Wee Scotch Whisky Tales

by Ian R Mitchell

  Burns was the Ploughman Poet, a poor peasant farmer who failed to make ends meet from his pen, despite his fame. When struggling to make a living farming, he took up a part-time job as an exciseman at £50 a year. Given Burns’ attitude to whisky it is possibly unsurprising that from time to time he was lax in the execution of his duties.

  On one occasion Burns entered the howff of an old dame suspected of selling illicit whisky and asked for a dram and some bread and cheese. When he offered to pay, the crone replied the he owed ‘Naething ava for the whisky, but saxpence for the bread and cheese.’ Laughingly Burns told her ‘Sin on, and fear not,’ and left the house. On another occasion he apprehended a whisky smuggler with his cart, and the man so moved Burns with the story of his poverty that the exciseman gave him a pound instead of arresting him.

  In 1794 Burns moved to Dumfries, where his wages rose to £70 a year, more than ever he made from his poetry. That his heart was not in his work as a gauger was shown by the fact that in Dumfries he wrote the poem The Exciseman which celebrates the devil running off with the exciseman to the delight of the local population. The move to Dumfries was good for Burns’ income but bad for his drinking. Conviviality and alcohol were linked in Scotland at this time in a way that would make today’s binge drinkers appear temperate. Every social occasion, from Halloween to markets and fairs, was marked by excess alcoholic consumption. These were periodic indulgences for the lower classes but in the genteel Dumfries society Burns now moved in, steady, heavy drinking was the norm. One commentator wrote:

  The whole town tipples; there are club rooms in every lane; the flow of drink is perpetual, the system of soaking knows no season. All classes drink – the schoolmaster, the curate, the publican and sinner, the tax gatherer, the exciseman, and the half-pay officer.

  Unable to resist such temptation Burns’ addiction grew. In January 1796 after a visit to his favourite Globe Tavern, Burns fell asleep in the snow on the way home, catching a severe chill and rheumatic fever which was to contribute to his death later in that year – at the age of 37.

  Burns wrote some of the finest love poems in any language, yet his treatment of women, who found him irresistible, was dreadful. He also wrote some of the best drinking songs ever, praising whisky in these above all other drink, but he was unable to enjoy the craitur without excess. Rabbie was a rogue, but he was aware of his flaws, of which women and drink were the main, and he hoped that, ‘Whatever may be my failings, may they ever be those of a generous heart and an independent mind.’ Indeed, they were. When we toast the ‘Immortal Memory’ of Scotland’s National Bard with the country’s national drink, let us note that he would have written many more wonderful songs had he used whisky as his servant, rather than as his master.

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

  CURRENT DEBATES ON ‘responsible drinking’ and on the cost and availability of alcohol have a long pedigree. Scotland, the birthplace of modern industrial whisky making, also saw the birth of the first of the temperance movements and an examination of their rise and fall might be of use in informing the present discussion.

  The beginnings of large-scale whisky commercial distilling in 1824 was facilitated by the reduction of the duty on spirits from 7s to 2s 6d (12.5p) a gallon – and a consequent reduction in the price of whisky. Consumption of the craitur in Scotland increased from about two million gallons in 1822 to approaching seven million in 1829, accompanied by a consequent increase in drunkenness. For example, in Glasgow from 1871-4 some 125,000 people were arrested as ‘drunk and incapable’. Many people felt Something Had To Be Done.

  Intemperance was an accepted part of upper-class Scottish society, but it had generally been conducted behind domestic doors or in private drinking clubs. The new urban working-class drunkenness on the other hand was manifested in public. Many early reformers were motivated by humanitarian impulses, but also by the fact that they felt the increasingly industrial society would be put at risk by workmen drinking, and that the middle classes would be taxed to pay the poor rates necessary to maintain the indigent drunken populace. From the outset the alcohol reformers target was the drink of the working man – and especially, their target was whisky. One sceptic commented that the rage against drunkenness was an ‘artful combination of the upper classes against the toiling portion of the community by keeping back whisky from the common people.’

