Other factors possibly helped to strangle illicit distillation in Lewis. The island was fortunate – or unfortunate – in that the two excise revenue cutters which patrolled the whole Minch and Atlantic seaboards, pursuing smugglers and distillers, were based at Stornoway. Then there was the rise in the power of the Free Kirk from the 1840s on the island, which organisation would take a less latitudinarian approach to all things illicit – including illicit distilling – than their Church of Scotland predecessors, some of whom appear to have been involved in smuggling. (The Barvas minister was denounced to the gaugers in the 1790s for running an illicit still). Finally, given the small local demand and inability to meet the wider mainland demand, there was little financial incentive, but a great risk, in illicit distillation.
And so by 1850, the tradition of the illegal pot still had died out on Lewis. Maybe there was drinking going in the numberless moorland bothans for a century-and-a-half afterwards, but all due tax on the craitur imbibed had been paid … so goes the conventional wisdom. But then, where did that copper kettle left outside Abhainn Dearg come from? Rather than having given up illicit distillation, were the Lewis folk just smart enough to have avoided detection? The answer lies hidden in the trackless, misty moors of Eilean Fraoch.
9 The Last Distiller Had the Last Laugh
THOUGH DOUBTLESS THE odd sma’ still might yet be found in remote areas of the West Highlands, the last illicit distiller on a scale large enough to provide his main income must have been Hamish Dhubh Macrae of Monar, who retired from his calling a century ago. He and his father had outwitted the excisemen for over 60 years, and even in finally giving up his trade, Hamish had the last laugh.
Hamish’s father Alasdair and his wife had originally come to Loch Monar from Kintail in the 1840s. Monar is and was one of the remotest parts of the Scottish mainland, accessible only by drove roads and bridle paths. Alasdair built a house on an island at the western end of Loch Monar, and by having the ‘lum reekin’ before he was challenged, gained squatter’s rights. He also built a causeway to connect the little fortress to the mainland. But the fire in his house was not the only one Alasdair lit.
It seems that the Macraes had come deliberately to Monar to engage in the illicit production of whisky. Monar was 40 miles, and hard miles at that, from the nearest gauger’s office in Dingwall. Alasdair originally had bothies at a place called Cosaig at the lochside, but when he suffered the indignity of being arrested by the gaugers and taken to Dingwall for trial, he vowed never to be captured again, and to improve the concealment of his trade.
He rebuilt his stills high on the side of a mountain over-looking Loch Monar, called Meall Mor, and here Hamish his son was apprenticed to the trade by being posted with a spyglass to keep a lookout for the excisemen coming up the glen. On one occasion, when snow fell and Hamish did not want footsteps to reveal the location of the stills, he stayed for several cold and hungry days on the bothy, high on Meall Mor, until the snow melted.
Though Alasdair, and Hamish after him, grew a few potatoes and indulged in a spot of poaching his main income was from the whisky; the winter months were given over to distillation, and the summer ones to distribution. There were customers in the area; the local gamekeepers and shepherds living in Glen Strathfarrar, east of Loch Monar supplied outlets as did passing drovers and tinkers, more numerous in those days. But the Macraes also sold to local hostelries in the district, and even visited fairs at Dingwall and elsewhere, selling The Pait Blend under the noses of the authorities. The whisky was named after a knoll, Pait (Gaelic: a hump) just opposite their island home.
Alasdair lived to the ripe old age of 97, and both he and his wife were carried back in their coffins for burial to the graveyard on Loch Duich in Kintail, by rough roads amounting to over 20 miles. The mountaineer, Revd AE Robertson, who took a photograph of Hamish and Mairi about 1905, knew the Macraes well and was told the story of their mother’s funeral. The porters were well supplied with illicit whisky that day, and one of them commented of Alasdair’s wife that ‘She was a big heavy woman too’ – adding that they required many stops for refreshment. One of these stops nearly led to a disaster, when the over-refreshed porters subsequently found themselves in Kintail – without the coffin – and had to return many weary miles to retrieve it.
