Till the Cows Come Home Read online

  The Collings, like all cattle breeders, had to choose between milk and beef. They chose beef. Thus began a division of the Shorthorn into two distinct types. Later pedigree breeders such as John Booth of Killerby and Warleby, and noblemen such as Lord Althorp and Sir Henry Vane Tempest, furthered the divergence. By 1817, animals taken to Scotland from Booth’s herd became a separate type, the Beef Shorthorn, and it was left to Thomas Bates of Kirklevington, in County Durham, to maintain the milking qualities of the breed that became the Dairy Shorthorn. This gave rise to the saying in Shorthorn circles, ‘Booth for the butcher, Bates for the pail’.

  Although Bates recovered some of the milking qualities of the old coarse Holderness cattle that the Collings’ breeding had damaged, his famous pedigree families – Princess and Duchess being the most notable – never fully matched their ancestors’ yields in the dairy, although their milk was of better quality. He was criticized for being more concerned with style over substance, and he never overcame his pedigree cows’ shortcomings in the pail. It was left to the commercial breeders to retain some of the early Shorthorn’s exceptional milking qualities.

  One commercial Cheshire dairyman was reported as saying at the Newcastle Royal Show of 1864 that ‘if he wanted milk he would rather have his stock related to the Cheshire cows of 1800, to the Ayrshire, or even the Welsh cow … than to Royal Dukes and Duchesses, and would prefer their being matched to the son of his neighbour’s best milking cow than to a bull of Bates’s or of Booth’s’. H. H. Dixon remarked in the middle years of the nineteenth century3 that any allusion to good milking pedigree in a sale catalogue of Shorthorns was regarded as an apology for doubtful or unfashionable blood. Such was the pedigree breeders’ disregard for the milking qualities of their stock.

  The fact was that the Shorthorn breeders came up against the old truth that not even Bakewell could overcome: you cannot have a cow that is equally good at producing milk and meat. Had they been able to achieve this, the British Friesian would have found it hard to oust the Shorthorn from the dairies of Britain after the Second World War.

  1 Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns.

  2 Freemartins appear in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as women who have been deliberately sterilized in the womb by the administration of hormones, as part of the government policy that requires 70 per cent of the female population to be freemartins.

  3 H. H. Dixon, ‘Rise and Progress of Shorthorns’, Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, i/ii, 317.

  CHAPTER 4

  The London Dairies

  BEFORE REFRIGERATION AND easy transport, in most big cities, even in the grandest parts, people would have had milk cows living close by. Even if they didn’t come into daily contact with them, they would have been able to smell them. At one time there were dozens of these city dairies, where cows were kept and milked on the premises and their milk either delivered house to house or sold from a shop attached to the cowshed. In smaller cities and towns the cows were kept in the countryside around, close enough for the milk to be brought in daily.

  In London, there was a tradition of Welsh country people, especially from Cardiganshire, coming to the capital to make their fortune in the milk business. By 1900, over half London’s dairies were owned by Welsh emigrants, who spoke Welsh among themselves, kept their chapels and held fast to the Land of their Fathers. Once they had made enough money, many of them returned home and set themselves up on small farms.

  These dairies had long been a feature of the metropolis. In 1694, a Mr Harrard, who lived at Baumes in Hoxton, bought up newly calved cows from the countryside around London, milked them through their lactations, and when they were dry, sold them fat to London butchers. He kept 300, sometimes 400 cows. The London cow population grew with the city. By 1794, there were estimated to be 8,500, nearly half of which were kept between Paddington and Gray’s Inn Road, with about 2,500 in the East End. William Marshall reported in 1798 that one dairyman kept 1,000 cows in milk, while there were three or four with 500 each. While the trade seems to have been dominated by a few large operators, it was always open to small producers to try their hand as well.

