One of David Cameron’s choices on Desert Island Discs, this book reminds us, was ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’. The book does not, however, explain why Cameron chose the Benny Hill ditty. Consulting the online archive, I found the then leader of the opposition explaining that ‘when you’re asked to sing a song’, ‘Ernie’ was the only one to which he could remember all the words. Sue Lawley tested him, and Cameron responded: ‘You can hear the hoof beats pound as they race across the ground, the clatter of the wheels as they span round and round’. It’s a miracle the Notting Hill Set was ever seen as smart.And yet I know what Cameron means.
For our generation milkmen are an exercise in nostalgia. It seems incredible that a novelty song about one could reach the top of the charts, but then it seems incredible that the job existed in the first place. In the late 1960s there were 40,000 milkmen in this country: the figure now is a tenth of that. Before the milkie disappears completely, Andrew Ward — who rattled the pints himself — has documented the once-familiar creature and his world.
There are tactics for protecting your product from birds (one milkman covered the bottles with a fur collar resembling a cat), though the feathery thieves became less interested when full-fat gave way to semi-skimmed. There are tricks for warming yourself on frosty mornings, like putting a brick on your float’s accelerator and running alongside it (what could possibly go wrong?). And there are occasional stints as a super-hero: one guy on Merseyside put out a caravan fire with bottles of lemonade from his van. He increased their effectiveness by shaking them up first.
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