Tuesday, 12 November 2019

And what, we wondered, was a cowkeeper? 

A cowkeeper was a Yorkshire or Lancashire farmer of the early nineteenth century who spotted that milk transported in churns by the railway to growing cities was often sour by the time it got there. Wouldn’t it be better for city-dwellers to have access to milk straight from the cow?

So these enterprising, hard-working dairy families moved with a few cows to Liverpool (in the case of the Joys, to Wavertree and then Garston), where they took, ideally, an end-of-terrace house with a yard, and set up business.

They milked at 5.00 and the milk round started by horse and cart at 7.30. They milked again at 2.00 with a 4.30 round. They delivered straight to the customer’s jug.

So a ‘cowkeeper’ was specifically a keeper of cows who provided superfresh milk rather than corporate railway milk. It was a very precise trade description, holding, perhaps, the same cachet as ‘organic’ today. 

And it was a profitable business (Dave’s grandfather, Percy, owned a Bullnose Morris Cowley and 3 properties).  As well as milk, a cowkeeper would have good quality manure to sell – 4 cows equalled 1 ton of manure a week equalled 5/- a week profit – and milk cart horses produced saleable dung too. 

Cows had a remarkably varied diet. They were grazed where possible, and always had access to municipal grass-cuttings, bran from millers, spent grain from brewers, molasses from sugar refiners, linseed cake from oil merchants, and a variety of seasonal root crops as well as imported maize and peas.

The favoured cow was the shorthorn as she milked well and could be quickly fattened up to sell as beef. These animals would be brought into the city on Cow Fridays, and be driven to their destination cowkeepers, followed by occasional cries of ‘There’s a bull loose!’

Although businesses were successful and were passed on from father to son, after World War II things changed. Many cowkeepers were bombed out of Liverpool and by 1951 no more than 6% of the city’s milk came from city shippons. Moreover, cowkeepers sold milk in its raw state to corporate dairies for the now necessary processing and bought it back bottled to sell on their rounds.

Eventually, the Joys had to give up all their cows and become ordinary milkmen selling corporate milk until they called it a day in the late 1960s.

This account covers a fraction of what Dave spoke about and omits most of his family history, an interlinking second strand to his talk. For those keen to know more, please consider buying his books – ‘Liverpool Cowkeepers’ and ‘My Family and Other Scousers’ – real gems of social history. We were really lucky to enjoy an afternoon with Dave and other Joys.

Our next meeting

U3A Todmorden’s next members’ meeting will be on Thursday, November 21st, 2019 in the Central Methodist Church Hall in Todmorden at 1.45. Our guest speaker, Heather Davis, will be delivering her interestingly-titled talk ‘Frogs, Firearms and Flames’ – Tales of a Museum Curator.

Our contact details are www.u3atod.org.uk (website), info@u3atod.org.uk (email), or 01422 886021 (phone).

Many thanks to Anne Foster for this report

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