The final straw School scheme ended with the milk snatcher
ON June 14 it’ll be 50 years since Parliament voted to end the distribution of free milk in schools for the over-7s.
On that day in 1971, Edward Heath’s Tory government passed the proposal at the behest of Education Minister Margaret Thatcher. Had she not later become Prime Minister and just faded into backbench obscurity, the epithet “Thatcher the milk-snatcher” would have been her footnote in history.
Many BT readers will remember school milk-time. The milk came in small bottles and in our primary school they handed out straws to drink it with. On cold days, our teacher would instruct the milk monitors to put the bottles on the hot water pipe running along the back of the classroom to warm them up.
I can’t say I ever much liked it, and I’m not sure that many of my classmates did either, but we drank it anyway as it was “good for you”.
Most people probably imagine that free school milk was a product of the welfare state, post-1945, but that’s not actually the case. Many older readers will remember getting free milk in schools well before 1945.
This was the work of various individuals, notably a Welsh dairy farmer called Robert Griffiths, plus the National Farmers Union (NFU), plus the Milk Marketing Scheme, a very entrepreneurial organisation set up in the 1930s partly seeking to do something to help dairy farmers who were producing more milk than the country was consuming.
It was largely thanks to the Milk Marketing Scheme that the 30s saw the establishment of “milk bars” around the country; they were popular well into the 1960s with many, especially youngsters, as alcoholfree places to socialise.
(Anyone know where Bristol’s milk bars were? Got any memories or pictures? Mail the usual address – Bristol.times@b-nm.co.uk)
The scheme also encouraged local authorities to buy and distribute milk to schools. During the 30s, with many kids growing up in desperate poverty, and with the stuff so cheap, many councils did so.
From what I can tell, most of
Bristol’s council-run primary schools were giving out milk by the late 1930s.
In 1971, milk-snatcher Thatcher’s move was deeply unpopular, even among many Conservatives. There was something mean-spirited about taking milk from children, many of them from poor families.
The way Thatcher and her supporters saw it, though, was that the country was now affluent enough and that it wasn’t the business of the state to be looking after children. But one suspects that she would be horrified if she were around today and could see the number of parents, many of them with jobs, being forced to rely on food banks.
Statue on show
Mr Splashy is now on display at M Shed in all his tarnished glory and you, too, can join in the “citywide conversation” about his future.
The Colston statue, fished from the drink, is on show at the museum alongside some of the placards from the protest which felled it a year ago, plus a timeline of some of the events leading up to his toppling on June 7, 2020.
Go visit him and you’ll have a chance to complete a survey asking for your thoughts on what happened that day and what you think should happen next.
Personally I’m a bit cynical about “consultations” and “conversations”, as they provide cover for politicians to distance themselves from decisions which will be unpopular with some. We elect them to provide leadership, and they should have done something about the statue and Colston’s memory/legacy years ago.
M Shed is now open, but visits must be booked in advance. For more on the Colston display see https://tinyurl.com/yhywpz88
There’s also a presentation and discussion on Zoom tonight (June 8) from the M Shed project team which created the display, talking about how they did it and what they hope to achieve. Details and booking at https://tinyurl.com/ cf4jt9rh
(I forget who suggested it, but
some wit said it should be hanging upside-down in a tank of City Docks water. With some goldfish. OK, I’ll shut up now.)
Gentlemen prefer money
Mrs Latimer and I spent a very nice day at Bowood in Wilts the other week. A fascinating place, if you’ve never been before. Grand house (an even grander one was demolished due to dilapidation years ago), lots of lovely furniture and artwork, wonderful estates, one of the best adventure playgrounds in the region etc etc, though what we were going for was the rhododendrons, which are truly spectacular in spring. I’d recommend you visit, though if you want the full splendour of the flowers you’re a bit late for this year. See www.bowood.org for more.
Everyone gets off on different things when visiting places like this, and Bowood, which is not National Trust owned, but still in the hands of the Marquesses of Lansdowne, pulls off that trick of providing something for everyone. Interestingly, though, the first display you pass on the Covid-safe route through the house, is a big one about the history of the terrible burden of taxation on the landed aristocracy and what a struggle it is to maintain such great houses and great estates.
Personally I greatly admired the paintings and statuary, including a sculpture titled The Distressed Mother by Sir Richard Westmacott. The card by it tells us that a previous Lord Lansdowne bought it for 500 guineas in 1823. The sort of money which would have built and funded a small home for distressed mothers, or set up three or four of them for life.
The National Trust is currently at the centre of some controversy (by which I mean a great deal of noise being made by a small number of people) over “wokeness” and all that stuff about examining the slavery connections of some of the trust’s great houses or the links between many properties and the empire.
Fact is, all great houses are monuments to the exploitation of the labour of others, and how we perceive this changes over time. Back in the 1970s, the National Trust discovered that the most popular parts of many of their grand houses were not the sumptuous rooms, but the kitchens and servants’ quarters. Precisely because most visitors understood that this was where they and their ancestors came from. (Or maybe they just liked Upstairs, Downstairs?)
More recent times have seen homosexuality being brought out of the landed gentry’s ample closets. While King George V might have remarked that “I thought chaps like that shot themselves”, a trip to many NT houses will nowadays include boards next to the portraits telling us that Lord Gerald was gay, Lady Hermione had numerous lesbian affairs and the Count of Money leapt into bed with anything that had a pulse.
But there’s more work needs doing here. So, for instance, the last time I visited Tredegar House (just over the Bridge near Newport) there was a big display on one of the nobs that owned the place between the wars. He was, we are told, gay, and enjoyed a flamboyant, hard-partying lifestyle and was courageous for being himself at a time when being caught could mean prison and ruination.
All of this is true. But what is also true is that this was the 1920s and 30s and that much of the family fortune had come from coal-mining. So while His Lordship was having masses of champagne-fuelled sex, the miners of South Wales and their families were living in abject misery.
He’d have been much more admirable if his sex was fuelled by modest quantities of brown ale or PG Tips and he used that great fortune to relieve the misfortune of those who had made it for him in the first place.
Cheers then!