I am trying to remember when I would have used one. I suppose it would have been after the pub in those years when I was a student and living in a bed sit in Withington.
There used to be a milk machine by the Scala Cinema which in turn was beside the White Lion. And I guess it would have been that bit of forward thinking about milk for breakfast which would have got me using it.
But then without a fridge and with most shops having closed by nine in the evening buying your emergency milk from a machine made sense.
Of course getting the cartoon open was another matter.
All of which got me thinking about the age of the vending machine which I assumed came along in the 19th century.
And there I was wrong, there is a reference to one in the first century when Hero of Alexandria came up with a machine to dispense holy water.*
The first modern one was introduced onto a London street in the early 1880s and sold post cards. For me the first I really remember were the Five Boys Chocolate bars usually on railway stations and which could be guaranteed to deliver slightly dry flaking chocolate which had gone white at the edges. There were also the polo mint machines and the chewing gum ones.
As for the milk vending machine I rather think they began to vanish in the 1970s, possibly in the wake of the supermarket revolution along with cheap fridges. For who would want to stand at what was often a shabby and knocked about machine, fumbling for the sixpence only to discover the coin had got stuck, the machine refused to accept it or worst still there were no cartoons left?
I suppose they fitted into that new high tech way of life that was the late 1950s and 60s, and I have to say that thinking back to the period it does look ultra modern and there was something novel about getting your milk this way instead of from a milkman.
Not of course that the milkman visits many houses anymore and I hear today that one more newspaper is about to turn itself over to an electronic version.
As someone who grew up in the 50s thinking that milk delivered to the door step along with a daily newspaper was the hall mark of civilized life this all seems a little sad.
And if I don’t stop I am in danger of sounding like my uncle who still could not bring himself to accept the fall of Constantinople.
Pictures; vending machine on Shude Hill taken by L Kaye, March 1960, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m59879, m59878, m5987, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass
There's still a milk machine (in working order) near my daughters house in Matlock. We've used it a few times over the past 5 years! Different model to the one in your photo - but a milk (& eggs I think) dispensing machine.
ReplyDeleteWe still receiver doorstep deliveries in glass bottles here in Timperley. Have done since we moved here in 1963. By coincidence, our original deliveries came from the same Heald's Dairy which serviced the machines. After many changes of supplier (but with the same milkman for the past 20 years) we are now supplied by Creamline Dairies which took over from Dairy Crest.
ReplyDeleteWhat's interesting about Creamline is that they supply the milk, not only in bottles with their own branding, but they also supply bottles with the names on them of the various individual farms which supply to Creamline. So we get bottles from farms in areas as diverse as Staffordshire, North Wales, Maghull, Durham, Southport, Knutsford, Chorley, etc. etc. It certainly adds a little interest to the daily pinta.
Loved the noise of the carton falling into the hindged collector
ReplyDeleteWe get milk delivered in Stockport. Curiously we get it in plastic bottles because we choose to have organic milk, the non organic is in glass, I am hoping it will all be in glass.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I am nearly 59 years of age I have never remember seeing a milk dispensing machine, I grew up in East Yorkshire.
We have milk delivered every other day to our doorstep by Milk and More.
ReplyDeleteWe get milk delivered every other day by Milk and More
ReplyDeleteI clearly remember the milk machine installed at Oldfield Park, Bath.
ReplyDeleteAs one poster wrote, they had a specific noise when dispensing the carton. A very loud resonating electrical BUZZZZZZZ from the solenoid as the carton fell down to the flap beneath. Both the carton of milk and the orange cost 6d. (two and a half pence)
It wasn’t unusual in those days to get mostly everything from street vending machines. I remember POLO mints, Little baby inch square yellow white and green packets of Beech Nut chewing gum, Fry’s chocolate creams, Four Boys chocolate, and particularly the little sixpenny boxes of Payne’s Poppets.
Along the road from where i used to live was a hardware and iron mongers shop that sold everything from pounds of six inch nails, to tin baths, buckets and brush heads.
Outside were two other vending machines. One dispensed a gallon of unbranded pink paraffin for four bob (20 pence). and the other was a very stately Esso Blue paraffin machine. Both were bolted side by side and we used to take the gallon container from our ‘Alladin’ room heater and place it underneath where we placed a rubber tube into the neck of the drum and it was automatically filled. All of these machines were beautifully lit by electricity at nighttime.
Can you imagine in this day and age anything like this surviving?
The digital age may have come about, but as a society we really have regressed. Nevertheless i am thankful to have lived through those times which were not only quieter, but far safer than nowadays.
I so agree anonymous .... the downside was getting one of those chocolate bars from a station vending machine and discovering that age had turned the edges white!
ReplyDeleteAs a kid my favourite vending machines were the cigarette ones because they didn't ask for I.D.
ReplyDeleteI used to go to Aberdeen football games with my dad. On the way back home to peterhead, we'd stop at a shop in the bridge of Don and get a carton each of milk. I'd have pink milk and dad would have plain. Sadly, the machine disappeared in the 1970s. Dad died years ago, but I still remember those days.
ReplyDelete3or4 in the morning after a night on the beer life saver nothing else open in them day's
ReplyDeleteLoved those milk machines as a child. There was a choice of 1/2 pint of milk, 8 fl oz strawberry milk (sometimes banana) or 8 fl oz orange squash. The sound of the sixpence (or later on 2 x 2p coins) dropping, pressing the button, the anticipation as the screw mechanism turned and the clunk as the carton dropped. Then the challenge of opening the carton cleanly - sometimes it tore - and then glugging the milk without it dripping down your chin. What a great experience!! Poor kids of today who missed out on all this!
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