Northumbrian milking machine tales: Old Alf’s contraption

Byres, hemmels, shippons and mistles - milking machine tales

By Jack Dent (2005)

I knew an old engineer in Leyburn when I was an apprentice during the war, and used to go into his workshop to get bits and pieces made, as parts were very scarce in those dark days. Old Alf could just about make anything – he had to.

One day he was fettling something and as I was waiting for it (as lads do), I was nosing about in his back shop and I found a two cylinder Jowett 8hp car which had been butchered and reformed as a mowing machine. It had a car front end and a pair of cast mower wheels and a cutter bar at the back. Alf told me he had made eight of these machines from scrap cars.

He had made them to order for local farmers between the horse and tractor age. But Alf was getting older and tractors were coming in so the secret of his “motor mower contraption” was lost.

After the war there appeared on the market another wonderful contraption called the “Motorcart”. This had a flat cart body with two rear wheels and at the front it had one huge tractor wheel. The chassis came up in a fork to a pivot on top of this wheel, and a 5 hp Petter engine was mounted on the side. It only had one forward gear and a reverse, and was steered by a tiller bar by the driver who stood on a platform in front of the cart body. The luxury of the seat was not part of the package.

Norman Harrison had one, and every morning he drove about a mile from Harmby to Leyburn to bring his milk cans to the Express Dairy. The top speed was something less than walking speed and I can vouch for this, for at the time I was an apprentice at the L.N.E.R. workshops next door to the Express Dairy. Norman had the machine for about 15 years and used it every day. He said the body fell to bits before the engine gave out – that’s the machine’s body and not Norman’s!

Northumbrian milking machine tales: Aye man, it's gannin' all the way to fifteen!

Byres, hemmels, shippons and mistles - milking machine tales
by Jack Dent (2005)

I installed a milking machine near my home for a very nice old chap and he was pleased at first, but then complained that it didn’t milk as well as his neighbour’s new machine. The neighbour’s was an Alfa-Laval and I found out that this neighbour was telling him that his machine worked better because his clock read 15, and the Simplex only 13.

The fact was that the different vacuum readings were due to the different pulsator requirements, but I thought I wouldn’t get very far trying to explain this to the old man. So I took a screwdriver to the back of the clock when the old lad wasn’t around and made it read two inches of mercury higher.
Photo: advertisement from the late 1930s for Alfa Laval equipment.

He was delighted and I was especially pleased when his neighbour told him that he thought the Simplex was a bit better milking machine.

One day I was fitting a small machine in a Dales byre and while fitting the vacuum line overhead, the farmer’s son came in and asked me if there would be any vibration in the pipe.

Picture: Widely used bucket type of milking plant, operating from a fixed overhead vacuum line. From Kenneth Russell (1969) The Principles of Dairy Farming.

His father was with him and then later on that afternoon, the old man came back into the byre. I was standing on the milking cracket fixing a tap and the old man walloped me across the backside and said “Thooed better leave a hole in yan end”. I asked him what for, and his reply was “te let viberashum oot”.

Northumbrian milking machine tales: Modern Contraptions and Young Upstarts

Byres, hemmels, shippons and mistles - milking machine tales
by Jack Dent (2005)

When I was fitting, I installed a weird contraption on a farm just outside Hexham; it was called a Runway Parlour and was very successful. First I suspended a runway track around the cowshed, and from it I suspended a cradle which supported a standard 10-gallon milk churn. The churn had a flat lid with a pulsator and inlet spigots. The vacuum pipe was also mounted on the runway and the cows were milked through the back legs.

Nothing new in that you may say, but remember this was 1953 and the milk was taken in a metal churn to the dairy and cooled with rotary turbo coolers which was a very efficient system.

I worked on a farm in the East Riding of Yorkshire and it was not a happy place as there was continual conflict between the farmer and his three sons. The lads had threatened to go on strike if he didn’t get a milking machine, and he was much against such newfangled things as he couldn’t see how they could be as clean as hand milking. All the time I was working there he kept coming into the cowshed and telling me that if it didn’t work right, I could take the damned thing away as it was going to be most uncomfortable for the cows.

However, I completed the installation, which was quite a big one for 40 cows. We milked for the first time on a Wednesday night and everything went off smoothly. I think that the cows were pleased that the old man was not there creating the bad atmosphere that constantly accompanied him.