  The first temperance society in the world was set up in Maryhill, then a village just outside Glasgow, by James Dunlop. This movement’s target was whisky (and other spirits), and not the wine drunk domestically by the middle and upper classes, which was assumed to be ‘nutritious’. Dunlop was aided in his work by the millionaire Glasgow printer and bible publisher William Collins, who did not endear himself to working men by arguing that they should only drink water. Collins’ money funded hundreds of tracts and the issuance of the Temperance Society Record. Collins was an evangelical Christian who believed that drink was the cause of poverty, and of irreligion.

  The early temperance movement was heavily religiously inspired. In 1842 an Irish priest, Theobald Mathew, led a procession of 50,000 people to Glasgow Green, where an estimated 80% of them signed a pledge to abstain from alcohol (though presumably not communion wine). Soon a whole range of societies burst into existence some advocating temperance (ie. a selective and moderate alcohol consumption) others increasingly becoming supporters of teetotalism, that is abstaining from all alcohol consumption, and still others going as far as prohibitionism, that is the banning of all production and sale of alcoholic drink.

  In the Victorian period and well into the 20th century this now almost forgotten crusade against alcohol was a mass movement which had a great influence on politics. Christian groups continued to wage the campaign against the ‘demon drink’, greatly strengthened when the Salvation Army arrived in Scotland in 1879, with its lively open-air meetings and anti-alcohol message. But many other organisations rejected the simplistic view of drink causing poverty and argued rather that it was the other way round. The exploited working man had no hope and no escape except into drunkenness, and tackling poverty would lead to more success in combating alcohol abuse.

  Movements such as the Independent Order of Rechabites waged temperance campaigns accompanied by the whole paraphernalia of uniforms and regalia that would provide colour in dull lives. The Rechabites were also a Friendly Society in the pre-welfare-state days, offering care for sickness and other benefits to those who practised temperance, and the loss of these if members lapsed. The Good Templars was another organisation which combined friendly society benefits with ritual and colour often inspired by Freemasonry, along with social activities and outings. It soon had a Scottish membership of 80,000, including one branch in Airdrie boasting over 4,000 members. The Band of Hope was an abstinence organisation, this time aimed at children and set up by William Quarrier, who established orphan homes.

  The combined pressure of all these organisations began to bear legislative fruit. In 1853 a Licensing Act closed pubs on Sundays and at 11pm on weekdays, and the increasing power of the anti-drink lobby meant that it became difficult to get new licences. Women and children were also selectively banned from public houses. In Glasgow by the later 19th century under a succession of provosts including William Collins Jnr, alcohol was forbidden on council premises – a ban that lasted until 1960, and Collins made it clear that had the law of the land allowed, he would have introduced prohibition in Glasgow. This pressure reached its culmination in 1913 when the Temperance (Scotland) Act became law, allowing for local plebiscites on the sale of alcohol. In the 1920s over 40 areas in Scotland voted to become ‘dry’ – but as these were mainly middle-class residential areas, the effect was limited.

  Initially many working-class reformers and trades unionists opposed the temperance movement as middle-class busybodies. But as the 19th century progressed the Labour movement more and more adopted the crusaders’ message against drink, whi
ch its leaders saw, not as the cause of working-class poverty, but as something which made it worse – and whose effects made working men less able to hear the socialist message of hope. Thus many of the early leaders of the Labour movement in Scotland such as Keir Hardie and John Maclean, were teetotal. The Co-operative movement – where working-class womens’ influence was strong – was especially down on drink, and it was not until 1958 that any of the branches of the SCWS were permitted to sell alcohol.

  This alliance between Labour and temperance had a dramatic outcome in Dundee, where the radical socialist and prohibitionist Edwin Scrymgeour was elected to parliament in 1922 – beating Winston Churchill. While the men of Dundee might have been voting for Scrymgeour’s firebrand socialism, the women were supporting him for his plans to outlaw the manufacture of alcohol altogether; and alcohol for the working man still meant largely whisky in those days. Scrymgeour introduced his Prohibitionist Bill to parliament in 1923 where it failed by 335 to 14.

