Mr Joseph Bradshaw remembers working as a child on a farm in Liverpool c1910-1925, interviewed in 1986

Mr Joseph Bradshaw was born in 1905 and interviewed in 1986 for the 'Looking Back at Liverpool: An Oral History of the Liverpool Region 1900-1960 ' project. He remembers here the work of a child on general mixed farms in the area.
Transcript

JOSEPH: There was myself and Chris, we ran the dairy. I was only a kid at the time and there were two families. One was the Allcock family, they had a dairy out farther than us. In combination of the two families we ran a milk run in Liverpool, you know, with the horse and cart. And I used to have to go when I became eight or ten - Chris my sister was about eight years older than me - and between us we delivered milk in the morning and I think at that time we had around thirty cows, which was a lot of stock.

INTERVIEWER: So what time would you have to get up to milk the cows?

JOSEPH: 5 o'clock!

INTERVIEWER: Milk them and then deliver the milk?

JOSEPH: Yes, deliver the milk, then go home and go to school.

INTERVIEWER: And what about when you came home?

JOSEPH: Same, in the afternoon, but most of the afternoon milk was fed to the pigs - we had pigs as well.

In 1917, it was Good Friday. I'd been away, I was twelve years old at that time. We used to do a lot of rabbiting in those days, it was real bush country, and I come home and my dad had a heart attack and died. From then on I was the man of the house. We had cattle to look after, horses, and we had a lot of poultry as well; a few pigs. It was a general mixed farm, which was the general thing in those days because that was people's way of life, living, other than in the city, and I might add at this stage Liverpool only had a population in these days of something like twelve thousand.