Next morning we milked again and that was the end of my tutelage. I was gathering up my tools ready to depart when he stormed into the cowshed waving a letter. He was waving his stick at me too and I thought I was about to be attacked. He shouted – “I bloody told you, so take the bugger out of here, and give me my money back”.

I finally got him to tell me what the problem was and he said – “Look at this letter from the dairy. My milk has failed the test, and in over 40 years I have never had any milk sent back. It’s a damned disgrace. I knew it would happen, but I let them bloody lads take me into it, and now look what’s happened!”

But my reaction was one of great relief and I’m afraid, and I didn’t endear myself to the old boy as I burst out laughing – the result I’m sure of the relief! I had great pleasure in pointing out to the old chap that the milk, which had been extracted by machine, was still on the milk stand waiting for the lorry to pick it up!

I thought the old bloke was going to have a fit. He was absolutely stunned and turned around and went across the yard muttering about modern contraptions and young upstarts.

Northumbrian milking machine tales: The revolution from hand milking to machines

Byres, hemmels, shippons and mistles - milking machine tales

by Jack Dent (2005)

Forty-five years doesn’t seem long as you live it, but nowadays I get some queer looks from young ones when I mention what went on in the past. This was brought home to me during my last few months working for Simplex. I was moving on after twenty odd years as I had reached the dizzy heights of “Northern Sales Manager”.

Image: an advert for Simplex milking equipment from Farm Mechanisation magazine, August 1966 kindly supplied by Tom Clancy, retired milking machine installer, Hamilton NZ.

 

The Simplex bucket unit used on North Tyne farms

I had to fill in for one of my reps and went up into the Whitby Dales to follow up an enquiry. The farmer was a nice young fellow and I sold him a small milking machine. As I was leaving he said –‘Oh do you have a son working for Simplex”? I said that I didn’t and asked why he wanted to know.

He replied – “When I was a little lad at home a man called Jack Dent put our milking machine in, and he stayed with us and he used to play football with us, eeh we had a grand time”. I looked closer at him and asked if he had lived at Waupley New Inn farm, and he said “Yes I did’! He couldn’t believe it when I told him that I was the same Jack Dent he’d known as a boy. In his mind he imagined that I had stayed the same age even though he had grown into a man.

I don’t think I put in the first milking parlour in the North of England, although I might well have been among the first. But I quite definitely sold the first New Zealand style “herringbone” type parlour in the North. This was to a man at Low Mowthorpe near Malton, and was on the next farm to MAF Experimental Husbandry Farm; it caused a great stir in the district.

Modern New Zealand herringbone

I sold a good many from that one, and I subsequently found that my competitors were taking their prospects to see it, and telling them that their’s was more advanced than ours. I suppose this was fair game as I had taken John Rowbottom down to the Farmer’s Weekly farm at Tring in Hertfordshire to see a Gascoigne herringbone. That was the only herringbone in the country at the time and mine was next.

I shudder to tell you the teething troubles we had with that machine and I just about lived on that farm for weeks. One night I was there and my fitter (Derek) was sorting things out. We couldn’t get something to work right and we decided he would stay the night to keep the thing going.

By this time, Derek was very popular as he was a brilliant piano player after the style of Russ Conway and the Rowbottom girls were all in love with him. They were delighted he was going to stay the night. It was 60 miles from his home and he said to one of these young ladies who was looking forward to hearing him play, “I’ll just nip home for my pyjamas.” “Oh please don’t be long” she said, “I have to go to bed soon.”

The well-cared-for old byre at Greenhaugh on the end of the house

Northumbrian milking machine tales: Getting the cuws used to being machine milked.

Byres, hemmels, shippons and mistles - milking machine tales
by Jack Dent (2005)

After a milking machine was installed, I had to spend sometime showing the farmers how to use and clean it. On one farm I was doing an installation for one of the nicest farmers I have ever worked for. His greatest pleasure was to go to Leyburn market every Friday to meet his friends and discuss the state of the stock trade, and he always wore a smart blue suit and a pristine white shirt.

