Wee Scotch Whisky Tales Read online

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1Ferintosh: Sadly Lost?

  2A Riot Creates The Whisky Island

  3The Whisky Wars in Scotland

  4The Strathdon Dram: The One That Got Away

  5The Deil’s Awa Wi’ Th’Excisemen: The Case of Malcolm Gillespie

  6The National Bard and The National Dram

  7Whisky’s Awa: The Rise and Fall of The Temperance Movement in Scotland

  8Lewis Whisky and the Case of the Illicit Still

  9The Last Distiller Had The Last Laugh

  10New Zealand Moonshine: The Hokonui Brand

  Preface

  LIKE MOST PEOPLE, my interest in whisky started with my drinking it and finding that it was the cure for all ills, physical and mental. As the years progressed my taste developed, as my means increased, from the firewater to which my purse initially stretched, towards an enjoyment of the finer pleasures of the myriad malts we are blessed with. A secondary gratification came in that I could then marry my profession as an historian with an interest in the plethora of tales associated with the amber dew, not just the stirring tales of the illicit distillers which add so much historical flavour to the story of out national drink, but also in exploring the connections of uisge beatha with the wider events of Scottish history – the Act of Union of 1707, the Highland Clearances and others. Hopefully this small collection of tales will interest the devoted tippler and inform him or her about some of the fascinating background to the emergence of whisky from the mists of time, and further that they will enjoy the tales as they should be, with a drap o’ the craitur to hand.

  Ian R Mitchell, Glasgow

  1 Ferintosh: Sadly Lost?

  ‘DUTY-FREE’ WHISKY is something we have all been offered on air flights and in airport shopping malls; usually it is a product which has at best a small discount off the official High Street price, but occasionally it costs more to the unwary for a drap o’ the craitur than a trip to the supermarket would. But for a century there was a duty-free whisky that was widely sold in Scotland and which for many years accounted for the bulk of legal whisky sales. Distilled on the Black Isle, Ferintosh may be ‘Sadly Lost’ as our national bard, Robert Burns, put it, but its memory should not be.

  The first tax on whisky was levied by the Scottish Parliament in 1644, at 2s 8d (13p) per pint (which was one-third of a gallon) of aqua vitae. This provided almost no government revenue since personal domestic consumption was exempt from taxation, and the thousands of small or sma’ stills which sold to a local market were impossible to police. The first mention of an actual distillery is in an Act of the Scottish parliament of 1690 which exempted the owner of the distillery at Ferintosh on the Black Isle, one Duncan Forbes of Culloden, from paying tax on his product, in return for an annual payment of 400 Scottish merks (about £20 sterling.) Given the low tax return on aqua vitae at this time parliament probably thought it had made a good deal, but they were to be proven way wrong by subsequent developments.

  The Forbes’ of Culloden were an old Whig family, originally from Aberdeenshire, who had bought the Culloden estate in about 1625 and then gradually extended their landholdings in the Moray Firth area, including the lands of Ferintosh. Strong adherents of the Protestant Succession, they had supported William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution of 1689-90 against the Catholic James II and VII and in the subsequent military conflicts. The lands and property of the Forbes’ were then plundered and damaged by a force of 700 Jacobite insurgents when Forbes was off fighting elsewhere. Amongst other damages for which he claimed £45,000 compensation, he stated he had ‘suffered the loss of his brewery of aqua vitae by fire in his absence.’ Forbes was awarded a much smaller sum and given the tax exemption, supposedly in perpetuity, for what was probably the first legally established commercial whisky distillery in Scotland.

  This exemption from tax which Ferintosh enjoyed survived the Act of Union of 1707. Whisky was still, pardon the expression, ‘small beer’ in the tax scheme of things and the new British Parliament was much more interested in extending the English tax system on ale north of the border, rather than bothering with what was still a very small-scale industry, as was then the production of aqua vitae. The Forbes’ family’s loyalty to the Hanoverian succession also survived the Union, and they were out with their retainers in the 1715 uprising opposing the Old Pretender, and then much more so in 1745 rebellion, when the Young Pretender landed.

