We won't forget Ernie!

HISTORIAN MERVYN EDWARDS RECALLS HOW REAL-LIFE ANTICS OF MILKMEN MIRRORED BENNY HILL'S IMMORTAL CREATION

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YOUNG people today wouldn't believe it, but almost anyone who wore a uniform in the past automatically commanded respect including railway station staff, bus conductors and even milkmen.

The milkos of old certainly deserved that acknowledgement, as we shall see today.

Local author Barry Williams wrote of the difficulty of delivering milk in snow. The story goes that in Church Street, Silverdale, during one particularly severe winter, there was three feet of snow. This did not prevent the intrepid milkman, Matthew Redfern from making his deliveries by horse and cart, but how would he drop the milk off if the paths were under such heavy snow?

Well, almost all the houses had sash windows, so people just pulled up their windows and he pushed a long pole towards his customers on which hung a small milk churn. The patrons would remove the churn, pour the milk into their own jug and then place the churn back on the pole so it could be returned to the milko. Problem solved!

But how about this for a door-to-door delivery service? My accompanying photographs show a milk float that couldn't be any nearer to a house in Chesterton namely, 65, Romney Avenue.

The pictures (from around 1985) are from our family archive - the Edwards family has a strong connection with Chesterton on my Dad's side and they capture the moment when a milk delivery lorry accidentally veered off the road and rolled downhill towards the property. I'm told that no one was hurt, but the photographs were taken for insurance reasons.

Weirdly, it isn’t the only connection that our family has with milk floats, because in the late 1960s, my maternal grandmother's house in Barrington Court, May Bank, was frequently a rest-point for two milkmen Bill and his younger sidekick David - who would park their chariot of churns outside in the street and pop in for a refreshing cuppa with Grandma and myself. Heaven knows what the neighbours thought at the time.