Probus Club

At the Hunmanby and District Jubilee Probus Club’s last meeting members entertained by Barrie Frost, of Reighton, who described running a milk round on a council estate in 1964. Previous to this he had been a salesman selling mechanically driven calculators to large businesses but saw the ‘writing was on the wall’ for such devices seeing electronic calculators were being produced for a fraction of the cost.

Dairies in those days would only supply milk to a licenced milk round. Some milk was supplied using milk tokens, which the milkman had to forward to the Token Surrender Department in Blackpool and it was usual for only one shop to be allowed to sell milk.

Barrie’s milk round amounted to 100 gallons or 800 pints, which was supplied to a total of 350 customers. He told the audience that at 4 o’clock in the morning he used to remember the house rather than what was being delivered. Britain’s dairy industry was once the envy of the world as it used glass bottles rather than plastic bags or waxed cartons favoured in Europe.

Milk was held in chilled stores, which received their deliveries direct from the dairy farms – the government fixed the price per pint as did the dairy farmer, but unfortunately the EU saw this as a monopoly and things turned into a ‘free for all’ by shopkeepers and garages, who sold at discount and it wasn’t unheard of for a milkman’s customer to buy one pint from him and two pints from the local shop.

Packaging soon went to waxed cartons but judges decided that these were an imposition and demanded that dairies went back to using glass bottles, although this didn’t last and finally the supermarkets destroyed what was a good industry.

At the next meeting on Thursday April 9 at 10am, the speakers will be Richard Walker and his wife who are going to describe their day at Buckingham Palace. New members are always welcome.