Memories of the Milk Marketing Board

Starting out at the MMB

The Milk Marketing Board (MMB) was established in 1933, at a time when thousands of dairy farmers were struggling financially. The purpose of the MMB was to buy, advertise and sell milk: guaranteeing a reasonable price for farmers and finding buyers for every drop of milk produced in England and Wales for the wholesale market. To fulfil this duty, the MMB had a vast staff network that operated across both countries and there were many different ways of acquiring a job in one of these positions.

Below you can hear our interviewees explain some of the ways in which people were recruited.

Anita

Anita joined the MMB when she was 16 years old and worked in the typing pool. Here she shares her memories of and feelings towards acquiring her first job in 1979:

Audio Transcription

Anita: Well, I was born in Walton-on-Thames in 1963, and I was brought up for a little while in Thames Ditton. We lived in Thomley Road which is just a little way down the road from where the Milk Marketing Board is. And then we moved to West Molesey, then the rest of my younger life I lived in West Molesey. And I left school, Bishop Fox school, and I left there when I was 16.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Anita: But my dad was a self-employed plumber and my mum just did, sort of, general little jobs. She worked in the local factory for some of the time but a lot of my childhood my mum was ill and in hospital a lot of the time. And so, I left school when I was 16 in 1979 and started working at Milk Marketing Board straight away. It was one of the best jobs that school leavers could get, to work at the milk Marketing board. They took on a lot of leavers. They were kind of like, in the area, one of the best jobs that you could get. And, yeah, I started there in 1979, literally weeks after I left school. And I worked in the typing pool. I learnt to type when I worked at the Milk Marketing Board, that was one of your, you know, like, options that you did typing and business studies, so I did that. Obviously learning to type on the really like old manual typewriters because that was all that they had at the time. Sort of kind of gave me the background to go into office work. And I wanted to be a secretary. So, as I say, that was how I ended up working in the typing pool because when you applied for the job at the Milk Marketing Board, if I remember properly, you just, you applied to work at the Milk Marketing Board and then you were, kind of, like, slotted into where they thought you would be. But, yeah, when I applied there, I went into the typing pool.

Steve Narramore

Steve recounts the process of how he was recruited by the MMB while studying at Bristol University:

Audio Transcription

Steve: Ok, so, I was born in 1957 in Leamington Spa, in the Midlands. My father was working for the tax service, so we had a fairly mobile lifestyle because they didn’t like tax people to stay in the same place for more than three or four years in case they got too cosy with the local accountant. So, my dad’s career was like three or four years at various different places, so we moved to Africa, in fact, we were in Kenya from ’59 to ’62, then we were in Bristol, then we were in Swansea, then we were in Newton Abbot in Devon, and then, by that time, I went off to college which was at Bristol University and my parents went off to Dorset.

After university was when I went and got my first job which was at the Milk Marketing Board in September 1978. I had two sisters, one older, one younger. My big sister went to London before me, because she was two years older, so when I came up to London, it was the first time I’d been really, to a big city and of course it was the punk era and I was a punk so it was very exciting for me to get a job up near London because it meant that I could go up to London all the time and go to the marque and electric ballroom and Camden Town and all those places and see all the punk bands, and when I’d been at college, I’d been to see lots of rock bands and that because I was really into that.

So, I should have mentioned probably that, at Bristol, I did economics, and I got recruited by the Milk Marketing Board through, what was laughingly called ‘The Milk Round’ quite coincidently, which was nothing to the Milk Marketing Board, it was just that a lot of big firms in those days used to go to the universities and do some mass interviews in order to recruit large numbers of people and the Milk Board, in those days, would recruit probably 50 graduates a year from various universities. So it was rather marvellous for us as, sort of 21 year olds, coming out of university because you, you know, you came there completely as a stranger but you were mixing with 50 other strangers who would all come from various places and, add to that, you’re working for a place where there were probably 1,500 people working so there was a lot of youngsters employed there as well, local youngsters who, you know, a lot of young boys and girls who were working in the various departments, you know, as juniors, one sort or another, working their way up the same as we were. And the other thing that was great for the graduates was that they had a whole induction process which was really good because, what they would do, was take you out to various, in the first few months you were there, you would go out as a sort of big group of graduates and you would visit various board locations, so they would take you to a regional office, and they had about, I can’t remember how many, maybe six or seven regional offices around England and Wales. They would take you to an AI centre, an artificial insemination centre where you could see a bull being milked for its semen, they would take you to a dairy where they were making cheese or cream or whatever. And they would take you to a sort of bottling plant as well, you know, where you could see the milk being put into bottles.

