British milk bottles were first produced in 1880 by the Express Dairy Company. The next to use them was Wiltshire United Dairies, which eventually became Unigate. They would be delivered by horse-drawn carts. Before the bottle, the milkman would fill the customers' jugs from a churn.

The bottles came in every shape and size, ranging from an eighth of a pint bottle to a two-pint size. The third of a pint bottle was later specifically designed for schools so it could not be resold.

Before pasteurisation became widespread, bottles were delivered four times a day. In 1894 Anthony Hailwood, a North Country dairyman, pioneered the method of sterilising milk by heating it to high temperatures.

Adverts on milk bottles first appeared in the mid-1920s, with a sand-blasting technique to etch them on glass. Advertising largely disappeared with the introduction of infrared bottle scanners in the early 1990s, designed to check cleanliness.

The first bottles used a porcelain stopper top held on by wire. Cardboard tops followed, although these were banned in the mid-1950s when deemed unhygienic. The silver, red, blue or yellow aluminium tops on today's bottles indicate the fat content. Unpasteurised is green topped.

© Sean Poulter, The Daily Mail 2001

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