Quiet milk floats are like a butterfly - so it stings like a bee to leave them in history

THE motoring theme continues this week, not quite like last week sublime but to another far from ridiculous, the humble milk float. Lots of you will recall seeing them, their morning duty done, heading majestically back to the depot, but the driver exposed to the elements, his burden of empty bottles behind him.

You may have seen them. But you wouldn’t have heard them. Silently propelled for their dark deliveries by electricity, they were the least intrusive of all traffic. And now, when electric cars are forecast for the future, they are, at the height of their reputation, scrapped.

I used to go everywhere with a camera, never without it, but when people started taking photos with their pocket telephones, when the chemist’s shop stopped selling films, and when their on-thepremises developing machines developed no more, I was bereft. I never missed that camera so much as one day in King Edward Street when I called at the milk depot to pay my bill, and very soon after the delivery van had been introduced. A long line of floats of all sizes and vintages and makes stood, like so many horses in their stalls, their days of duty done, cast aside and presumably awaiting an undeserved future.

Believe it or not but milk floats are collected now. They used to be charged to cover 40 to 50 miles every working day, the perfect runabout much as invalid carriages are today.

Seems odd that such things are scrapped, as the pace they set for generations now receives a massive boost.

Seems odd that such things are scrapped, as the pace they set for generations now receives a massive

boost.

Peter Chapman