Burford Dairy

Burford Dairy
Whilst posted to RAF Brize Norton in 1965-67 I found an additional source of income.
Just outside Burford was Burford Dairy, Ian the son of the family who owned would come into the pub in Carterton on occasions and one evening asked if any of us airmen would like to work in the dairy in the weekend mornings to bottle up milk for delivery across the Cotswolds. So started a long period where me, John Lucey, Frank Cooper, Pete Watling, and a couple of others were involved at the dairy most weekends at about 7 am, with often a hangover, operating the milk bottle cleaning equipment and then the machines that filled the bottles with milk.
We would normally finish about 11 am and back to Brize. This was in the days when all milk was in glass bottles. There were from memory about nine or ten milk dairy delivery companies across the area that contracted to Burford Dairies for their supplies of milk. Each dairy had its own bottles with its own name, logo and design. We had a bottling schedule that gave us the quantity of milk to be bottled for each dairy. This was in normal, gold top and jersey and school milk. No semi skimmed or fat free in the 1960’s. The first job was to locate enough bottles, for each dairy, to do the run. Empties that had been returned were in piles around the yard so they were located and fed into the bottle cleaning process. If there was not enough, we would go into a big shed and locate new bottles that were in storage for each of the customers. Once the bottles had been located then it was on to the cleaning process.
Once the bottles had been through the cleaning process and crated it was on to filling. Crates of clean bottles were fed down a conveyor belt and where one of us would operate hydraulic machine to grab the bottles from the crates. As the crate came down the operator would plunge the apparatus down into the crate where each bottle would be secured around the neck, a leaver pulled to secure them and in one movement the secured bottles were lifted up, swung round and the leaver released, and the bottles deposited on a line flowing into the milk dispensing machine. The bottles were filled with milk and re-joined the conveyor; another person loaded the bottles into the now empty crates. Another operator took the crates off the line and stacked up each dairies order compliment on the loading bays awaiting loading onto lorries and out to delivery.
As you can imagine this was a task that could easily go wrong and frequently did. Wrong bottles for a dairy, breakages on the line, bottle jams and a broken glass.
And a fair quantity of milk consumed by us operators.

Soon after we had started, we all ended with an irate Ian taking us to task. Somehow the previous weekend a returned bottle had gone through the cleaning process, filled with milk, sent to Chipping Norton Dairy who had delivered the bottle of milk to a customer. The customer had the most unpleasant surprise. In the bottle was a large rat that had got into the bottle, originally, we guessed to drink left over milk. The bottle had had gone through all the processes complete with rat and delivered to a customer.
It was a badge we wore with pride.