  Duncan Forbes of Culloden was at this latter time Lord Advocate of Scotland and had succeeded to the estate of his elder brother, known as ‘Bumper’ John who had basically drank himself to death. Forbes not only raised a militia to fight Bonnie Prince Charlie – which tied down many Jacobite troops in the north – but also persuaded many Highland chiefs to stay neutral in the conflict. Walter Scott later argued that Duncan Forbes did more than any man alive to save the Hanoverian dynasty. He nevertheless fell from favour with his efforts to promote leniency in the aftermath of the Rebellion and died in 1747.

  But the Forbes’ were still key players politically in what was then called North Britain, and another Jacobite rebellion was expected – hence the building of the massive Fort George on the Moray coast – and the Ferintosh tax exemption was continued. By the middle of the 18th century the growth in the popularity of whisky and whisky consumption meant that the Forbes family’s earnings from Ferintosh, from being merely pocket money, had become a major part of their income. Estimates are impossible verify but it was said that Duncan Forbes had gained £18,000 a year from the profits of his tax-exempt whisky.1 Whilst Forbes was off fighting the Jacobites, Culloden House was once again occupied – as it had been in 1689 – by supporters of the Stuarts, including no less than Bonnie Prince Charlie himself, who spent the nights before the Battle of Culloden there, and was reputed to have drunk a bottle of Ferintosh before bedtime.

  Up until the 1770s, Ferintosh out-produced the other legal distilleries in Scotland – there were less than 10 of their number – both in volume and quality. In 1766 Ferintosh distilled 68,000 proof gallons while the total output from the other distilleries was 35,000 gallons. Duncan Forbes’ son Arthur married an English heiress, as did so many Scottish lairds of the time, and moved south but he greatly expanded the operations at Ferintosh and there were reputedly four distilleries operating in the area under his ownership, with output peaking in the early 1780s at over 120,000 gallons of spirit annually. The wealth produced by this enabled Arthur to employ the Adam brothers in remodelling Culloden House into the Palladian mansion it remains today.

  These distilleries were large-scale operations which employed, directly or indirectly over 1,000 people. However the Old Statistical Account of 1791-2 subsequently described a very different situation from the heyday of Ferintosh:

  There are buildings which during the existence of the Ferintosh privilege were erected by the company for the purpose of distilling and now lie unoccupied. They are of a very considerable extent …

  What had happened? In 1784 parliament ended the Ferintosh tax exemption, in return for a one-off payment of £21,000. This was admittedly a huge sum at that time, but when it is recalled that on the output of whisky the distillery had produced, Forbes of Culloden should have been paying – according to his numerous critics – £20,000 of tax anually, then the damage to his financial position is clear. One reason that this change happened was simply that whisky had become so popular that a tax exemption, which had originally been a cheap way of rewarding a political favourite, was now a gaping hole in the national revenue. The legislation cites this as a reason, for ending the privilege, and gave another:

  Which exemption has been found detrimental to the Revenue and prejudicial to the distillery in o
ther parts of Scotland.

  The increasing popularity of whisky had transformed it in the Lowlands from a cottage industry to an increasingly industrial one. From the 1770s large-scale distillers like John Stein in Clackmannanshire were investing huge amounts of capital in producing whisky, and they resented the tax exemption given to Ferintosh which in turn forced them to produce a cheaper, lower quality product in order to compete on price. This increasingly powerful group of industrial capitalists were becoming more important to the government than the maintenance of goodwill to a landed family whose favours were all in the past, and which was of decreasing political importance now that the Jacobite threat had clearly died. It is no accident that the Ferintosh privilege was ended at the same time as the ban on Highland dress, the bagpipes and the Gaelic language. Times had changed.

  In The Making of Scotch Whisky by JR Hume and Michael S Moss (1981) – from which the figures in this article are taken – the authors state that ‘the name (Ferintosh) became synonymous with good quality spirit’ in the 18th century, as its popularity testified. It has the distinction of having had panegyrics composed to it in two languages, Scots and Gaelic. People are familiar with Burns’ lament on the demise of Ferintosh.