Robert Prebble

Robert joined the MMB in 1965 after completing a six week course at the London School of Computer Programming. Here explains why he joined the MMB and how the experience he gained there helped shape his future career:

Audio Transcription

Robert: I worked as the computer operator at the MMB in the data processing department in 1965 and that was following completing a course, a six-week course, at the London School of Computer Programming.

Interviewer: Right, and how long were you there for Robert?

Robert: I was only there for six months. I terminated my employment and joined a united friendly insurance in Suffolk as a trainee underwriter. After public school education I joined the Airforce and spent three and a half years in the Airforce and, after that, I decided to embark on a career in data processing or IT, and that’s how it came about basically.

Interviewer: What made you want to do that, data processing?

Robert: I was just interested in technology, basically, that’s what it was, the main interest.

Jobs at the MMB

From it’s headquarters at Gigg’s Hill in Thames Ditton and supported by a workforce of 7,000 employees spread further around the country, the MMB maintained stable economic conditions for up to 70,000 independent farms. Everyone had a job to do and managers ensured that it was done well.

Below you can explore the variety of opportunities and job roles available at the MMB.

Betty Bore and Sandra Murray

It was crucial that the milk produced by the farmers was of a high quality. Both Betty and Sandra were responsible for testing the milk and reporting their findings back to the farmers so that they could act on any issues that arose. Here they explain how the milk was tested:

Audio Transcription

Betty: Well, I was, it was called central testing, and I was in the office and I would work ten days on and then four days off, which I thought was marvellous because it was like having a holiday every fortnight. There were two of us in the office, there was a young man, I think his name was Dave, was there, and he just explained that we took results from the laboratory and passed them onto the main section and then we would contact farmers if there was a problem with their milk samples and talk to them. Shall I tell her about my moment of fame?

Interviewer: Yeah, go on.

Betty: Well, Michael Evis who is the Glastonbury man, you know, I had to phone up and tell him that he’d got antibiotics in the milk, which was, of course, something that had to be dealt with and he was so polite and said “thank you very much, I’ll get onto it straight away.” And I thought that was my moment of fame, talking to Mr Glastonbury himself. But in general everybody was very polite and they realised we were trying to help them, make sure their milk was of a fit quality to be sold so there were no problems at all.

Interviewer: And would you, so you would phone the farmers up?

Betty: On occasion.

Interviewer: Yeah, and how about you Sandra? Just your job role and what it entailed.

Sandra: I was, the job title was milk analysist. Basically there was a rota on the wall and you were given a job for the day, if you like, from, the milk samples used to come, were collected on the back of the milk tankers and it was a big black box and they took two samples in little sample pots, put them in the black box with ice packs and eventually they arrived at the Thames Ditton lab. There were other labs dotted around the country, I think there was one in Clineffly, Newcastle and Plymouth. So the samples would arrive in boxes, you’d get loads of boxes a day, and then basically, in the sample reception was where the boxes were opened and you had two samples from each farm and they were put in long aluminium racks. So you put, you had two racks and they went in the same position. All the racks were numbered and these racks, once they were filled up, stored in a fridge, and then the testing began and the first instrument they used to go through was called the petrifoss and basically you loaded the rack on, you had to shake it, load it onto the machine, and then it had, like a dipping needle, and it would go down into the sample, go up, go across and it would be put into, the sample of milk would be blown into a petri dish of milk agar. And then you stacked the petri dishes in a basket and then they went into a, I think it was an incubator type thing for the bacteria to grow. The ID process went round. Every sample had a bar code to each farm, and a certain barcode number, and that was that farm’s number. And it went round and three days later, whoever was on the, counting the bacteria job, I can’t remember the name of the instrument that you used to use. Would take the baskets out the incubator and then they’d literally put it on this machine and count, by hand, with a water soluble pen, used to mark the petri dishes of all the bacteria that had grown in the three days.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Sandra: And if there was a lot in there, then they had a high count.

Janet

Janet worked as a cook for the MMB. Here she explains some of the challenges that came with her role:

Audio Transcription

Janet: As a cook I wasn’t involved in the menu setting at this stage, when I first joined, it was basically cooking what was on the menu. It was always three hot meals, there was always salad and there was always milk pudding, for obvious reasons, and there was always custard. And hot and cold desserts and it was just a case of getting in at seven and preparing for that day to be ready for twelve o’clock. And I think the service was twelve until two, I think, from what I can remember. And then clearing up afterwards. Washing up.

