Copy Book Archive

The Iron Horse and the Iron Cow Railways not only brought fresh, healthy food to the urban poor, they improved the conditions of working animals.
1861
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Music: Sir Charles Villiers Stanford

© Alan Fleming, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0. Source

About this picture …

Milk churns stand on the platform of Oakworth station, on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway in West Yorkshire.

The Iron Horse and the Iron Cow
In the 1850s, London could not house enough cows for its population, so dairymen watered down their milk from cholera-infested roadside pumps, adding snails or sheep’s brains to thicken it (more). No legislation could have solved that dilemma of supply and demand. But railways did.

ONE of the most striking illustrations of the utility of railways in contributing to the supply of wholesome articles of food to the population of large cities, is to be found in the rapid growth of the traffic in Milk.

Readers of newspapers may remember the descriptions published some years since of the horrid dens in which London cows were penned, and of the odious compound sold by the name of milk, of which the least deleterious ingredient in it was supplied by the “cow with the iron tail.”*

That state of affairs is now completely changed.

What with the greatly improved state of the London dairies and the better quality of the milk supplied by them, together with the large quantities brought by railway from a range of a hundred miles and more all round London, even the poorest classes in the metropolis are now enabled to obtain as wholesome a supply of the article as the inhabitants of most country towns.

A reference to a short story in Charles Dickens’s ‘Household Words’ of November 9, 1850, in which a London dairyman was accused of adulterating milk with water from a street-side hand-pump (‘the cow with an iron tail’) and adding calves’ brains as a thickener.

Précis

In the 1850s, London dairymen adulterated their milk in order to meet a demand for milk far greater than anything the cows held in squalid urban pens could supply. Samuel Smiles praised the railways for bringing fresh, pure milk to the capital from the countryside, improving the lives of poor people and of cattle too. (55 / 60 words)

Source

From ‘Lives of the Engineers’ by Samuel Smiles (1812-1904).

Suggested Music

Symphony No. 6 in E Flat

4: Moderato E Maestoso

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924)

Performed by the Ulster Orchestra, conducted by Vernon Handley.

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