  The failure of this one attempt to introduce prohibition into Britain was soon followed by its introduction into the United States of America. The disastrous consequences of this measure, with its massive increase in racketeering and its limited effect on alcohol consumption, meant that the ideas of prohibition were discredited, and the issue dropped from the political agenda. Trying to prohibit the production of alcohol is today seen as a hopeless cause, and, while individuals might themselves ‘Take the Pledge’, few of them nowadays would hope to persuade the majority of their fellows to do the same. Ironically though, today’s ‘sensible drinking’ mantra is quite close to that of the early temperance reformers, before they moved towards their less tolerant teetotal and prohibitionist positions.

  8 Lewis Whisky and the Case of the Illicit Still

  AT ABHAINN DEARG by Uig Bay on the Isle of Lewis, which location I personally hold to be the most beautiful place on earth, there was recently established the first legal distillery to operate on the Isle of Lewis for at least a century and a half. In a former fish-bait shed the ‘Spirit of Lewis’ is lovingly produced from local barley. What the distillery’s owners did not anticipate was that the enthusiasm for their enterprise would extend so far as to their finding an illicit still from the 1950s dumped outside the shed one morning, donated anonymously by someone who clearly wanted their project to succeed.

  The brief Lewis experiment with legal whisky distilling had ended by the 1860s, but that illicit still is ‘proof ’ that the island’s distilling tradition had carried on many years after most people had assumed it had vanished. The distillation of spirits has as long a history in the Outer Isles as it does elsewhere in Scotland. When Martin Martin visited Lewis in about 1695, he commented:

  Their plenty of corn was such as disposed the natives to brew several sorts of liquors, as common usquebaugh, another called trestarig, id est, aqua-vitae, three times distilled, which is strong and hot, a third sort is four times distilled, and this by the natives is called usqubaugh-baul … two spoonfulls of this last liquor is a sufficient dose; and if any man exceed this, it would presently stop his breath and endanger his life.

  Martin added that, ‘The trestarig and usquebaugh-baul are both made of oats’ and the use of oats for distilling is confirmed by the Revd JL Buchanan who visited Lewis a century later and noted that oats and not barley was the favoured grain. However by the mid-18th century natural selection had ‘created’ whisky as we now know it, as opposed to the various other spirits and cordials, and barley was being used for whisky distillation in Lewis just as elsewhere. The drink’s popularity grew amongst the townspeople of Stornoway, whose richer inhabitants were reported to be partly paying their maidservants’ wages in whisky – at the rate of a wine glass each morning! Its popularity also began to replace that of ale amongst the country people, but the main reason for domestic distillation was not the legally permitted one of personal consumption, but that of ‘paying’ the rent.

  In the century before 1840, the main method a Lewis peasant had of getting money to pay his rent was to convert a part of his crop to whisky, sell it, and hand the money gained over to the landlord. In 1833 the minister of Stornoway Parish stated in the New Statistical Account that,

  Formerly when each tenant was allowed to convert the produce of his little lot into usquebaugh, or tres-tarig, that is thrice distilled, it was solely to pay his rent, – illicit distillation had not the same dete-riorating effect here on the morals of the people as on the mainland.

  Leaving the second part of the reverend gentleman’s assertion aside for the moment, the first is undoubtedly accurate, and confirmed by other accounts which all state that the distilling was small-scale, never attaining the commercial magnitude of operations taking place at the same time, for example, on mainland areas like Donside in Aberdeenshire.

  The main reason for this would appear to be, possibly, not only the superior moral quality of the Lewis population, but simply, lack of opportunity. Even more so than in remote mainland Highland areas, the market available for mass-produced illicit whisky was just not there; the population of the whole of the Outer Isles in 1800 was less than 10,000, and the logistics of getting any large amounts of illegally produced whisky off the island and to distant customers was simply beyond the capability and probably even the imagination of the largely monoglot and un-entrepreneurial Gaelic peasants of Lewis, moral though they undoubtedly were.