  William Youatt wrote about the London dairies in 1834. After travelling the kingdom gathering information for his Cattle book and being welcomed wherever he went, he was disappointed to find that the gates of the ‘overgrown milk establishments’ of the capital were closed to him. Assuming they had something to hide, he determined to discover what it was. By this time the metropolitan herd ran to about 12,000 cows, almost all of the Dairy Shorthorn breed. They supplied Londoners with ‘new milk’, a product that sounded wholesome and healthful, but that hardly ever made it unadulterated to the breakfast tables of the populace.

  Youatt noted the common practice of most, if not all, of the ‘little dairymen’ who kept half a dozen cows, of putting by the evening’s milk until next morning, skimming off the cream, adding a little warm water and selling the collation to the public as that morning’s milk. The real morning’s milk was also put by, skimmed and warmed a little before being sold as the evening’s milk. Retail milk sellers, who didn’t keep any cows of their own, bought whole milk from the large dairies, but whatever they did with it before they sold it, Youatt was sure it was not to the benefit of their customers. Now, of course, people have been conditioned to accept, even prefer, skimmed milk, and would make no complaint. To be fair to the dairies, they had to be skilful in meeting fluctuating demand for their highly perishable product. If it didn’t sell quickly, they only had a short time to turn it into cream or butter.

  Most of the smaller and medium-sized dairymen bought newly calved cows because they did not have the facilities to breed from them. Once a cow’s daily yield fell below four quarts (a gallon), she was dried off and fattened for sale to the butcher. They could not afford to carry passengers. That was why the Dairy Shorthorn was in favour, because she was, without doubt, the best dual-purpose cow then available. Her milk was high in solids, although not as high as the old Longhorn she replaced, and she would readily fatten on clover hay and linseed cake once she stopped milking. This one-lactation system was wasteful of good milking cows and added considerable expense for the dairymen. Newly calved cows from the dealers cost about £20 each and were highly variable milkers. The buyer could not tell from looking at them how well they would milk: the size of a cow’s udder is a poor guide to whether or not she will be a ‘deep milker’.

  The larger producers, with the space and facilities to breed their own replacement cows, had an advantage over their smaller competitors. They knew which animals were worth keeping because they had milked them through many lactations – often up to seven or eight – a much better practice than selling good milking cows and replacing them with animals of unknown quality.

  They also had the advantage that the dealers who supplied most of the cows to the London dairies preferred to do business with larger enterprises because they could move cows in larger lots, often at a better price than the poorer dairyman could pay. A few of the biggest dairies had buildings that could accommodate five or six thousand cows, and the dealers used them as staging posts for their animals until they could be sold on. The dairy owner would charge a shilling a night for a cow’s accommodation, have his milkmaids milk the cows and keep a record of their yields. He knew better than anyone else – even the dealer – which cows were yielding well, had a good temperament and didn’t kick. A cow gives her best yield and quality of milk during her third or fourth lactation, and it was these that fetched the best prices.

  Youatt got his own back on the London cow-keepers who had snubbed him by showing, with calculations, that they were defrauding their customers. He estimated the average yield across all the dairy cows in London to be 9 quarts (2¼ gallons) a day. Multiplied by 12,000 cows made it 108,000 quarts, and multiplied by 365 days that came to 39,420,000 quarts a year (9,855,000 gallons). Milk was sold at 6d. (2½p) a quart, which made the annual value of all milk sold in Lond
on (without the cream and butter) £985,500 a year. If this was divided by the 12,000 cows, he arrived at the ‘strange and incredible sum of more than £82’ output from each cow per year. This, said Youatt, proved ‘the rascality that pervades some of the departments of the concern’. He acquitted ‘the wholesale dealers of any share in the roguery’ and laid the blame squarely on the retail dealers.

  The conditions in which the cows were kept were remarkable for the time. An article on ‘London Dairies’ in the British Farmer’s Magazine of February 1831 describes the large one run by a Mr Rhodes, ‘farmer, near Islington’. The cowsheds faced east on a piece of gently sloping ground of about two or three acres in extent; they were light and airy, with panes of glass above ventilation shutters set on solid walls. Each shed held four to five hundred cows and ran up and down the slope to allow gutters to carry away their waste. The cows’ drinking water also ran downhill from trough to trough along the whole length of the shed. Piped water was rare at the time because lead piping was expensive, and letting it flow freely avoided the labour of carrying water to the cows or having to let them out to drink twice a day from water troughs.

