Harper’s Dairy served customers for decades
A Liverpool great-grandmother who grew up in her family’s dairy still lives there 90 years on. Back in the 1800s, generations of farmers from the Pennine Dales sought a new life in areas that now encompass Liverpool as we know it today.
The cowkeepers or dairymen as they were known sold milk to a rapidly expanding city population, with their families going on to serve customers for generations. Refrigeration and pasteurisation later became common place, and other factors such as shelf life for milk being extended and the Milk Marketing Board coming into existence saw cowkeepers role as both producers and retailer decrease.
And while this may feel like a distant part of our city’s heritage – it is still within living memory. In 1935, Joan Fenney (nee Harper), then aged three, moved to Harper’s Dairy on Rose Lane in Mossley Hill with her parents and siblings Olive and Thomas.
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Joan’s dad, Edward Harper and mum Doris Harper (nee Stockdale) both came from dairy backgrounds and raised their family on the historic dairy site. In the early days, the Harper’s delivered milk to generations of customers using a horse and cart.
In 1972, Joan and her husband Jim took over Harper’s Dairy and continued to live there with their children, Rob and Sarah. It’s now been 25 years since it operated as a dairy, but Joan, now 93, still lives at Harper’s Dairy and couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
As part of the Liverpool ECHO’s How It Used To Be series, we visited Joan at Harper’s Dairy to see some of the relics of its past and to hear her incredible memories spanning decades. The great-grandmother told the ECHO: “My mother’s parents originally had a dairy opposite the Brookhouse pub.
“The family had been in Bootle till then and when my mum was six weeks old they moved into what became Dafna’s Cheesecake Factory – they moved into it brand new when it was fresh built. My father’s parents had a dairy in Wavertree in Chestnut Grove and both families originated from Yorkshire when everybody was coming to Liverpool to make a living.
“They knew of one another because they both knew that the other family was doing the same as them, coming down to make a living, but they didn’t meet. Then their parents both retired and went back to Yorkshire, which is now Cumbria, and it was only when they got back up there that they met.
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“My mother had been in Liverpool on Smithdown Road for 20 years, but dad had gone up, I think it was less than 10 years that he was in Liverpool, so he was a real Yorkshireman by the time they met. Mum wanted to come back to Liverpool so when this place came up for sale in 1935 and they were married, they came down.
“There was my sister, my brother and me, the baby, who was aged three when we came down and I’ve now lived here for 90 years. My dad, he insisted on being called a cowkeeper, whereas most people were just called dairymen.”
As a child, Joan said she remembers there being bells in the different rooms, work being done the family’s back kitchen and there also being a washhouse where all the milk bottle would be cleaned. She said their family home was “always open” to the children who lived around them and during the war, they were the only ones who had a phone for neighbours to use.
The mum-of-three said: “This place was absolutely swarming with children. Rose Brae was full of children.
“People had gone off to the war and the kids just came and played here. As they got a bit older, they got interested in farming.
“One young fellow that was a friend of my brother’s, he took on a sheep farm over in Australia and then moved to New Zealand. The last I heard of him, which was about 20 odd years ago, he was extremely wealthy.
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“There was another, he moved down to Shropshire and his father came to the back door and told me off because we encouraged him to come here. But what he did was he went to an agricultural college afterwards and then his father bought him a farm.
“It was a sort of stepping off for people that were interested in that sort of a life. They got it in their blood a bit and my dad always had a couple of lads with him just helping us and they came for nothing – they just wanted to be here.”
Joan said Harper’s Dairy had 32 cows and that they used to deliver milk on a horse and cart. She said: “I was a teenager when I started the milk round.
“My brother went back up to Cumbria, he owned the sheep farm, so I had to take over his milk round. I’d not been very good at doing anything – but I could do a milk round. I was good at it.
“You just got a customer here, there, everywhere. But when the war started, they allotted you so much and we were allotted our share of what we could have and that was the whole Pitville estate.
“So at one period, I served every house there. As soon as the war finished, we started getting people back because people liked getting the milk from this sort of a dairy.” By the 1950s, Joan said her dad whittled down the amount of cows they had from 32 to three, as pasteurisation became more common.
This saw many local dairies buying in milk to continue to deliver on their rounds. Joan said: “Having your milk pasteurised meant getting up and milking, sending your milk away, getting milk back – so you weren’t getting your own back, you were getting anybody’s milk back.
“My dad was a sheep farmer, and so got rid of the cows. Being a sheep man, he went round all the properties, the likes of Sudley House, and we had sheep there.
“He was allowed to put sheep on the golf course during the war because the war was on. If you had a bit of grass, he would have a sheep on them.”
In 1954, Joan married her husband Jim and together they had two children, Rob and Sarah. In 1972, Joan and Jim took over Harper’s Dairy.
Joan said: “I had 40 crates of milk and the round took me from 5am till 6.30am. By 6.30am, I’d be buying the morning paper.
“It took me an hour and a half and I always had three school boys or three school girls. Mine was the biggest round, then there was Jim’s round, which was more spread out, around Allerton Drive, Mather Avenue.”
Harper’s Dairy was later taken over by their son Rob, but officially closed 25 years ago in 2000. Joan said the family business was impacted by the rise in local supermarkets – but despite no longer being in operation, its history still lives on.
Joan gave the ECHO a tour of the old dairy, showing us where the 32 cows and a bull were held, as well as the meal house and the stable which held their horses. A wall was also removed in the site to enable vehicles to be moved inside when that was introduced for deliveries.
Inside her home, Joan has empty milk bottles with different Harper’s Dairy designs proudly on display and outside, the old signage can still be seen on Rose Brae. Now in her 90s, Joan has three grandsons, four great-grandsons and one great-granddaughter – named Harper – after their famous family business.
Joan said: “I never want to be anywhere else. If we had any time off, Jim and I always headed up to Cumbria and so we decided that when we retired, we’d buy a house up there. We did, and I didn’t have to be up there many days before I realised, can we go home?
“Nothing I see makes me want to go and live anywhere else – however nice, however tarted up. Nothing else will do – this is home.”