Several of the people we have interviewed for the project remember their mothers making cheese in the farmhouse:
“And we milked, sold milk, and me mother used to make cheese. She was a very good cheesemaker , but she always said it wasn’t the person who made the cheese, it was the field that the cows ate out of and we had a very good cow pasture there, extremely good one”
Bob (72) & Dick (83) Guy formerly of Hill Top Lodge
Some of the cheese apparently went to feed coal miners in County Durham via markets in Barnard Castle. Bob and Dick Guy remembered their grandfather leaving really early in the morning once a month with the horse and trap taking cheese along with any spare butter and eggs to the market there: “Took hours, longer still on way back if pubs open!!”
Our researcher Sue has just found a little booklet about farming in Upper Swaledale in the late 1940s.
This has proved to be a fascinating read as it was written pretty much at the point in time when the last cheese was being made in the dale. The arrival of efficient road transport and the establishment of the Milk Marketing Board meant that liquid milk became far more saleable:
“By now cheese-making has – to all intents and purposes – ceased in the dale. The writers know of only one farm which up to recently still had a flickering interest in making cheese. The heavy work of the actual processing fell to the lot of the female section of the farm family, and there is little doubt that at least some of them showed no grief when milk began to leave the farm by motor lorry. On the other hand a few regret that they have in all probability made their last cheese. Perhaps it is that the departure of the milk from the farm leaves unsatisfied a craftsman’s pride which was originally rewarded by the sight of something developing under their care and attention. One farmer was about to break a long standing family tradition. Cheese had been made and sold to the same firm for a little over a century and he confessed rather wistfully that it ‘seemed a shame’.”
From ‘Farm Life in a Yorkshire Dale. An Economic Study of Swaledale’ (1948) by W H Long & G M Davies.
The coming of the milk lorry provided a small but useful income stream for some farmers as William Calvert recalled from his childhood:
“At that time, milk wagon used to come from Leyburn, gathering milk. And m’father thought, he had a bit o’surplus. Many a time they sold mebbe five gallon at start, to get going, and so, that was added income. And I’ve seen him on a night just say, after tea, ‘well, I’m off to go get a bit o’profit in’, that was milking at night. He normally milked about four cows by hand.”
William Calvert (83), formerly of Greenses farm