  The owners of Lewis at this time were the Mackenzies of Seaforth, who encouraged and supported this illegal distillation, as a means of ensuring their rents were paid. Not only that, they appear to have negotiated a deal with the excise that allowed Lewis crofters the right to produce and sell more than they personally consumed. In a letter to the treasury dated 1824 (a year after the total overhaul of the distilling legislation), Stewart Mackenzie protested that this right had been withdrawn, and the harassment of the distillation subsequently was making it difficult for the tenants to pay, and Mackenzie to collect, their rents. 6

  The late 1820s saw an increase in the efforts of the excisemen, which met with growing success with the arrests of crofters in Back, Coll, Barvas Habost, South Lochs, Shawbost and South Bragar, along with subsequent fines and imprisonment. Crofters retreated from the moors to remote caves. Gheodha Beuc (Noisy Cave) at the Butt of Lewis and Geodha Thogallaich (Brewing Cave) in Tolsta became the last refuges of the distillers though even they were not safe from small boats set into the narrow inlets from the revenue cutters. The effect on living standards of the suppression of illicit distilling was outlined by the then estate factor John Munro Mackenzie in 1851, ‘ … when times changed and whisky could no longer be made, those who did not change their occupation and become fishermen are now very ill off.’

  Out of this dilemma came the first experiment with legal distillation in Lewis. Stewart Mackenzie himself set up a legal distillery, buy his tenants’ surplus grain off them (receiving the money back as rent!) and then turn that peasant produce into a profitable distilling enterprise. Lewis had plenty of water, plenty of fuel (peat) and surplus barley ... it seemed a good idea at the time, and Mackenzie poured the considerable sum of £14,000 into the venture. By 1833 the minister at Stornoway could write that amongst the ‘modern’ buildings in the town:

  There is also a distillery on a grand scale, with coppers of large diameter, furnaces, vats, coolers, flake-stands under a running stream; also a very large malt barn and mill.

  The works were situated at the Shoe Burn which lies in the grounds of the present Lewis Castle. One Mr Macnee was engaged as the chief distiller and became a well-liked fellow in the town, earning the nickname Thomas Mhor. This might have been due to the size of the drams he dispensed to the townspeople and sailors who bought whisky at the distillery. He apparently was giving measures greater than they had paid for! Efforts were made to supply the Glasgow market with the product, and there was even some discussion of appointing a London agent, but most of the whisky appears to have met the local demand of townsfolk and
passing sailors in Stornoway.

  It is often stated, and was recently re-affirmed in the Stornoway Gazette, that the Shoeburn Distillery closed just before or just after the Mathesons bought Lewis in 1844. However a perusal of the diary of the estate chamberlain, or factor, John Munro Mackenzie, from 1851, shows that this was not the case, and in fact expansion appears to have been the keynote. In March 1851 he recorded his search along the Laxdale River with a view to ‘fixing the site of Mill dam and lead [lade] for Distillery’.

  Construction duly commenced and by December Mackenzie was able to note with satisfaction that the work was complete and that he had, ‘Remained at the Distillery all day seeing the men paid & arranged various matters with foremen.’ One of the men he mentions being the abovementioned chief distiller Mr Macnee. It is this clear that Shoeburn Distillery continued in operation well into the 1850s, contrary to received opinion, and that Matheson, a convinced temperance advocate, continued to produce and profit from whisky distillation at Stornoway for at least a decade after he purchased the island. One source gives 1857 as the date Matheson demolished the works and replaced it with stables. Lewis was not to become another Islay … possibly that local market was just too small and Stornoway just too far away from larger centres of demand (though the Orkney distilleries of this period flourished) for Shoeburn to survive.

  Matheson, the Christian evangelical teetotaller, had made his fortune supplying the Chinese market with opium from India and in the process turned a large proportion of China’s population into drug addicts; in addition it lead to that country’s bankruptcy. Matheson’s duplicitous nature was also shown in that while continuing to produce legal whisky, at the same time he tightened the screw against illicit distilling. His factor wrote clauses into tenants’ leases stipulating that the penalty for distillation of any kind was eviction.