Interviewer: Was the day quite, did the kind of pressure change as you went through the day?

Janet: Absolutely, as you got closer to twelve o’clock the pressure was on to make sure everything was ready.

Interviewer: Right.

Janet: And everybody had their own area that they were responsible for, and then we’d swap round, you wouldn’t be doing it all the time.

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah. And did you know in advance, what you’d be cooking?

Janet: Oh yeah, we’d have menus for the week, in fact we might have even had them for the month. And then when I became head chef I was doing all the planning and the ordering of the food as well so I would spend a lot less time in the kitchen and only be in the kitchen if somebody was off sick or on holiday.

Janet Turner

Janet worked in the MMB’s marketing department. Here she explains the breadth and depth of work that this department was responsible for:

Audio Transcription

Janet: My role at, in market development covered a huge, huge field. It covered things like the advertising on television, sponsorship of things like cricket, the Milk Race, which was a huge event. And when that was on the road all the enquiries actually came through to the office, I worked in. We also dealt with things like milk vending machines, also mobile milk centres that actually went to all the country shows, and also, we had a department called The Dairy Produce Advisory Service. This was a service that actually wrote articles on the goodness of milk and the products that were produced from milk, and so these were things that were sent to schools, there was information to local clinics, or health visitors, and pregnant mothers. Also, we were part of information to schools and the catering of schools and their lunches and so this was a huge, huge area.

Now, that was a very small part because also we produced things like cookery books, and when we’re talking about cookery books, a run for an average cookery book was 1.6 million. So this was a huge event. Dairy Produce Advisory Service would have actually tested all the recipes, had photographs taken and then we had our own print buyers who would actually market these, they went to a printer and then our sales teams in the areas and, as I say, there were 12 area offices, and so we had sales teams in all those offices. So it covered a vast area.

We also did quite a lot of research into ice cream, cheese, butter and obviously different kinds of milk. So the marketing was really important and it was extremely interesting. So I got involved in lots of different sorts of produce and, yes, it was a very exciting time.

Socialising at work

Unlike other companies at the time, the MMB had many on-site facilities which its staff (and their families) could use at their leisure. From a swimming pool and a tennis court to staff theatre trips, the MMB seemed to have it all! These staff benefits made the MMB a great place to work and many interviewees have fond memories of the times spent using these facilities both inside and outside of working hours.

Here some of the memories made below:

Jane and Ken Jukes

Jane and Ken met while working at the MMB. Ken remembers the facilities available at work and how he enjoyed them with his colleagues:

Audio Transcription

Ken: Yeah, I would play most lunchtimes, seems to be my recollection, badminton, squash. When I was sort of 16, 17, 18 I was quite a good squash player and so played squash when I got to the MMB. Badminton, there was a guy in the department, Dave Mole, remember him?

Jane: He died unfortunately.

Ken: He was a semi-pro footballer. He had played for the county, in whatever division they were in, and he was very good and so sometimes we’d go out, five, six, seven or us and go and play football. I used to play in goal for my school and so I’d always end up in goal, firing shots at me. That was all very good as well and then there is the bar, the Friday evenings after work. So those are really the abiding memories I have of the Milk Marketing Board. It was just meeting with very much likeminded people, sport, getting together, and its just purely an extension of university. I only did one year at polytechnic and it was almost like that gave me the full three year experience if you like because of meeting so many likeminded people and the ability to have a good time. It really was. It was a special two years, not only because obviously I met Jane but just, you know, the friends you made.

John Coker

At the MMB, John worked in computing. Here he describes how he would spend his lunchtimes while at work:

Audio Transcription

John: There was a social club onsite, so we had a swimming pool, badminton court, basketball court, bowling green, cricket pitches, football pitches, it was just wonderful. A bar, a function room, it was just unbelievable. And, so, you know, you might go from office to bar. Often at lunchtime I’d play tennis with one of my colleagues, maybe go for a swim. There was the fete every year for all the family. We could bring the family at the weekend, to go swimming. So, you know, lounge around all day at the swimming pool.

Interviewer: Yeah.

John: I didn’t play cricket or football, but, some tennis, swimming, some badminton, you know. It was there so, it was so easy.

