with green lining. He doled the milk out of churns with ladles and I remember, you left the jug/s on the front step and he ladled out your requirements. If the family were out all day, you had to make sure that milk was left in the coolest place possible, (the meter box or coal house with a cover on). He sold nothing but ordinary milk, I cannot remember his name, he always wore a white coat, brown gaiters and a cloth cap. He sold out to Handsworth Dairies and then we had their fine well maintained smaller floats visiting us (horse drawn) as opposed to the big floats that the Co-Op used. Theirs was a covered float drawn by a larger horse (small shire type, similar to their coal carts or the horse drawn railway parcels carts). Lady P will remember the top end of Court Lane by Oscott College had a wide grass strip in front of the last dozen or so houses before you got to the cemetery and college gates and regularly the horse drawn vehicles would be up on this as the animals chose something different in their diet. The interesting thing is that in the late 1940s, not only did the milk, coal, railway, bread (remember Scribbans bread wagons) companies use horse and carts, but every morning a Sentinel steam lorry would come down Court Lane. Who it belonged to or where it went I have no idea, but it was a regular hissing, chuffing visitor. That was only 70 odd years ago, it seems like yesterday sometimes. The two shops at the top end of Court Lane, both sold milk, but only Maddox the one next to the Greyhound sold 'sterra', which was always sneered at by my mother, but loved by my sister and I as well as my grandmother in Harborne who used nothing but, 'BECAUSE IT KEPT LONGER AND VERY RARELY WENT OFF'. We had no fridges (at least the clerical class did not) and milk lived in the pantry/larder (dependent on your upbringing). We had a pantry, my off Slade Road Gran had a larder. The point of all this is to ask one question. Where did Handsworth Dairies, Midland Counties Dairies, the Co=Op et al get their milk from and how was it delivered to them. I know when I moved to the West Country most railway towns had an Express Dairies/Cow and Gate dairy/creamery alongside the railway line and they regularly sent off refrigerated tankers to London,

Bob Davis
 
I suppose the sterilized milk referred to in this thread is akin to the tasteless stuff now sold in cardboard cartons. That seems to quote a shelf life of months! :eek:
It is fine to keep it for an emergency and making custard or Chinese wedding cake I guess. :D
 
A lot of milk for London and its environs did go by GWR rail tankers from some stations in Devon and Cornwall. It went to Kensington. It was collected from farms in churns by motor vehicles. I remember the milk Trains going from Totnes.
As far as Birmingham is concerned I am sure similar transport from Wales, the west of England and the Cotwolds was made by the GWR. Birmingham was fortunate in having an LMS presence so there is a good chance that they also brought in milk by rail tanker. This rail traffic started to decline in the 1960's, road tankers taking the trade away.
 
Old Mohawk, I remember those third-of-a-pint milk bottles we had at school. They're selling them now as little vases. I remember that there were several ways to drink your milk: 1) punch a hole in the top and stick the straw through 2) push your thumb into the top so that it dented it and came off so that you drink it out of the bottle while the teacher wasn't looking 3) carefully remove the top with the palm of your hand so that it stayed flatter than the person's sitting next to you 4) drink the cream first with the straw so that the bottle stayed 'clean' and lastly 5) drink the milk from the bottom, through the straw, so the glass stayed cloudy as the cream went down! I can still task the metal top as we used to lick those too. Just remembered you could flatten your straw too so that it took longer to drink. Oh how we hated it if the milk monitor took all the tops off and put the straws in for us, especially if they did this too early and we got chalk dust floating on the top.

Bob, yes I do remember the strip of grass, it's still there but were there driveways over it then? Also, Dad was very friendly with Tom Maddox and we had our papers (and our comics) from him. I think his wife's name was Margaret. Everything we had was Co-op as Dad worked at the one on Stockland Green before he trained to be a teleprinter engineer - wonder what he would've made of all this computer malarky.

One last very important thing - sterra makes lovely custard!
 
Lady Penelope said:
Old Mohawk, I remember those third-of-a-pint milk bottles we had at school. They're selling them now as little vases. I remember that there were several ways to drink your milk: 1) punch a hole in the top and stick the straw through 2) push your thumb into the top so that it dented it and came off so that you drink it out of the bottle while the teacher wasn't looking 3) carefully remove the top with the palm of your hand so that it stayed flatter than the person's sitting next to you 4) drink the cream first with the straw so that the bottle stayed 'clean' and lastly 5) drink the milk from the bottom, through the straw, so the glass stayed cloudy as the cream went down! I can still task the metal top as we used to lick those too. Just remembered you could flatten your straw too so that it took longer to drink. Oh how we hated it if the milk monitor took all the tops off and put the straws in for us, especially if they did this too early and we got chalk dust floating on the top.

Bob, yes I do remember the strip of grass, it's still there but were there driveways over it then? Also, Dad was very friendly with Tom Maddox and we had our papers (and our comics) from him. I think his wife's name was Margaret. Everything we had was Co-op as Dad worked at the one on Stockland Green before he trained to be a teleprinter engineer - wonder what he would've made of all this computer malarky.

