The Co-op Dairy, Kingstanding Road

In 1940 a boy called Bernie Ryman started work at the Co-op milk dairy on Kingstanding Road. Eighteen months later, with the older men called up, he had a round of his own. It began in Kings Road and finished in Cooksey Lane, and he worked it with a horse called Tasty. In winter he put studs in the horse’s shoes, lit the candles in the cart lamps and set off, as he told Voices of Kingstanding, “Hail Rain or Snow”. When the drifts were too deep, “we would get as far as possible then use a sleigh to finish the round.”

For the estate’s first generation, this is where the milk came from. The dairy stood on Kingstanding Road just down from the junction with Hawthorn Road and Dyas Road, between Goodway Road and the Territorial Army drill hall. The drill hall is still there, as the Army Reserve Centre. The dairy has gone.

Stables at the bottom of the slope

Bernie remembered the layout exactly. The yard ran down a slope, with the stables at the bottom and the empty carts parked along one side. Opposite were the offices, a receptionist and “the boss man a Mr Kinsella”. Up at road level was the loading deck. The milk came out from the main dairy in the city the afternoon before and waited overnight in the cool rooms. During the war the men took turns to sleep at the dairy, in case it was bombed and the horses had to be got out.

Maurice Sellar remembered “about 10 or more magnificent clydesdales”. In snow or frost a cart needed two horses to climb onto Hawthorn Road; going the other way, he said, fully laden carts went “full gallop down the Warren Farm hill”. Richard Wall, who grew up in Hurlingham Road, remembered green carts and horses that knew the round so well that the milkman could call his horse up the street from behind a hedge. Wall and his friends learned to call it first. Carol’s grandfather, Sid Evans, was the dairy’s farrier.

From horses to floats

The horses went when the electric floats came. Maurice Sellar said most went to the knacker’s yard and some, after an outcry, to a home for old horses. By July 1964, when Les Robinson started as a “jockey” straight from Great Barr Comprehensive, every round went out by float, though a few old horses were still stabled at the dairy “seeing out their time”.

Rounds were two-man jobs, a milkman and a lad, usually under eighteen. The gates opened at 4.30 to 5 in the morning. Sundays were busy with extra pints and cream; Mondays were for empties; on Fridays and Saturdays the lad delivered while the milkman collected the money, and they finished at five or six. There were four kinds of milk: pasteurised, homogenised, sterilised (“usually used for cups of tea”) and Jersey gold cap, a penny dearer.

He also remembered the morning after a stag night, when about twenty of them came through the gates an hour late and the governor was waiting: “This is a dairy but smells more like a damn brewery this morning.”

One old photograph on Voices of Kingstanding shows a milkman with his horse and cart and is marked only “Kingstanding – Harry Holly”. Mike Johnson later wrote that his grandfather, Harry Johnson, was a Co-op milkman in Kingstanding in the late 1930s and was photographed with his horse, Holly, just before the war. It may well be the same picture.

Three dairies on one road

The Co-op was not the only dairy. Bernie Ryman and Richard Wall both remembered the Midland Counties Dairy further along Kingstanding Road towards the Circle; Wall put it just past the Settlement, and remembered that its floats were already electric in the war. A third firm, Wathes, Cattell and Gurden, used vans.

The Co-op held a sports day every year for the men and their families. The year his team won the tug of war, each man got a little cake stand. The photograph, from about 1950, names them: Bernie Ryman, Tom Smith, Cyril Hethington, Norman Broad, Bert Tyler and Dennis Linden.

Some stayed for good: Keith Moore left a Hawthorn Road butcher’s to be a milkman here for twenty-two years, and John Baxter, his daughter wrote, worked for the Co-op dairy for forty. When the depot closed is not recorded. But for two generations of Kingstanding lads, the first job of their lives began at those gates at five in the morning, a crate in each hand and the whole sleeping estate in front of them.