Liverpool’s Urban Dairies
Dave Joy on a country tradition in the city
BEFORE the days of refrigeration and pasteurisation, England’s burgeoning towns and cities were supplied with fresh milk from thousands of cows kept in the backyards of urban dairies. For obvious reasons, the men and women who kept these beasts – and sold their milk – were known as Cowkeepers.
It was through researching my family history that I first became aware of the occupation of cowkeeper. It was more than just a job, it was a way of life – one that spanned some 150 years, from the early 1800s to the mid 1900s. Despite its early prominence, it has now, for the most part, been forgotten. But it provides fascinating insights into family life, entrepreneurship (aka Yorkshire business nous), food supply in a bygone age and the ability of a family business to adapt to change.
Liverpool is famous for many things: its music scene, comedians, football teams, heritage waterfront and architecture. But it is little known that, although the self-employed urban cowkeeper was ubiquitous in 19thcentury England, it was in Liverpool that the trade had its stronghold.
The majority of Liverpool cowkeepers came from farming families in the Yorkshire Dales, including the northern regions of what was then Cumberland and Westmorland. With so many people moving to the cities in search of work, farming communities faced severe economic decline. But some wily Dalesmen decided to take the proverbial bull by the horns. They moved their cows into Liverpool in order to sell milk, fresh from the cow, to a hungry urban population.
The base of operations for a successful city cowkeeping business was the Milkhouse. As well as functioning as a retail outlet (downstairs) and a family home (upstairs), they had to accommodate a city herd of sometimes up to 30 cattle.
To do this, shoe-horned to the side or rear of each milkhouse was a yard with a number of outbuildings, including a shippon, where the cows were housed and milked, a stable for the horse, a cart shed for the milk float, a midden and a hayloft.
Cowkeepers were producer-retailers. They provided a seamless service of delivering fresh milk, from cow to customer, at least twice a day: first milking at 5.00 am, out on the round by 7.30 am; second milking 2.00 pm, out on the round by 4.30 pm. And by having a milk round, cowkeepers were able to extend their customer base tenfold, ensuring they could sell all of the daily production.
In addition to milking cows and selling milk on the rounds, cattle and horses had to be mucked out, fed and watered. As tighter regulations were introduced, all the surfaces and utensils used in the milk production process had to be cleaned and scalded; walls had to be painted or whitewashed twice a year.
In the back room there might be butter and cheese to be made or cream to be separated, whilst in the front room there was a busy shop to run, with customers queuing in time for each milking. The milkhouse and its dairy shop were open for business from dawn till dusk – at the very least!
For the first cowkeepers, the preferred breed was the shorthorn, as it had a high milk yield but would fatten up well for the beef market once its milking days were over. When they were newly calved and in full lactation, cows would be brought from the home farm or from cattle marts via the railways. They would be unloaded at Lime Street Station and herded through the city streets like a rodeo roundup. Traffic would be halted and pedestrians would leap into doorways with the shout of “There’s a bull loose!” Boys were employed as runners to keep ahead of the herd and make sure no cow sneaked down a side street.
Each cow would spend about twelve months in the city. Then they were either returned to the home farm to be put to the bull once more, or they were sold to the local markets for beef. Because of this constant turnover, these cattle were referred to as “flying herds”. Many city milkhouses were operated as satellite outlets for the home farm, with lots of to-ing and fro-ing between town and countryside.
Most cowkeepers preferred to graze their stock whenever possible, as this was said to produce better quality milk. However, the closer you were to the centre of the city, the fewer opportunities there were for grazing. Cowkeepers would take regular cartloads of grass cuttings from the
city’s parks, gardens, playing fields and cemeteries.
The cows’ diet would also include grain obtained from the local breweries, seed cake (such as linseed) from the vegetable oil refineries, molasses from the sugar refineries and hay from farms on the edge of the city. Local farmers would also supply cowkeepers with surplus root crops or straw (for bedding) in return for a cartload of cow muck. Sawdust from the city sawmills was spread lavishly on the shippon floors to absorb moisture and make the muck easier to shift.
Cows produce muck in significant quantities. Back on the home farm it would have been spread on the land as a natural fertiliser. In the small city shippons, producing muck in such quantities could have been a liability, but the wily cowkeepers turned it to their advantage.
They contained the muck in a midden – often formed by two brick walls (approximately five feet high) built in the corner of the yard or, alternatively, in the form of a covered pit in the floor of the yard. Once the midden was full it would be emptied by hand and transferred into a cart. It was then taken away and sold to farmers on the edge of the city. At the end of the 19th century a cowkeeper could expect to make a good profit, selling his cow muck for 5s per ton. So, that old saying, “where there’s muck, there’s brass”, held particularly true for the city cowkeepers.
To begin with, milkhouses in the city centre were converted endterraced properties, housing maybe
6-8 cows. But as the city expanded, the town planners recognised that there was a need to accommodate this successful and necessary business.
So it was in the suburbs of
Liverpool that modern, purpose-built milkhouses began to appear – spacious enough and appropriately equipped to accommodate larger herds and to meet the increasingly rigorous health and hygiene standards. Many of these properties escaped the bombings of World War II and subsequent inner-city redevelopment, and survive to this day.
With its short supply chain (cow to customer) there were no middlemen, and cowkeeping was a profitable business for those who were willing to put in the necessary hard work. Many of the original cowkeepers made enough money to return to their farm in the Dales and buy it outright. They then passed on the city milkhouse to the next generation for them to make their own living as cowkeepers.
In 1900 there were nearly 500 premises in the city licensed to keep over 6,000 cows, producing some 17,000 gallons of milk per day. But 20th-century technology would gradually bring about the demise of the city’s milkhouses. For as pasteurisation and refrigeration became commonplace, so the shelf life of milk was extended. This effectively removed the need for milk that was fresh from the cow. Some cowkeepers returned to the family farm in the Dales and continued dairying there.
Others remained in the city and adapted by disposing of their herds, but continuing to serve their customers by buying in milk that was already treated, refrigerated and bottled – they became milkmen and their milkhouse became a dairy.
Though a minority hung on stoically to their cowkeeping way of life, the Fifties and Sixties saw the end of most of these family businesses. The last Liverpool cowkeeper, Joe Capstick of 4 Marlborough Road, did not move his cows out of the city until the summer of 1975!
It marked the end of an era.
Liverpool Cowkeepers by Dave Joy is available from amberley-books.com, £12.99. Watch Leaving of the Cows at player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watchleaving-of-the-cows-1975-online