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25
Sept
Couple retire from Bishop Monkton milk round after 50 years of service
“What are we going to do without them?”
That's how residents of Bishop Monkton are feeling after learning that, after half a century, the couple who deliver the village's milk will retire on October 3.
Husband and wife David and Christine Jones – Bishop Monkton people themselves – have, without missing a day, delivered milk for 50 years to the village, which is the last one to be dropped from a round that once included all the surrounding small villages west of Ripon, necessitating a 3am start.
9p a pint
When they started in 1976, milk cost 9p a pint and was mainly farm-bottled, with both production and selling tightly controlled by the then Milk Marketing Board. Back then, they delivered 800 pints of milk a day, but that has since shrunk to about 750 pints a week.
Remarkably, there are about a dozen of the couple's original customers still living in the village.
Christine said:
It is the people that have made this such an enjoyable, special job – getting to know them and helping out.
Village lifeline
The couple regularly shopped for housebound villagers when the internet and online shopping were a thing of the future.
Christine has sat with people in the final stages of their life, offering comfort when no-one else was available, given company to elderly people who lived alone and in need of a friendly chat, and taken time to visit villagers in hospital or in a care home.
They have always kept a few frozen meals to hand and have invited people who would otherwise have been alone to their own home for Christmas dinner, collecting them and taking them home afterwards.
They said:
We like to think we were a fourth emergency service.
Never a day missed
The milk has been delivered, with never a day missed. After all, what is a foot or two of snow, inches and inches of flood water, or even a covid pandemic?
When the village was cut in two for several months for roadworks, there was never any doubt the milk would not arrive. David and Christine simply took an alternative route, a round trip of a mere 25 miles.
The couple have come in for plenty of praise and appreciation since they announced their retirement, but their response is typical of this kind and caring couple. They said:
We've just been doing our job. It’s really nothing out of the ordinary.
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