  Thee, Ferintosh, O sadly lost

  Scotland lament frae coast tae coast

  Now colic grips and barkin’ hoast

  May kill us a’

  But sometime before that, in his poem Moladh an Uisge-Beatha (In Praise of Whisky) the poet Uilleam (William) Ross had written of the virtues of Ferintosh as follows:

  Stuth glan Toiseachd gun truailleadh …

  ’S cha b’e druaip na Frainge

  Which roughly translates as:

  Clean drink of Ferintosh without impurities …

  None of your rubbish from France.

  Although it was considered to taste better than the Lowland competition it is probably a mistake to see Ferintosh as a Highland single malt, as we might drink today. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations in 1776 stated that whisky was generally made from one-third malted barley and a mixture of other grains, malted and unmalted. There is a contract from 1757 between Forbes of Culloden and one Donald MacDonald for 25 gallons of aqua vitae, ‘being Spirits distilled from Corn of the growth of the Lands of Ferintosh.’ The probable sites of the various distilleries operated by the Forbes family in the vicinity of Ryefield House on the Black Isle were excavated by the North of Scotland Archeological Society in 2009-10, and the largest of these at Mulchaich consisted of seven large, dressed-stone buildings, some three stories high, indicating a considerable undertaking. Interestingly one of the buildings would appear to have been a corn-drying kiln, indicating that that grain, possibly in addition to barley, was used widely in the distillation of Ferintosh.

  The reputation of the whisky was such that, even after it ceased production, several others used the name to promote their product, most notably the Ben Wyvis Distillery of Dingwall which operated from 1879 till 1926. And then the name Ferintosh was, like the whisky, sadly lost … or was it? In the last decade or so a new strain of lactobacillus has been identified in the whisky production process and it has been given, by some biochemist with a knowledge of whisky-distilling history, the designation … lactobacillus ferintoshensis. There are microbreweries on the Black Isle today, maybe one day we will have a boutique distillery producing a dram which revives the Ferintosh name?

  2 A Riot Creates The Whisky Island

  WHEN SCOTLAND AND England unified their parliaments in 1707, there was very little of what we would now call ‘whisky’ distilled in Scotland, apart from in scattered sma’ stills. The only major producer was the aforementioned Forbes of Culloden’s distillery at Ferintosh, where he was allowed to produce his aqua vitae tax-free and appears to have used a lot of corn in the production process as I outlined in the previous chapter. The national drinks were claret and wine for the upper classes, and tippeny ale for the lower orders; almost all malted grains were used for brewing, rather than for distillation, at that time. A convoluted process, in which malted barley was a key player, was to change this situation completely and establish whisky as Scotland’s ‘national drink’.

  The Union was not popular in its early years, to say the least. Jacobites opposed it because it blocked the way to the return of the Stuarts, Presbyterians opposed it as it introduced toleration for non-Presbyterians in 1712 and most importantly, as a move to equalise Scottish and English taxes a malt tax was proposed in 1713 which was so unpopular that it contributed to a motion in parliament to repeal the Act of Union itself. This motion narrowly failed – and the imposition of the tax itself was postponed. However, in 1725 the London government came back with its malt tax proposal, though at a lower rate of 3d a barrel of beer brewed in Scotland against the English rate which was double that. Opposition to the tax amongst the populace was general, leading to a brewers’ strike in Edinburgh, and riots throughout the land, but nowhere was hostility more widespread than in Glasgow.

  In June 1725 crowds assembled in the centre of the city and rang the town’s fire bell to summon forth support. Initially they molested the excisemen sent to collect the new tax, but then turned their attention to the local MP, Daniel (or Donald) Campbell, who was reputed – correctly – to have voted for the malt tax. Campbell was an exceedingly rich merchant capitalist who had in 1711-12 built the Shawfield Mansion in the centre of Glasgow, at the junction of the Trongate and Glassford Street. This was then the finest Palladian mansion in the city and possibly in Scotland. The crowd smashed the windows of the mansion and looted many of its contents.

