Milk

Hi Tony, No, Its my fault. After post 7 or 8, I thought that was the end of the subject, so after Midland Red said the photo could stay, I informed him I had found the original picture in google images.My apologies, I should really have put it on the forum, but, as I said, I thought that was the end of it . Adrian

There was one of those milk machines in Livingstone Road swimming baths. As you walked through the main doors it was on the left hand side. I remember getting a drink from it during the 1960s.

Manor House, Don't remember that, the cafe was on the other side, ran part length of the pool, the door though from the pool halfway down, the counter end on to the door, and the out door level with the pool door, the deep-end and the diving on the left, where you came in from the dressing rooms. Remember it as of yesterday.

The one I remember was outside the post office and the ironmongers shop facing Stoke Park School (near the ten-pin bowling alley. I recall that it had milk and orange juice, too; and that the design was exactly the same as the one in the photo, pale blue and white. Must have been in the sixties; I was a small child, and cannot remember when it disappeared. I have an offering for 'oddest thing bought from a vending machine'... a small tin of olives in brine. Any other offers?

Remember at Livingstone Road having hot drink of an OXO cube in the late '40s early '50s.

When I went to Eschwege whilst working for Massey Ferguson they had a beer machine! Us Brits were most impressed.

Manor House, The milk company at Aldermans Green had white glass thin necked bottles, I think they had the treatment to the milk imprinted in the glass somehow, it was most important.

Kaga. It's likely to have been 'Coventry Purity Milk Supply'. Formed in December 1926 after the purchase of another dairy and closed sometime around 1954. Edit: I do have one of their bottles.

Hi Manor House, thank you. As I said, in the early twenties milk was a great scourge, killing thousands of children. The purity milk firm I believe used heat treatment or such to pasteurise their milk, whatever they named it, purity because it purified the milk from TB, and other firms followed suite. I'm sure there was a lot in the papers of those days. 1940ish, the government regulated the milk firms to certain streets for economy and I believe 'purity' lost a lot of their customers to me, for the scare had passed, and I lost the Stoney Stanton Road, Foleshill Road and Old Church Road customers.

It has been 48yrs since I've had fresh milk like that. But, for our safety today, milk does have to have treatment.

It has been 76 years for me and I milked my own glass, but it wasn't till 1940 that we installed a milking machine and cooling machine. I have no idea if and when pasteurisation became compulsory. The machine at the Livingstone wasn't there in the fifties.

"Pasteurisation" was known about in China since early 12th century.

A recent addition from a well known internet auction site. This vintage metal milk bottle box. To stop the blue tits getting at the cream!

Manor House, Hold on, didn't they have metal tops? I'm sure the Purity did. Weren't they for flak?

Kaga, if you mean sterilised milk, then yes. When I was a bairn, we used to visit my aunt in Foleshill. She always had sterilised milk (for some reason... thinks... apparently it keeps longer, and they were even poorer than us, so had no fridge), and it was in the taller straight bottle as shown in post number 23, not the conventional milk bottle that I was used to. It had the same type of top as a beer bottle, so you needed an opener to open it. I dreaded drinking tea at my aunt's as the milk made it taste vile. I was used to gold-topped Channel Islands milk, which we got from the milkman who lived next door to us. Well me mam thought it was best. Soft tops, of course, so the milkman always placed cups over the tops, to stop the early birds pecking out the cream.