There was a milk bottle from Blisworth for sale on the Ebay.co.uk website on 25th November 2007. In an elapsed time of six days a few people of Blisworth
were watching the bidding to see who would buy it.
The Story of the Cherry Dairies Milk Bottle
There was a milk bottle from Blisworth for sale on the Ebay.co.uk website on 25th November 2007. In an elapsed time of six days a few people of Blisworth
were watching the bidding to see who would buy it.
By way of historical background, a John C Cherry came to Blisworth in 1930 with two sons; Sid Cherry and his brother Henry Cecil. The brothers ran a dairy near the Elm Tree through WWII war years and on to about 1957. The pattern of the bottles was the familiar old-fashioned sort, one pint, with a two inch diameter cardboard top which could be 'punched out' in the centre to allow insertion of a straw. For school children bottles of 1/3 pint were issued early in the morning at the school gate. The son of Henry Cecil, Derek, has commented that these bottles are not particularly rare; "people still dig them up and bring them to me". But the bottles with M. Cherry on them are rare. There isn't one in the village. They date back to the time after Sid died in 1954, when his wife Mary took over running the dairy for a few years and Henry Cecil worked for her dealing with the books and the deliveries. In the 40s and 50s the dairy cows would make a journey between the milking parlour near the Elm Tree and a field on the Northampton Road about ½ mile away. The very light traffic of the times just put up with this 7am and 4pm inconvenience but it wouldn't be possible these days.
On Ebay the bottle carried an initial £2 bid from 'Terry' for about five days. By tracing Terry's purchases it was evident that if any object was a milk bottle, from anywhere, then he wanted it. It was not until the last hour of bidding that others showed their colours while Terry remained content to just sit back and not increase his bid. 'Wicked-Can' entered a bid for £15 which was later upped to £20; the intention was that 'Wicked-Can' would make a gift of the bottle to Derek Cherry. A confident looking 'Toy-Boater' came late on the scene and ousted 'Wicked-Can' with a topping bid of £21. Time ran out and these intrepid bidders could only gape at the screen, presumably, as some blasted unscrupulous 'Fantastic-Fox' made the deal at £22 with a pre-lodged bid that obviously exceeded £21 by a suitable margin. Such are the problems of any visit to the Ebay site.
Was this lovely bottle to go to a good home?
There were good reasons to suspect that the new home would actually be in Blisworth. It would be unethical to state what justifies such an assertion but, you see, all the bidders with the exception of 'Terry' were surely from Blisworth - their Ebay names and so on spot-lit them admirably! Or so I thought - someone pointed out that the bidder 'Fantastic-Fox' was in fact based in London. It is possible to look up information like that in the Ebay pages. Meanwhile, a first draught of this web-page was posted with the aim of pressurising the owner of the bottle, thought to be in Blisworth, to come out and admit they have it. 'Wicked-Can' was me, by the way, and all of these names are pseudonyms anyway.
What happened next was pretty surreal. Contact was made with
'Fantastic-Fox'
to direct his attention to the first version of this page. This
contact was made through Ebay's own emailling service. He was astounded
that his action in swooping onto the bottle had 'deprived' Blisworth of an artifact
that is part of village history. Considering he was a collector, he also seemed strangely
willing to part with the bottle, this eagerness becoming more understandable
when he explained that he wasn't a collector at all. In fact, he is part of the
management team at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly, London, and simply wanted the
bottle as a stage prop. In their comedic production of "The 39
Steps" the character of Richard Hannay encounters a milkman one morning and
it would be for that scene the bottle would be used. 'Fantastic-Fox' was planning to deal with the Blisworth bottle
in the same way as others, that is; paint white the inside of the
bottle to look as though it was full of milk, as in the inset, and add an old-fashioned cardboard
cap! Before he got round to that,
thank goodness, someone in London by chance turned up with a crate of old 1930s
milk bottles that had cost next to nothing. So the Blisworth bottle, which
took two weeks to get to London, would
not be needed anyway.
Then, in recognition of
our village history, the management team stated their desire
to donate the bottle to the Blisworth website and not accept any payment for
it. They had the bright idea of photographing some of the cast with the
well-travelled bottle and offering the picture for background interest on this
page. However, when they realised that I was going to be in the West End
early in January, to enjoy a Christmas present, they invited me to join them for
a photograph and the result is what you see here, actor Simon Day, who plays the
lead role of Richard Hannay in "The 39 Steps", handing over the bottle.
Following the original intention, it then only remained for me to deliver the bottle to Derek Cherry. The lower photograph shows an original J. C. Cherry with the lettering in red recalling the father of the brothers. The middle bottle is an H. C. Cherry bottle but the lettering has gone, leaving little more than a mark on the glass. The bottle on the right is the one that completes the collection with M. Cherry.
Tony Marsh
In January 2013
Andy Newbury managed to
pick up another bottle on Ebay
so now the village has two of these.