Hope Farm Dairy, 23 Hope Street, Cambridge

History of Hope Farm Dairy

1911

William Polendine Curtis, 38, dairyman, b Cambridge

Kate née Pink, 38, b Longstanton

Clarence W Curtis, 14, assisting in business, b Cambridge

Leonard G Curtis, 10, schoolboy, b Cambridge

Harold P Curtis, 1, b Cambridge

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1913

W P Curtis, cowkeeper and dairyman

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Milly Barraclough recalled being sent with her sister with a pint jug and fourpence to Mr Curtis’s dairy. They would knock on the door and hand over the money and jug to Mrs Curtis. The rather forbidding lady would close the door and later return with their jug full of milk from the dairy in the back yard. The milk came from the cows the Curtis boys drove in for milking from the fields in the Rustat Road area. (JF)

BF lived in the 1930s in a house in Argyle Street that backed onto the dairy. She recalled how during the summer months, when the dairy had grazing rights, one of the Curtis’s sons would take the herd across Mill Road into Catharine Street and onto Coldhams Common and bring them back in the evening – he riding his bike behind them.

In 2021 LF wrote: The deputy head of Netherhall, Mick Knight, lived in the area as a boy. He told me he also took the cows down Hope Street, Catharine Street all the way to Coldhams Common for grazing. Imagine  a herd of cows crossing Mill Road now!