T
HE LEGEND of the amorous milkman is not just a myth. According to a former milkman, who has spent 30 years researching a book about what really went on in the world of the dairy float, they brought a very real aura of sexual adventure to the doorstep.
“These Romeos of the road were secure in their dealings with women, they were full of one-liners and capable of developing a fanbase,” says author and ex-milkman Andrew Ward. “Meanwhile female customers could fantasise about the milkman’s potential in the bedroom as they walked up the garden path with a worldly independence and knocked on the door advertising vitality and virility.”
If you think this is stretching the point somewhat then consider the stories that Ward has collected from the men who ministered daily to the needs of often lonely, bored and frustrated housewives, many of whom, if the milkmen are to be believed, not only answered the door in a state of semi-undress but could also act in more outrageously flirtatious ways.
Benny Hill’s famous song about Ernie, the fastest milkman in the west, was it seems closer to reality than many of us realised.
At one house a relief milkmen saw a note outside the door that read: “If I buy 10 pints and a dozen eggs will you snog me?”
Another recalls: “I got plenty of propositions when I was younger and you have to laugh about some of the tricks we got up to.”
Sometimes a proposition was blatant. “One woman said, ‘My purse is up in my bedroom, follow me.’ Then upstairs she jumped on her milkman,” says Ward.
One milkie in particular kept being moved from one round to another because irate husbands would phone the dairy and threaten violence.
“One classic tease was for a woman to ask her milkman to help her move some furniture into the bedroom,” says Ward. Other customers were so hard up that they offered to pay their milk bill in a variety of imaginative ways. “The legend suggests that milkmen who do the same round for years can watch their children grow up.”
Artist Grayson Perry experienced this first hand when his mother, with whom he later lost touch, took up with a Co-op milkman in the 1960s.
“One night Perry’s father, an engineer, discovered the affair and confronted his wife. The couple split up but got back together a few weeks later. But the affair with the milkman continued,” reveals Ward. “During the Easter holiday of 1965 Perry’s father discovered his wife was pregnant by the milkman. Apparently the milkman had three women pregnant at the same time – his own wife, Perry’s mother and a teacher. The milkman left his wife and moved in with Perry’s mother. They lost the first baby but had a child two years later.”
Angie Smith was a divorcee with two young sons when she had a brief affair with milkman John Good and became pregnant. Smith was 23 in November 1968 when she gave birth to a daughter in her father’s garden shed in Walthamstow, east London.
Her parents were unaware of the pregnancy so Angie smuggled the baby out of the house in a laundry bag and left her in the lobby of nearby flats near the dustbins. The baby was found 24 hours later by a tenant and nicknamed the Dustbin Baby by the media before being named Michelle by her adoptive parents. Birth mother and baby were reunited in 2015 after Michelle Rooney began looking for her birth parents at the age of 21 after she was told of her traumatic start to life. She also tracked down her father John Good, who was 83, suffering terminal cancer and unaware he’d had a baby.
There was certainly plenty of opportunity for this sort of shenanigans to take place. In the late 1960s and early 1970s more than 40,000 milkmen delivered to around 18million homes – about 99 per cent of households.
wARD says: “Some milkmen used strategies to catch a customer naked, such as ringing the doorbell when she was about to get in the bath or suggesting that hoovering in the nude was the latest fitness craze.” One canny milkman waited until the shower stopped and then rang the doorbell so the customer had to come to the door in a towel.
“I know I’m getting old,” Alf Milton told his local newspaper when he retired after 47 years as a milkman in