The night we were to use the machine for the first time, it happened to be a Friday night, so Charlie duly arrived back from Leyburn and looked into the byre to see how I was getting on. I told him I was ready to demonstrate the machine working, and if he could get changed, I would instruct him in its use.

He said he would appreciate if I did the milking that night and he would just watch. He added that he hadn’t missed a milking for over 40 years, and was looking forward to watching someone else milk his cows.

“Fair enough” I said and proceeded to start milking. Charlie stood at the back of the byre which is not very wide in small Dales byres. There was the “standing” where the cow stood which was as long as the cow, then the two-foot wide muck “grip” behind the cow, then if you were lucky, there was about three feet of “back walk” before the wall. Charlie stood there revelling in the fact that he wasn’t having to milk for the first time and he had divested himself of his jacket and tie and just stood there, the epitome of contentment.

Photo: Cowshed with milk pipeline direct to the dairy. Source: Kenneth Russell (1969) The Principles of Dairy Farming.

Now milking for the first time was never the easiest of tasks. I was strange to the cows, and the machine was a new experience to them. In those early days a cow would fetch a lot more money if an auctioneer could declare that “she was used to being machine milked”.

Well of course the inevitable happened. As I was putting the unit on the heifer, she coughed and poor old Charlie was directly in the line of fire. It was a bullseye, right dead centre on Charlie’s pristine best white shirt. I waited for the explosion but he looked at the mess and casually remarked – “I don’t suppose that would have happened if I’d been milking”.

He then departed leaving me to finish the job.

Northumbrian milking machine tales: Traps for young players

Byres, hemmels, shippons and mistles - milking machine tales
by Jack Dent (2005)


I started for the Simplex Milking Machine Company in February 1952 and was designated a “Service Inspector” which meant visiting farms over a wide area fitting new milking machines. At that time most of the herds were between 10 and 20 cows and farmers were making a decent living from those numbers.

I stayed on the farm for about three days while installing the machines; some were good and some I couldn’t get away from fast enough. Some are still friends with half a century on. I also met some “canny lasses”!

As to the buildings themselves, they varied quite a lot from Northumberland byres, Yorkshire Dales “hemmels”, West Yorkshire “shippons” and East Yorkshire “mistles” while up in the hills they were usually called “cow’ouses”!

On the low better land, buildings were nearly always brick and were easy to knock holes though their walls, except if they were on big estates when they were built with “engineering bricks” and were a day’s work getting a two-inch hole through for the vacuum pipe. These bricks were of Victorian origin and through some process in their firing ended up being extremely hard.

The stone walls in buildings up the Dales were a very different matter. It wasn’t simply a case of taking stones out to make the hole for the pipe. Oh no, after a few near disasters I learned to weigh up the enemy, i.e. the wall, and it’s structure built by cunning old masons centuries before. Each stone carried the weight of its neighbours and if I pulled one out, there was likely to be a rumble and I’d end up in a lot of dust (from the lime plaster before cement was invented) and with no wall.

I only had this happen to me once and I didn’t do it. I was being “helped” by one of those farmers who knew everything there was to know about everything, and when I told him not to be too enthusiastic about removing stones from the wall, he told me that the wall had stood for hundreds of years and would be standing long after I had gone. He wasn’t quite accurate! When I heard the first slight rumble, I was gone, and the wall didn’t stand long after my departure. It came down around the farmer and he was left standing on a stepladder with a new view of his farm from his byre.

So the best advice for getting a vacuum pipe through a stone wall was that of hedgehogs making love – the job needs to be done very carefully.

Once I was fitting a new machine away up in Wensleydale and I was working on my own as all the farm staff were in the hayfield. It was about half past two on a nice summer’s day – ideal for haymaking.

I was standing on a three-legged milking cracket (stool), and carefully taking out small stones form inside the wall, when without any warning, one of the throughstones (large flat stones that tie the wall together) slipped and fell sideways trapping my wrist. My arm was at full stretch and I could not move it in any direction.

The cracket, (as crackets were prone to be), was very precarious and any movement on my part was likely to topple the blessed thing and I would have been left suspended by my wrist. I spent a very uncomfortable afternoon stuck in the hole until the men came in from the hayfield. In the way of what usually happens when someone else’s discomfort is witnessed, it was several seconds before they perceived the danger I was in, and were able to stop laughing and release me.