It's lovely to see those old photos of dairies and cows in Liverpool, don't have any photos, but as a contribution to these postings, this excerpt from my father's memoir of growing up in Scotland Rd., about 1915:
"As a child I would toddle round to John's dairy to get a warm drink straight from the cow and to watch him cooling the milk which he poured through a Funnel into a steel ventilator from which it emerged through the vanes directly into the churns. This operation required a bucket of hot water into which I promptly sat only to he rushed off to my mother bawling my head off. When I became older I sometimes helped on his rounds. That was when housewives bought milk straight from the churn and a valued possession was a white quart jug. One time he had a real high-stepper of a pony which would stand in the street harnessed and docile as a lamb until it heard the key turn in the padlock, at which point it would tear off like something possessed, with old John hurling himself into the float and grabbing the reins just in time.
There was a morning when, standing in the float with ten-gallon churn of milk, the sound of the padlock hit the mad moke's ears and off it shot. Grabbing the reins instinctively, I tugged on the wrong one and there we were, careering along the pavement, one wheel on, one wheel off. Fortunately the Cowkeeper with an extra spurt and his usual acrobatics brought the pony under control at the same time giving me a stinging crack on the head and a warning not to do that again. We were lucky the main road was only yards away.
On another day, John and I, armed with long canes, drove three of his poor dried-up cows through the streets onto the luggage boat and into the Lairage at Birkenhead. The Pride I felt in this exercise excluded any pity for the animals but it's as well l didn't witness their ignoble end, as according to John: they were stunned with a Sledge hammer and then cut up."
From: "Candles, Carts and Carbolic, a Liverpool Childhood between the Wars" by Jim Callaghan, Carnegie Publishing. Available at any bookstore.
