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« on: Wednesday 18 July 12 18:18 BST (UK) »
Tortoise1's father's account of the dairy sounds very familiar. In the 1960s we lived next door to a dairy farm near Clitheroe and one of my duties, at the age of eleven, was to hop over the wall with a tall, 'willow pattern' jug and 7d (3.5p) for a pint of milk.
The 'cooler' in the dairy consisted of a hefty steel bracket attached to the wall, on top of which was a stainless steel, semi-circular bath which would have held about ten gallons of milk. On the front of this bath was a tap, which discharged into a trough and thence through a row of holes which allowed it to flow down a convoluted heat exchanger into a further trough. The heat exchanger had a hosepipe at the bottom right corner, which was attached to a water tap and a further hosepipe at the top left, discharging into a drain. Below the lower trough, a milk kit was placed with a large funnel called a 'sile' placed in the top. A stainless steel mesh 'sandwich' in the bottom of the sile contained a disc of filter paper, which I was told was called a 'sile wad'. The exciting part was when you asked for the pint of milk and the farmer deftly stopped the flow of milk from the bottom trough, with a plug very similar to a sink plug, removed the sile, dipped a one-pint measure into the milk kit, poured it into your jug (with a bit extra for luck), replaced the sile and then unbunged the bottom trough - all before the milk in the bottom trough started to overflow!
It was never as much fun to watch when farms started using 'bulk tanks'.
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