The Churn At The End Of The Lane:

Farming and smallholding practices have altered over the past century or so. Some have been subtle, others less so — and many brought about by technology and legislation. In another of his monthly series, Jeremy Hobson continues to outline just a few of them.

- Jeremy Hobson

Readers of the books by James Herriot and viewers of television’s All Creatures Great and Small will be aware of how small dairy farmers milked by hand and took the churns to the end of the lane in order that it could be picked up by the milk lorry. Particularly in the Yorkshire Dales, many of the hill farmers only kept a handful of milking cows and, even in the 1970s, I knew several who simply kept a house-cow and milked it by hand.

Hand milking has, of course, been carried out worldwide over centuries. In the UK, at the turn of the 20th century, it was reckoned that milking by hand allowed around ten cows to be milked in about an hour and a half. It was obviously a time-consuming business - and, after the First World War, one that was in desperate need of some form of mechanisation.

Arthur Hosier, son of a Somerset farmer, was one who embraced change and, amongst other things, developed the milking ‘bail’ - a wheeled, portable, floorless milking parlour containing - as A G Street describes it in his book