One last very important thing - sterra makes lovely custard!
Click to expand...
No the grass area was complete, no driveways. Opposite Maddox (he had a son called Barry, who would play sax in his garden), they lived in the house next to the old cottages just before the bend which had previously been occupied by Oscar Cotton (Rev'd or Pastor of the Baptist Church at Chester Road). He used to ride an Autocycle, but I cannot remember the make. I know the policeman from Sutton could only walk down the odd numbered side as far as the Greyhound and if he crossed the road to talk to my Dad, he always stayed on the footpath and would not come up the frontpath. The houses went up to 404, I cannot remember who lived in 404 or 402, at 400 were the greenhouses, at 398 the Greys, us at 396, the Milners at 394 her mum used to live in one of the cottages over the road, the Dudleys at 392 and the Ponters at 388 or 390. You can now rush down and check for me, but I believe that that the house on the garages entrance was either 386 or 384. The only other name I remember was Glendenning who lived about 380 and Mr Wall the bus inspector who I think lived in the last of the older houses. Interesting that Beggars Bush, Oscott College and The Greyhound are all beginning to come together. The last time I was up there, I went down Chester Road, noted all the posh new houses and is it Oscott Village?, but all the old terraced houses seem to have lost their front gardens. Now you have been blessed with traffic lights as well, but what happened to our Christmas watering hole the New Oscott. If the son of MR Edwards who would be a couple of years younger than me, he would probably have the answer to the actual location of the Greyhound - Sutton or Birmingham. Maddox were definitely Sutton.
Sterra not only makes lovely custard, it also makes lovely porridge and was even better when poured on fresh hot porridge.

Bob
 
Only ever had pasteurised when at school.....I suppose we had stera because, as has already been mentioned by onceabrummie, we had no fridge and it lasted longer in warm weather.
 
And on a similar note, did anyone else have tinned fruit - peaches, mandarin orange segments and fruit salad with Carnation milk on it? I can't decide whether or not I used to like it.....usually had it on Sunday afternoons. And tinned salmon sandwiches - posh, eh?

My Mom used to work for a wedding caterer on Saturdays and sometimes we used to go with her...I remember doing 100's of these tinned fruit cocktails...I suppose people these days have somewhat higher expectations, though....
 
oh yes speedy we had the tinned fruit with carnation milk...loved it but could not stand the tins of condensed milk..yukkie yuk:D...i believe that salmon was not expensive back in the day..a cheap meal our nan used to say..need a second mortgage to buy it now and i love it :eek:

lyn
 
Last edited:
Funny Lyn, we were only talking about tinned salmon today and it's amazing how many people prefer it (me included) to the fresh stuff.
Tinned peaches and evap on a Sunday teatime - Oh Yes!
 
Speedy23,

Same as you, tinned fruit & Carnation of a Sunday afternoon teatime, simply because it had good shelf life & there wasn't that much fresh fruit about in the 1940s. The alternative was bread & butter with squares of chocolate, there being none of these fancy spreads about them.

LadyP,

Number 2 method of consuming the milk as from 1947 onwards I was at a boys only school and I can't imagine us having namby-pamby things like straws! They were available, of course, but not used for consuming milk.

And yes, I still buy Princes tinned red salmon here and love the crunchy bones, though always remove the black skin.

Maurice
 
Speedy23 said:
And on a similar note, did anyone else have tinned fruit - peaches, mandarin orange segments and fruit salad with Carnation milk on it? I can't decide whether or not I used to like it.....usually had it on Sunday afternoons. And tinned salmon sandwiches - posh, eh?

My Mom used to work for a wedding caterer on Saturdays and sometimes we used to go with her...I remember doing 100's of these tinned fruit cocktails...I suppose people these days have somewhat higher expectations, though....
Click to expand...
Didn't we All?
 
Evaporated milk! Now there's a treat. Not only for your Sunday best tinned fruit salad but for, pouring around the edge of a bowl of porridge. Let's face it porridge oats was a bit bland, but add evap milk and hey presto, a gorgeous jelly like substance would appear around the edges. Lovely. Viv.
 
We certainly had tinned fruit, usually fruit salad or pears. My favourite was mandarin orange segments. I had mixed views about Carnation milk, it was ok, but I preferred tinned cream.


Tinned salmon was quite expensive up until that botulism event in the late seventies when four people became ill and two died. The price of tinned salmon crashed overnight.
 
How names stick. We say milk churn but it's a long time since it was used to make butter. History of drinking milk not always as healthy as the adverts claim, in the early C20 some sixty five thousand died as a direct result of drinking milk contaminated with tuberculosis.
 
We had condensed milk on our porridge. We called it 'Iggledy-piggledy' (50 or so years before In the Night Garden' for those with grandchildren) because of the way it went onto the plate if you held the spoon up in the air. I have a tin on my shelf at the moment waiting to make an NZ recipe with apricots and lemons - delicious but very high-calorie.
I'd forgotten about tinned thick cream Morturn, we had that occasionally but I preferred evap.
Strangely Sospiri I hadn't associated the tinned fruit with post-war shortages. I wasn't aware of the war really, being born after it, except at Christmas when we had Dad's navy socks hung up.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top