Interviewer: And with the fete, were you involved in organising that or taking part?

John: No, took part. A guy called John Fisher was the sports and social club secretary, I suppose. He used to organise it. He was also the regional manager in Harrogate, in his later days. He used to live in Esher, then he moved up to Harrogate. I don’t know what happened to him.

Roger Allen

Engaging with the sports facilities was not the only pastime at the MMB. Roger remembers forging new relationships with his colleagues:

Audio Transcription

Roger: Well, a particularly interesting time was when I was at the bottling plant in Preston, we were very short of staff, and we would be near somewhere about 1964, we’ll say, and we were very short of people and along came the first Caribbean gentleman I’d ever met and said he wanted a job and looking back I realise the Windrush generation was just arriving, they were arriving in Liverpool and in Preston which had docks at that time. This gentleman came for a job, which I was happy to give him because we hadn’t got enough people and he said to me, “well Mr Allen, do you need anymore people?” “Well yes, I said, we do.” And immediately the following day two more Caribbean men arrived. One of the interesting things there was that I said to these chaps, “well, where do you live?” and they gave me an address in Preston and I said, “and what about you?” and he gave me the same address as the first man and I now realise that these chaps were, what was called, ‘hot bedding’. They were going to work, someone else used the bed, and then they came on their next shift, as it were. So that interested me, the very concept of all these men living in the same house.

Memorable moments

The sports facilities available at the MMB were not the only thing that the interviewees had fond memories of. Explore some of the other memorial moments below:

Christine

Christine joined the MMB as a junior clerk after she left school and progressed on to have many other roles within the company during her ten years of service. Here she recounts the work she carried out while covering on Boxing Day each year:

Audio Transcription

Christine: Well, I carried on as per usual because obviously the bosses were on 24-hour call for any situation but it was a lot harder and you still had to arrange everything to run normally. So, you still had to arrange the transport over strikes and deliveries. It was a bit harder, but it wasn’t quite my responsibility to deal with that. Obviously, snow made life a bit difficult, yeah. And I always worked on Boxing Day, because we had 24-hour cover. So, bosses used to be on, say the weekend, and if there were any real emergencies you would come in and help out. Particularly like Christmas, that would be when everything was shut down, you’d all have to do the cover. If you were having snow, snow might mean that you’d have to work an extra day, it was just to keep the flow of milk going so that the pint was always sitting on the doorstep.

There would be three people on Boxing Day, and it was, I used to volunteer for Boxing Day every time. The A3 was empty, you used to get there, and the building was empty, and you used to just sit there and work together sorting out a couple of days in advance, phoning it out. Those were the things you were doing all the time. Not only working out where to move things to but you had to phone every creamery, every dairy and all the transport to actually arrange everything every day.

Jennifer

Many interviewees remembered the bomb threats that used to occur onsite at the offices of the MMB. Here Jennifer explains the surprising way that these were handled:

Audio Transcription

Jennifer: Well I can remember exciting times, I don’t know whether it’s happy times but, I remember, I’ve always thought it was quite funny, we had bomb threats at one time from, well I don’t know who from actually, but we used to have a dustbin that was lined with foam, right. And if a parcel came in that they weren’t sure about, they used to put it in this dustbin in case it exploded. And I always thought, I don’t know if that would have done any good if it had of been a bomb, and I always remember, the young lad, he had ordered some name plates for doors and it came and somebody thought they looked suspicious and they put it in this box, this dustbin. All it was, was name plates for the door, you know.

Interviewer: So, what would happen, how would they make the decision as to like something looks dodgy?

Jennifer: I don’t know. I don’t know.

Interviewer: You’d have to feel it?!

Jennifer: I don’t know if they didn’t realise what this was.

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah.

Jennifer: A funny shape or something, I don’t know. Whether these door plates looked like things of dynamite or something, I don’t know. I don’t know because it was just this ordinary dustbin.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Jennifer: With all this foam round the inside of it, inside the lid and they put it in there. I don’t know.

Peter Roper

Peter joined the MMB as a junior clerk. As a young 19 year old, he quickly made lots of friends and created innovative ways to spend time with them, during work hours:

Audio Transcription

Peter: There was one particular girl I got on really well with, her name was Wendy, in fact I found a picture of her on the ‘I used to work for the Milk Marketing Board’ Facebook group, on, what did I say in that? Sorry, I’ll just find that a minute. This is what I wrote ‘all the other clerks were female, and I was in heaven as a 19 year old. Below is a birthday card which the girls, in quotes, made for me led by Wendy, a lovely young lady who lived quite near in Kingston. We occasionally co-ordinated sick days so we could go out together. I remember this happening once we both decided we were going to go out for the day together and skip off work, and so we both did that, but when we came back into the office, of course, these other ladies, some of them a bit older, were no fools. They connected the fact that we were both missing on the same day, so I wouldn’t exactly say we got found out.’

