Around Bamford: March 2023

Tuesday 7 March 2023

The Story of Milkstone, Near Rochdale, in Greater Manchester.

Milkstone was a small community near Rochdale, just to the south of the town centre. It is now more or less only the name of a road near Deeplish. Milkstone became a thriving weaving community from around 1840. The place-name of Milkstone is obviously derived from the stone tables upon which farmers would place their milk churns to be collected or rested before being collected by horse and cart. These stone tables or milkstones were usually two upright stones with a long stone slab placed on top; sometimes they were wooden tables. Some of these milk-stone tables still stand at the entrance to farms, but they are growing scarcer now, as are the wooden milk tables, which tended to rot away and collapse. And now the milk churns themselves, which stood on top of the stone tables, are now collectors items - and some even antiques!

The Wikipedia website says: "In Britain, milk churns would be left by dairy farmers by the roadside on purpose-built platforms, or stands, at the right height to be loaded on to the dairy's cart or lorry. They fell out of use when milk began to be collected by tanker from the farm and ceased entirely by 1979. Some stands remain in the countryside as historical features, but most have been dismantled or left to decay."

John Cole in his 1988 local history book 'Rochdale Revisited - A Town And Its People', says that:

"Edwin Waugh, the Lancashire dialect poet, believed that the area known as Milkstone got its name in or around 1645, during the Great Plague. According to Waugh, the inhabitants wanted to keep strangers away from Rochdale to mini-mise the risk of contagion, and various "plague stones" or milkstones, were set up to serve the outlying areas. William Robertson, the journalist and historian, disagreed with this dramatic interpretation. Of an earlier stone at Sparth, Robertson states: "Mr Walmsley who owned a large tract of land in Castleton, was the first to erect stone tables on which women could rest their cans of milk." These stone tables "consisted of two upright flags, with another lying across" and a similar stone, on the ancient route to Oldham, lent its name to the area - Milkstone.

"Antiquarian Richard Heape agreed with this derivation of the area named Milkstone (a resting place "for the use of the people, who in the old days had to fetch the milk from the farms") but took issue with Robertson's identification of Walmsley as the local originator of the practise. Whatever the correct derivation, a community slowly grew around the Milkstone and by the 1830s the area consisted of several three-storey weavers' cottagers (built in the early years of the century) and recently constructed back-to-back houses huddled around a central court-yard known as Vine Place. The owners of the properties were local worthies such as Joseph mills (a farmer of 40 acres) who owned several houses in nearby Mere Lane; Robert Taylor Heape, a wood merchant, of Castlemere House, and John Howard, a woolstapler, of Baillie Street.

"The inhabitants of the cottages were not nearly so affluent. As we have seen from the 1820s on, handloom weavers suffered a slow and painful decline into poverty and destitution. Mechanisation (the powerloom) gradually replaced traditional methods, and by 1841 Rochdale woollen (and cotton) weavers in general, and the inhabitants of Milkstone in particular, were in an appalling state. So much so that when the census of 1841 was carried out in Rochdale, a special note was taken of the material wellbeing (or rather the lack of it) of the weavers of Milkstone. The dreadful poverty was confirmed by E Carleton Tufnell, Assistant Poor Law Commissioner, who reproduced the census statistics in a long report dated 2 October 1841:- The cases cited make harrowing reading: Edmund Butterworth, a woollen weaver, 30 years of age, supporting a wife and two children and living in a property with weekly rental of 1s 6d had '"nothing coming into support, had gone five weeks (without any money) and was now in extreme destitution."' John Kershaw, a 35-year-old woollen weaver, was the father of four children; his cottage contained just two beds ('"one very indifferent with no blanket'") and the family was '"in a very distressed condition"'. John Binns, the head of a family of six, was a 45-year old woollen weaver who had '"straw for bedding, there being no proper bed in the house, wrappering for covers, no blankets and no sheets."
"The worst case of all was that of the family of Thomas Blomley (six in all). Blomley was a 30-year-old woollen weaver with a weekly income of 20s paying 1s a week rent. The house contained '"one bed, one cover lid and two sheets"' and Thomas Blomley, who had had been out of work for 10 weeks, was described as '"a case of deep distress who had nearly starved to death for want of food."'

John Cole (1988) adds more to the story, he says: "All in all, hundreds of Rochdale handloom weavers lived in similar conditions. The cottages in Milkstone generally contained '"about half a dozen chairs, two tables and a set of crockery ... the beds were mostly very wretched." However, the buildings themselves '"were mostly well built and secure against the rain ... The sitting room was generally about 15 feet square, floored with stone and the walls plastered and clean." Just as well really, because the cottages at Vine Place, the scene of such poverty and deprivation were not actually demolished until 1940!"

Sources/References:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_churn#Milk_churn_stands

Photo No 2 (above) from Geograph: Waiting for the milk lorry: © Copyright Maurice Pullin and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

John Cole, Rochdale Revisited - A Town And Its People, George Kelsall, Littleborough, Lancashire, 1988.