  The authorities called in the military to restore order, and Lord Deloriane’s Foot, commanded by one Captain Bushell, fired on the demonstrators, killing nine and wounding 16 of them – without having first read the Riot Act or having fired warning shots, as was legally required. This failed to restore order and the Glasgow magistrates ordered the troops to leave the city, subsequently charging Bushell with murder – a charge eventually dropped. The troops retreated towards Dumbarton Castle and were again attacked. Again they fired and again killed an undetermined further number of rioters. Finally General Wade, commander-in-chief of forces in Scotland, was sent to Glasgow with a much larger number of troops, including the Earl of Stair’s Dragoons, to quell the rioting. Wade was accompanied by the Lord Advocate, Duncan Forbes of Culloden (of untaxed Ferintosh fame covered in Chapter 1!) who exacted retribution for the riots. Several of the culprits were jailed, fined, whipped through the town or exiled for life.

  Forbes also arrested Provost Millar and the rest of the town council for alleged complicity with the rioters. Though these charges were subsequently dropped the council was fined a total of almost £10,000 to cover the cost of the riots and was forced to sell off most of the city’s common lands to pay the fine. Much of the compensation went direct to Campbell of Shawfield, a total of more than £6,000 for his damages. However this can be seen as a reward for a loyal government supporter rather than valid compensation, as two separate estimates by tradesmen for repairs to the building (which was not demolished or burnt down as many stories state) came to a few hundred rather than thousands of pounds. Until its demolition in 1792 Shawfield Mansion remained the most luxurious dwelling in the city – so much so that Bonnie Prince Charlie stayed there in 1746 during his retreat to Culloden and fell for the charms of Clementina Walkinshaw. (Whilst he did so, Campbell of Shawfield, who had fled Glasgow, raised at his own expense a militia to fight the Jacobite army).

  But to return to our story, one effect of the malt tax led to a decline in ale drinking in Scotland and an increased consumption of whisky – much of it produced from the illicit sma’ stills in the Highlands and smuggled south. ‘Whisky’ at this time was a term which covered a multitude of sins, and included any distillation made from any malted grain – or grain mixed with unmalted grain – and flavoured with herbs, raisins, spices and a variety of other ingredients to make it palatable. The emergence of a drink based on
malted barley took longer to emerge, and again has a connection with our story of the malt tax.

  With his fairly ill-gotten gains from the Shawfield Riots, Daniel Campbell procured the bulk of the purchase price for the island of Islay in the Inner Hebrides. He set about the process of agricultural improvement on the island, developing mining and other enterprises as well as introducing new methods of crop rotation and new crops, such as the higher yielding barley to replace the strain called ‘bere’. This led to the situation where tenant farmers who had a surplus of the grain could use it to produce the drink that was to become known as whisky. That this practice had become widespread in the 50 years after Campbell bought Islay is shown by the comments of the Revd Archibald Robertson of Kildalton parish in 1777:

  We have not an excise officer in the whole island. The quantity therefore of whisky made here is very great; and the evil, that follows drinking to excess of this liquor, is very visible in this island.

  Initially these were sma’ stills bubbling away for personal or local consumption, with a little smuggling sideline to the Lowlands. The Highland product, made from malted barley was considered to taste much better than Lowland whisky, generally made with other grains, and was in increasing demand. And by 1750 it was this drink that was generally known as whisky, and the term did not any longer apply to the rougher grain spirits flavoured like cordials.

  At the same time another development took place which was of great importance and can be regarded as the first step towards making Islay – arguably – the malt whisky capital of the world. Campbell of Shawfield had died in 1753 and his estate had passed to his grandson, who carried on the process of economic development, most notably with the construction of the planned village of Bowmore in the 1760s. The new laird encouraged one Daniel Simson, a farmer at Bridgend who had done some small-scale distilling, to open a larger enterprise in the town, and – probably some time before 1779 – Bowmore Distillery opened. This was the first of a long and illustrious line which, after the Excise Act of 1823, basically doomed the sma’ stills and paved the way for large-scale distilleries; by the mid-19th century nine such distilleries were operating on the island.