Being a woman at the MMB

At the MMB the division of labour was very much gender orientated. The role of a manager and jobs in computing and IT were considered to be reserved for men. Other, more ‘traditional’ roles including typing and cooking were filled by women. This divide, and the effect that it had on the women involved, is built upon and explained below:

Angie Cook and Maggie Cotter

Angie and Maggie both worked in IT and computing at the MMB. Here they explain how the culture of the time affected their working life:

Audio Transcription

Maggie: It was a great course.

Angie: It was a good time to be in IT, wasn’t it, yeah.

Maggie: But it was very much a man’s world then, wasn’t it.

Angie: It was a man’s world, yeah.

Maggie: One woman, or female, to ten men probably.

Angie: Yeah, something like that. It was getting better by the time I joined. Actually, it got to 50/50 in our office, I thought, at the MMB. Whereas previously, especially at the BBC, I, we were outnumbered. It was ok, it was comfortable because there was lots of young people, so yeah. My boss was a woman.

Maggie: And I think she was probably the only one.

Angie: She would have been late 60s, 70, odd which is unusual because IT, data processing only got going in the sort of late 60s, 70s, they would have had to have been trained up, they didn’t start in it, you know. There was, a sort of, revolution going on, wasn’t there, in business, that it was all going onto computers. So, coming to the Milk Marketing Board, getting back to that, they were an established system, weren’t they with ICL machines and they had, like, their payroll was all run on it and all the standard stuff. But new stuff was coming in and we were converting stuff.

Maggie: There was still some of it that was paper based.

Angie: It was paper based that we would then put onto computers.

Maggie: I have always felt, in IT, I mean, teaching in primary schools was different, that was mostly all women, in IT as a woman you had to be better than the men to even be recognised as the, or maybe equal to them. Did you feel that?

Angie: I am trying to think. I don’t know. When I was younger in my early twenties, it was all a bit, sort of, you’ve got to prove yourself, in any job, I think. It’s all a bit like that, so there was a little bit of that, but I am not sure that pressure came from a lot of men around. It did evolve. When I went to Sainsbury’s it was very predominantly men but by the time I got to the Milk Marketing Board 12 years later, it had, it was getting 50/50. Yeah, it was going that way and you felt more comfortable with more women. Although I didn’t feel intimidated and in the early 70s offices were where you got pictures on the wall, posters of, like Pirelli posters, were allowed. You’d be sitting in an office and there would be topless women, basically, sitting or posing and you’d just work with that facing you because it was predominately men. Did you have that?

Maggie: There were always some men who felt that women weren’t equal.

Angie: Yes.

Maggie: And so to prove yourself you had to be as good as them or better.

Angie: There was a bit of that, yes, yes.

Maggie: And I think, perhaps, promotion was.

Angie: You think it was hindered?

Maggie: I don’t know.

Angie: The MMB was, I felt, quite liberal. It had got better by then I felt. See, I’d been in IT 12 years before.

Maggie: I hadn’t. It was my first experience.

Angie: But then you’d come from teaching. In my experience it started off predominantly men. BBC, slightly women, but quite a lot of us women working on it. And then by the time I got to the Milk Marketing Board in ’83 it was pretty equal, I think.

Maggie: But most of the managers were men, weren’t they.

Angie: They were actually, yes.

Maggie: I can only remember Jo, as a team leader, but they were all men.

Angie: Yeah, my boss, the project I worked on, she was a woman. That was quite rare, she was the only one I think. So, it was evolving still.

Interviewer: And that office environment, was that at the MMB, that that was like that, like you were saying about the posters and that kind of thing?

Angie: No, it was in the computer room. We had a great big sort of room where the computer was, it was all locked and, you know, we had to have it air conditioned and everything, special conditioned. And the people, the operators as they called them, they guys who handed all the work and did all that and did all the admin on the work, they sat in that room. They had posters and I remember that in 1983. Now they weren’t there when I left in the ’90s, I think they were all gone by then. So in ten years that I was there things evolved again, yeah, moved on. The posters had gone, but it was a man’s world, they were all men. The chats, you know, used to stop the conversation if you walked in the room, oh it’s a woman, oh, oh! Yeah, I’d better be quiet, better not tell any more of those jokes, you know, things like that. It was very ‘chappy’, sort of world, still.

