John Attrill on Milk

The original hand milking, that was … well you sat down and you just drew it out by hand and then when labour became just a bit scarcer, we turned over to what we called milking machines which were bucket units that you plugged into the vacuum pipe and put what we called the unit onto the cow’s udder and it went into a bucket which held as much as she’d give, maximum about four gallons.

Then you had to take that away and carry it to the dairy whereas then … that started I suppose about oh, end of the ’40s or perhaps a bit earlier, perhaps end of the War and then about 1960 we went to what they called parlour milking where you had six stalls with specialist milking things and the cows came to it and took their turn and out they went and the milk went straight up and into the dairy and into the bulk tank which was a lot easier.