  There was a separate range of buildings around a square yard where the cows were fattened after they had finished giving milk, and further sheds to accommodate the pigs kept to consume surplus skim milk, which was held in a huge tank twelve feet deep and six feet in diameter. The milk quickly went sour, but it didn’t matter because that was believed to be more nourishing, although it is not recorded what the smell was like. There were pits for storing roots, straw, hay and grains, and a place for cutting straw into chaff. At the lowest part of the slope was the deep pit into which all the dung was emptied. There were cart sheds, stables and other buildings; in fact everything that was needed to run an efficient, almost industrial enterprise, remarkably modern for its time. Nowadays it would be described as ‘zero grazing’, where everything the cows ate was carried to them.

  The unfortunate cows were tied in their stalls during the whole time they were in milk. Some of them had been chained there for more than two years. The only exercise they got was standing up and lying down. Youatt was critical of their treatment and compared it to a more enlightened dairy owned by a Mr Laycock, whose cows were let out twice a day for up to three hours, to drink and exercise; during the growing season, they grazed from six in the morning until midday and from two o’clock in the afternoon until three o’clock the next morning. Rhodes claimed his cows gave more milk, but Youatt associated being tied in a stall for 24 months with disease, foot and digestive troubles and a deterioration in the quality of the milk. Without going so far as to call it cruel, he did not have much good to say for such an unnatural system of cow-keeping, which attracted the same criticism as is raised against modern indoor systems of dairying.

  The main foodstuff for metropolitan cows was the abundant and cheap supply of spent brewers’ and distillers’ grains, which were available all year round, although cheaper in spring and autumn when the dairymen stocked up on them. Brewers’ grains are the germinated grains of cereal (usually barley in Britain) left over from brewing beer. They have been soaked in water, allowed to germinate and then dried to produce malt. The malted grains are then milled and steeped in hot water (mashed) to transform the starch into sugars. The resulting wort is boiled, filtered and fermented to produce beer. The residue, after the sugars have been extracted from the grain, is concentrated protein and fibre and suited to the feeding of ruminants. Not all grains have the same feeding value; it depends how much goodness has been extracted in the brewing process. As Youatt remarked, ‘the dairyman must know his brewer’.

  Brewers’ grains have been a valuable part of the feeding of livestock for thousands of years. Large estates, farms and monasteries had them left over from their brewing. But with the growth of the cities and towns during the Industrial Revolution, huge quantities of grains were being produced that brewers had to dispose of. Town dairies were often attached to a brewery, and the still-warm grains could be ensiled in brick-lined watertight pits, trodden down to expel the air and sealed with a covering of eight or nine inches of soil to keep them moist in summer and protected from the elements in winter. Warm grains would continue fermenting until, having used up the available oxygen, they would be pickled, like silage, and preserved until the pit was broken open. Fermentation improved their feeding quality, and when properly stored, they would keep for two years or more. Sometimes salt was added to improve the palatability and provide minerals for the cows.

  A bushel of grains a day (about 35 lb), spaced out in five feeds over twenty-four hours, would stimulate milk production. This was combined with 10–12 lb of chopped hay and two bushels of mangolds, turnips or potatoes, depending on the time of year. Another commonly used high-protein feeding stuff was linseed cake, the residue from pressing linseed (flax) to obtain the oil, although it was more useful for fattening the cows at the end of their lactation. It had the property of making their coats shine.

  There was a clever division of labour in the dairies. The dairymen looked after the cows and made them available to be milked by the milk dealers from about four o’clock in the morning until six thirty in the evening. The retail milk dealers would order the milk they needed for that day’s delivery and the dairyman would allocate to the dealer’s milkers the number of cows he thought would supply that amount. Whatever milk they took was carefully measured in the measuring room, and if the yield was more than the retailer had bargained for, the surplus was kept by the dairyman to make up any deficiencies in other retailers’ yields. If any was left and could not be sold that day, it was skimmed and its cream made into butter, with the whey being fed to the dairyman’s pigs.