Maggie: All the operators were men.

Angie: All the operators were men, yeah.

Interviewer: Do you think that kind of, environment that you were talking about, did that filter through to the way that they were with you as women? Or not?

Angie: What when we dealt with people like that, in that man’s world, with those chaps?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Angie: They were younger than us.

Maggie: Yeah.

Angie: They were like early 20s. As I say, I was in my 30s by then. So they seemed really young and immature and sort of, oh, typical lad, you know, like, go down the pub on a Friday night and get out of it, you know, and like love all their posters everywhere and, you know, reading page three when you go in.

Maggie: Well I guess in our offices we were all doing the same work.

Angie: I didn’t feel it in the office that we were in.

Maggie: No, not really.

Angie: It sounds really sort of, what’s the word, they, I don’t know. We’d been to university and stuff and it was a different level of working. I mean, you had to be, doing the course, or you had to have a qualification to do our job whereas a computer operator would walk in at 16 basically and do the job.

Maggie: Yeah they learnt on the job, didn’t they.

Angie: They learnt on the job, yeah. It was a different, shall we say, level or status, if you like.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Sue Davies

Sue worked in the communications department at the MMB. Unlike some of the other offices, this department comprised of mostly women. Here Sue explains what she got up to with the other women that she worked with:

Audio Transcription

Interviewer: I’m really interested in the male-female split across, the organisation and what it was like for women working there.

Sue: Well, my small department was three men and me. And, but the rest of the marketing department was all women, so, a mixture there. But it was, it sort of became a Friday afternoon lunchtime down the pub thing, so.

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sue: You know, an hour for lunch but you came back at three o’clock and you crept in and hoped nobody noticed.

The end of the MMB

From the 1970s, it became apparent that the MMB was on the demise and, on 1 November 1994, the MMB effectively ceased operation. As the company had been around since the 1930s, its closure had a devastating impact on it’s workforce, local community and farmers that it served.

Here, some interviewees recount their memories of the closure:

David Justesen

David worked as Desktop Services Manager for the MMB during the 1990s. While he left the company before it closed, here he remembers how he felt upon hearing the news of its demise:

Audio Transcription

David: I would say, sadness, because the Milk Marketing Board had been a big part of my life. Obviously, I’d parted company with the Milk Marketing Board before it, kind of, disbanded.

Interviewer: Yeah.

David: But, I was, my parents lived in Thames Ditton, so I was always kind of visiting them and driving past the buildings, and they changed a little bit. It was sad to see the big buildings getting demolished, so, sadness really. But then again, you know, business is business, things move on and nothings kind of safe, things unfortunately can disappear. But I will always look upon it fondly, I really will. I had a great time there and they treated me very well and I enjoyed it and hopefully I gave a lot back to them.

Jane Taylor

As sports and social club manager, Jane had a lot of contact with a number of people across the company. This gave her a unique insight into the thoughts and feelings towards the closure. Here she recounts her memories of how the demise of the MMB unfolded:

Audio Transcription

Jane: It was a great shock. I have to laugh because they interviewed a couple of people, who, I wouldn’t have picked actually because one was the gardener, yet I don’t think the response, I remember the cameras being there and people being asked but they just sort of didn’t really give a strong enough, what was the feeling. That should have come across more. I think the, it was an absolute shock. You know, the Milk Marketing Board, an establishment that had been there since the ’30s coming to an end, it just didn’t seem, you know, everybody was shocked I would say. Except perhaps people that were in the know.

Interviewer: And did it change the atmosphere at work?

Jane: Yes.

Interviewer: How long did you have?

Jane: It’s all people could talk about, you know, and it was actually very difficult because I know from a personal view, and I know from people that were coming in when they had been made redundant, and they just said “what am I going to do?” you know, “I’ve been here for donkey’s years.” It was a struggle and, you know, the last day I worked I think I actually secured a job, and that was a temporary job. It wasn’t a good time to be made redundant either, you know, it was still sort of, I think another recession happened but for all those people to go and find jobs, you know, 900, whatever. There were a few that stayed on with Milk Marque, but not many.

Interviewer: And how long did you have between being told and the final kind of days?

