SAMA HOOLE: A milk boy drank what he carried. It was one of the few perks. A pint on the cart in the dark, cream and all, every morning for 9 years.

Tallest men are from cow country.  --Cal Abasas 

@SamaHoole Thought you'd appreciate. The tallest men are from 'cow country' https://t.co/995Mb2mTIY

— Cal_Abasas (@Cal_Abasas) October 6, 2026

The most famous British film star of the twentieth century spent his childhood delivering milk from a horse and cart, and by eighteen he was six foot two. He was born in 1930 in Fountainbridge, a slum district of Edinburgh that smelled of the brewery and the rubber works. The family had two rooms and shared a lavatory on the stair. As a baby he slept in the bottom drawer of a wardrobe. At nine he got a job before school on a milk round for the St Cuthbert's Co-operative dairy. Up at five, out with the horse, bottles up four flights of tenement stairs and the empties back down. At thirteen he left school and did it full time. A milk boy drank what he carried. It was one of the few perks. A pint on the cart in the dark, cream and all, every morning for nine years. His father was a lorry driver of ordinary height. The boys he had grown up with were small, as slum children were. He was a head taller than all of them. They called him Big Tam. He joined the Navy, took up weights, placed in the Mr Universe contest, drifted into acting, and in 1962 walked onto a screen as James Bond. His name was Sean Connery.

Nobody can prove what did it. But a child from two rooms in Fountainbridge had no business being built like that, and the one thing he had that the others did not was a milk cart.