  There were dairies in a few other major cities in the kingdom, with a ‘leviathan dairy’ in Glasgow owned by William Harley, a Scottish entrepreneur. Harley sold water from springs rising on his small estate, and ran public baths. But his dairy enterprise – Willowbank Dairy, at the top of West Nile Street – was without doubt his most impressive undertaking. His byres, wrote H. H. Dixon, ‘lay among a frowning forest of chimneys, and [were] reached through mud and mire, now over a tram-road, now across a canal, and finally past a manufactory where horses [were] boiled into glue by the score’. There was a viewing gallery to which ‘princes, noblemen and gentlemen from almost every quarter of the globe’ came, paying a shilling a ticket to admire the lines of cows being fed four times a day from feed-trolleys. Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia (later the tsar), and Archdukes John and Lewis of Austria were among the distinguished visitors. Harley was a masterly self-publicist; he even wrote a book in 1829 celebrating his enterprise, The Harleian Dairy System.

  He kept over a thousand cows in sheds holding about a hundred each, managed by two men to a shed, feeding and mucking out and grooming the animals daily. He gave his sheds names: The Parlour, The Thistle, The Holloween (sic), The Waterloo, The Malakoff and so on. At the peak of his enterprise, in 1860, before the European rinderpest epidemic struck, he had 1,700 cows in milk. He fed generously for yield on the sound Scots principle that a ‘coo milks by the mou’’ – you won’t get out what you don’t put in – with draff (the Scottish word for distiller’s grains), steamed turnips, cut hay, straw, ground maize meal and 6–10 gallons a day each (as much as they would take) of pot ale, the high-protein liquid left after the first distillation. In summer he cut grass and brought it in from his meadows.

  He devised an ingenious labour-saving arrangement for clearing away ‘the scourings’ – cow muck and urine. Each cow was measured when she arrived in the byre and allocated a stall that exactly matched her length so that her muck and urine would fall away from her into gutters that ran behind the close-packed rows of cattle. These were regularly flushed into a tank, the contents of which (what we would now call slurry) was discharged along miles of pipe out of the city to fertilize the meadows where the grass grew.

  Each dairymaid was allotted 13 cows in full milk (more if the
cows were giving less ). The high yielders were milked three times a day and the professional dairymaids were encouraged to sing to their charges because Harley knew ‘cows are partial to a pleasing sound’. The average yield of all cows and heifers in milk was one and a half to two gallons a day. Every Friday the yield of each was recorded and the quality tested by ‘lactometer’. Seven milkers lived on the premises and the rest came in from the city at milking times: five o’clock in the morning, noon, and six o’clock in the evening. To milk so many cows would have needed more than 70 people just for the milking, and another 25 or so to look after the cows, not to mention the men employed in the fields.

  The coming of the railways and the devastating outbreak of rinderpest in 1860, which carried off 80 per cent of the cows, damaged the city cow-keepers’ trade, but it did not destroy it. It would have recovered had it not been for motor transport, refrigeration, and the increasingly stringent public health measures designed to eradicate childhood tuberculosis. Some dairymen lasted until the Second World War, delivering warm milk twice a day, with the attraction that it came from cows kept on their own premises.

  Even as late as 1950, there were more than 700 dairies selling fresh milk in London. Jones Bros in Middlesex Street in the East End is the last of the Welsh dairies still operating in the city. The business, which was started in 1877 by Henry Jones, has survived two wars and being undercut by supermarkets and convenience stores. The current Henry Jones, with his sister Lucy, is the fourth generation, albeit milk is now only a part of their operation. They have cleverly expanded into all kinds of fresh food and groceries delivered to homes and offices across London, from Canary Wharf to Kensington. They have the edge on the supermarkets because their delivery is free and no order is too small. It’s a remarkable and inspiring story of survival against the trend by giving a service to the public.