Jane: Well, I think I knew in ’91 that the writing was on the wall. And then when we had the official thing I was in the sports club, but the sports club didn’t close until the September of the next year. So I had a bit longer and then we were trying to sell off the assets to raise money, and as I said, give, we donated money to a local cause so they could get a transport vehicle to take disabled people. I can’t remember the whole circumstances but the money went to a good use.

Mike

When the MMB closed, a voluntary scheme – Milk Marque – was established in its absence and controlled 65% of the UK’s milk marketing. Mike was a programmer for the MMB and was involved in the shift to Milk Marque in the early 90s. Here he explains how he managed the transition period:

Audio Transcription

Interviewer: Can you remember what it was like being at the MMB when it was announced that the company, as it had been, was ending?

Mike: Well, to us it was a slightly, on the side sort of thing because, you’ve got to remember the first step that had been taken with us was being outsourced. And so that process of enquiries and things started in ’92 and we were all outsourced in, you’ve got all the stuff there, January ’93. So, we were already slightly separate, right, albeit, still liaising with the people we already liaised with, as our customers and personal colleagues. So, and then, for a while we were outsourced and still working at Thames Ditton, but by the time the split came in November 1994, we were already operating out a case house in Walton-on-Thames. But in terms of us, it was, to a certain extent, two systems because basically, you may have heard, when the Greater London Council became the greater London Residuary Body, you don’t just wind one system down because there were some farmers who still had to be paid for the milk who hadn’t, weren’t initially going to Milk Marque, they hadn’t made up their mind. So, what I can remember is that for a number of critical systems we created, as an outsource company, we had the existing system, the MMB system, and we created a clone of it for the Milk Mark system. I remember all the VMEUs that we had for development testing, I think I remember they always used to start with a ‘U’, and I said “what we will do is, we’ll keep the ‘U’s for the MMB and pull versions of those, which will go to Milk Marque.” And so for a while, for six months or so, we were running two versions of each critical system, one for MMB, winding it down, and the other for Milk Marque.

Keith, Peter, Colin and Hugh

Keith, Peter, Colin and Hugh held various roles at the MMB. Here they explain the effect that the introduction of Clover and commercialisation had on the MMB:

Audio Transcription

Hugh: Cathedral City is probably something that was born out of the Milk Marketing Board.

Keith: It was over matured, wasn’t it? The thing was cheddar cheese should mature for about seven months.

Hugh: Seven years, you can get!

Keith: If you keep on going, because no one wants to buy it, it gets more, and more, and more mature and eventually they re-branded this left over cheese, extra mature.

Colin: It’s morphed into this massive brand, a bit like Clover. In the early days, the Milk Marketing Board, there were big factions in the board who said, “we shouldn’t be pushing this.” And it was the time when spreads were king. Spreads were just invented, straight from the fridge, none of that, sort of, keeping it by the stove for a bit. In fact, Clover is in fact cream with a sort of a vegetable juice added it to.

Hugh: Well, it was then, when it was first produced.

Colin: And the farmer said, “well, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, aren’t we?” You know, you’re moving away from milk, making this stuff, pushing it like mad, well in fact, well its saviour, I mean Clover was unbelievable. Clover was one of the things, I think, that probably brought an end to the MMB because we were now getting heavily commercial. Brand innovation and all that, that wasn’t supposed to be us. It was supposed to be, you know the sort of, illegitimate son of the Milk Marketing Board, Dairy Crest, wasn’t it.

Peter: Well Clover was the answer to the problem about how do you deal with, how do you spread butter straight from the fridge and the answer was to put oil in it.

Colin: I think that probably accelerated our demise to an extent.

Keith: And the constant bombardment by northern foods to constantly have a go and try and weaken the farmers’ position. Because the history of the Milk Marketing Board was that, until the Milk Marketing Board was statutory and put in place, the creamery would announce that you’re paying six pence less per gallon, I suppose, to the farmer. And he had nowhere else to send his milk to.

Colin: Yeah.

Keith: So, one time, the creameries were king, then they lost that crown and then got it back again, over a long period of time and they were firing away.

Colin: Yeah, they wanted us out.

Keith: Yet on the continent it was quite normal for large cooperatives to have a manufacturing arm, so the European model was different, and what we were moving towards.

Starting out at the MMB

Jobs at the MMB

Socialising at work

Memorable moments

Being a woman at the MMB

The end of the MMB

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