My dad worked for midland counties from the depot in Shirley between Stanton Road and Sandy Hill road on the Stratford Road, He started in 1940 with a horse and cart and his round was Haslucks Green Road and its side roads from the Baldwin Pub upto the Colebrook pub.He left the depot when he was called up into the army in 1942 and returned to it in 1946 after de mob until 1948.
He still had a horse and cart but at the time electric hand carts were just started appearing,which he did not like nor trust, the co-op and midland couties roundsmen used to work hand in hand in those days, if anybody refused to pay one company and thought they could get a free weeks milk out of the other they used to find out different, as my dad and the co-op milkman used to meet in the colebrook pub every saturday and tell each other of the customers who owed more than 2 weeks money,that was of course after finding the husbands in the pubs and getting them to cough up the money owed as the wives used to tell him the Husbands were.
When I was nine I became a runner for the local midland counties milkman who ran out of the Solihull depot in Yew tree Lane,wrapping the yellow and white packets of butter in little paper bags trying to balance them on top of the pass bottles, all they used to sell back then was butter,unflavoured ski yoghurts,orange squash and sometimes third of a pint and a pint of made up orange squash, the roundsman was called Eric, a very tall thin man and it was round 4.
I stayed as a runner flicking in between the co-op and what later became Unigate, the last 2 yrs I stayed with Unigate still doing the rounds from the solihull depot deliverying my last bottle way back in 1976 and it was on round 4 I finished on.
At the Solihull depot I remeber the yard supervisor,his nickname was "H", about 6 yrs later I married and moved to Shirley,it was when I was in the front garden I heard a voice shouting me,it was "H" himself and he only lived 2 doors away, my dad turned up a few days later to visit and H and his wife was outside, it turned out that "H" and my dad had worked together as roundsmen after the war in Shirley and "H"s wifes dad had been the Depot Manager then
Small world ! though never did find out what "H" actually stood for