Subject

A popular local personality. The following text came from the Greenwich Phantom, who would like any more information you have:
Doug was the son of Bill Mullins, one of the ‘old school’ of dairymen. He had started out in Hampshire but moved up to Greenwich in 1926. His dairy was on the spot that the garden now occupies, and he and his red and white handcart was a familiar sight around Greenwich streets for fifty four years.

Bill was joined by his son Doug, who eventually took over the business. Although he finally caved in to modern technology and got himself one of those little electric milk floats that were all the rage, it remained red and white and he remained true to the old dairy traditions.

Bill collapsed outside his shop in 1980, and died shortly afterwards. Greenwich went into mourning. At his funeral the streets were lined with customers, neighbours and friends, little knowing that just eleven years later his son ‘Dougie’ would be found outside the shop after collapsing himself, finally passing away in Greenwich District Hospital on November 29, 1991 at the age of just 59. His funeral was every bit as well-attended as his father’s. The Mercury even carried a photo of a milk bottle-shaped wreath.

Doug, it seems, was the last of London’s ‘true dairymen,’ and it’s clear he was much missed. His widow, Ellen, told the Mercury at the time “People have so many memories,” going on to talk about life-long customers who remembered Dougie as a boy, up to his elbows in suds, washing milk bottles, or his getting his first delivery cart aged around 14.