Finding Milkmaids – Tawdry Tales of Intellectual Theft and Gentlemen’s Entertainment (Day 8 of 12)

Yes, there is much shame all around in today’s episode. It’s not something I’d normally wish to spring on you this early in the New Year (Happy New Year, by the way), so apologies in advance; complaints in the comments box at the bottom, please.

Before we get into the details, it’s worth considering ‘maids-a-milking’ in the context of the overall quest. Remember what this is all about: we’re walking in the footsteps of history, or trying to anyway. An Eighteenth Century Lothario – a young lover attempting to impress his fair maiden – made twelve audacious gift deliveries on twelve consecutive days; his exploits were the stuff of the legend that is ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, first published in 1780. That’s our working template.

Things have changed since 1780, of course. That was a long time ago, before the telegraph, the telephone, and – critically for today’s challenge – the milking machine.

In the history of cows, the invention of the milking machine in around 1875 marks a dark day. The soft silky hands of those young maids were replaced by chromed nipple caps, an internal rubber seal and a vacuum pump. It also sounded an early death knell for Milkmaids.

‘Milkmaid’ had once been an honourable profession, famed for its many innovations. Indeed, Sarah Nelmes, a noted milk maid and one of the BBC’s 100-most-important-Britains, was responsible for inventing the most important public health advance of modern times: vaccination against disease. You can look this up; it’s true, or at least as true as any of the recent Hollywood biographies of ‘people from so long ago we don’t really know what happened’. Have you seen Noah? We know the real thing featured Jews and animals; and here we know that the real vaccination story featured milkmaids and cows. One less-known version goes like this:

Troubled by the coxpox blisters on her hands, Sarah Nelmes went along to a local doctor, Edward Jenner.

“Oi,” she said, “I’ve been cultivating this puss in me blisters, and I was wondering whether you might like to buy some of it to cure smallpox.”

“Where the hell did you get that?” asked Jenner, examining the suppurating sores on her hands.

“Blossom,” she said.

“Blossom? From a flower?”

“Nah,” she said, “I got infected by Blossom, she’s our best milker.”

“A cow? You’re a milkmaid. Why would I want your puss?”

“Have you ever seen a milkmaid with smallpox?” said Sarah.

Jenner was forced to admit that he hadn’t. He paid her sixpence and injected some of her puss into James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his gardener (there wasn’t much control of clinical trials in those days and you were allowed to do such things to the offspring of servants). Fortunately, the experiment proved the validity of Sarah’s hypothesis. The boy lived and didn’t catch smallpox, though he did catch cowpox, the lesser version long suffered by milkmaids. He had a hard time explaining the hand blisters to his less-subtle school friends. They christened him Jimmy-the-Juggler and made crude masturbation jokes.

It’s my contention that Sarah never got the credit she deserved.  In those day, there were no chat shows or Celebrity Big Brother where fleeting notoriety could be cashed in for a pension pot. Meanwhile, Jenner made a fortune selling out to drug companies. Blossom was skinned and her hide now hangs on the wall of the St George’s Medical School library in Tooting, which only goes to show that animals involved in medical advances don’t generally fare as well as their human collaborators.  (You only have to look at the fate of Dolly the Sheep; not only did she die young, mainly because she was born with a human age of 45, but she also ended up stuffed in an Edinburgh museum. I’ve been there; it’s not impressive. She looks like… well, like an old sheep, which perhaps isn’t surprising since that’s what she was cloned to be.)

Now, you can look this story up if you don’t believe me. Most of the facts are true (Sarah Nelmes, Edward Jenner, Jimmy Phipps and Blossom were all real people and/or cows); I had to fill in with the dialogue a bit, but Edward Jenner did become very famous and Blossom’s hide is on a wall in a medical school.

The point is this: post-cowpox and the milking machine, milkmaiding went into terminal decline. Louis Pasteur finished it off with his damned hot and cold thing. Only a French man could come up with a process that involved doing something, then U-turning to do the very opposite, ending up with exactly what you started and declaring it a success.

“There, I’ve made it pasteurised!”

“It’s a white liquid, just like before.”

“Oui, brilliant, isn’t it?”

The upshot is you can’t find a qualified milkmaid for love nor money these days. Or so I thought…

You see, actually, that’s not entirely true. I’m being coy, because this is where my tale turns tawdry. A man has to do what a man has to do in pursuit of his true-love’s happiness:

There’s this club in Soho… ‘Spearmint Friesian’… which is designed for gentlemen who want to do the things that little Jimmy Phipps was accused of doing. ‘Nuff said. I flash a little cash and hire half a dozen exotic dancers from Bratislava and their two understudies to come up to Northamptonshire of the afternoon. I’m not sure the understudies were technically ‘maids’, but they seemed happy to share costumes with the other girls. (Mercifully, the trains are back running on time after that Christmas incident when Network Rail engineers had rather too much ‘seasonal spirit’ and forgot that people might want to run rolling stock along their tracks.)

Day Eight is ticked off.

If you haven’t done so yet, check out the rest of the series…

• The Partridge in the Pear Tree
• The Two Turtle Doves
• The Three French Hens
• The Four ‘Corley’ Birds
• The Five Gold Rings
• The Six Geese-A-Laying
• The Seven Swans-A-Swimming