Column by historian Roger Bingham of Ackenthwaite:

IN ABOUT 1890, Westmorland’s MP, Captain Jocelyn Bagot of Levens Hall, got into terrible trouble when he declared at the county show dinner that Westmorland butter was ‘no better than axle grease’.

But, after the inevitable furore died down, he set about organising a travelling dairy school. This was a horse-drawn caravan where farm girls observed practical demonstrations and had lectures in hygiene.

50 years later, a contributor from Lupton to the Women’s Institute’s accounts of 'some Westmorland villages' recalled that ‘before a dairymaid could begin to handle butter she had to scald her hands by dipping them in very hot water and then rub them all over with oatmeal and rinse in cold water, do this a few times and the butter could be handled without any trouble’.

She also remembered how the introduction by the Bland family at Lupton Hall of a butter-worker, a kind of mangle known as 'Scotch hands', made the work 'much easier’ and enabled the farm to produce 200 pounds of butter in one week. Not only was the yield increased, but so was the quality - which resulted in the ‘butter ladies’ winning prizes donated by landowners like the Wilsons of Rigmaden and Lady Henry Bentinck of Underley Hall. These included silver-plated tea pots, biscuit barrels and, inevitably, cream jugs which graced the parlour cabinets but ‘of course were never ever used’.