Hamish carried on the good work after his father’s death. He was a colourful character, considering himself the equal of any, refusing to speak anything but Gaelic, and donning full Highland dress to visit the laird, Captain Stirling, at Pait Lodge (where a bottle reputedly changed hands) on Sundays. He and his sister Mairi were actually born at Monar and spent their entire lives there. Another brother, Alexander, emigrated to New Zealand and became part of an illicit whisky distilling dynasty in Southland (see Chapter 10).
Local people connived with the Macraes in the production of their whisky, sending runners ahead to warn them that the excisemen were on their way. On one occasion the gaugers were welcomed into a house in Strathfarrar, and entertained while news of their arrival was sent ahead. In the house the gaugers over-indulged in whisky (possibly Hamish’s own) and felt so hungover the next day that they abandoned their search and returned to Dingwall empty-handed and sorry-headed.
But by the early 1900s there were fewer illicit distillers to chase, and the noose was tightening, making it more difficult for Hamish to live off his trade. And he was getting old, and had also heard the wonderful news that Lloyd George had introduced old-age pensions. Captain Stirling prevailed upon Hamish to give the distilling up. But Hamish turned even his retirement to good use. While at a fair in Beauly he approached a couple of excisemen and informed them, that if he could receive the £5 reward, he would show them the location of some illicit stills. He then led the guagers to his own bothies, and pocketed the reward, while they delightedly took away the stills for destruction. The ruins of the bothies are still there on Meall Mor for those who search, but the Macraes’ island home was sadly submerged by the building of the Monar dam in 1959, and the raising of the water level.
Jamie and his sister retired to the old folks’ home at Kilmorack, and on their deaths were also taken back to Kintail for burial beside their parents – though this time they were transported by road, not carried on foot as their parents had been. The Macraes of Monar have passed into history and The Pait Blend into folklore, its famed taste a fond memory … unless there is still a bottle lying beneath the waters of Loch Monar?
10 New Zealand Moonshine: The Hokonui Brand
MARY McRAE SAILED for New Zealand on the emigrant ship The Hydaspes in 1872. Recently widowed, she took with her her four sons and three daughters, and her memories of her 45 hard years in Kintail, the MacRae heartland. She also took with her a wooden box marked ‘Household Goods’, which contained one of the most essential household items in Kintail at that time. This was a fine copper and brass whisky still, which was to have a colourful history once it was reassembled on her new holding in the Hokonui hills of Southland in New Zealand’s South Island.
She left behind in Kintail a conviction for illegal distilling, which had attracted to her – or rather to her son Duncan – a massive £650 fine, with an additional £150 for non-appearance at court, for operating a still on Kishorn island in Kintail. Mary’s husband had died the year before, and possibly dire economic necessity had driven her to illicit distilling to support her large family, as it did many others. There is no record of the fine being paid before Mary left Scotland, indeed such a sum would have been impossible for a poor Highland crofter to find.
The McRaes settled in the Southland district which was heavily populated by Scots, particularly Scots Highlanders, with many hundreds from Kintail itself. The locals still universally spoke Gaelic, played the classical bagpipe (piobaireachd), and had a taste for whisky – which was very expensive if imported. There existed a local hooch produced from the Cabbage Tree, but this deadly brew was more of a rum than a whisky, and Mary soon found a ready demand for her craitur when
she started distilling again with her sons. At events in the local Celtic Society Hall and as far away as Invercargill at the Caledonian Sports Society’s Games, the Hokonui brand soon found a market.
This was still frontier time in Southland, and the authorities could only make limited efforts to control illicit stills, of which there were many besides Mary’s. On one occasion officers came to her cabin and listened at the window to the conversation for clues – as the talk inside was all in Gaelic, they went away as mystified as when they had come. On another occasion the customs officers might have been more lucky, had Mary (now known as the cailleach) not sat down over a whisky barrel, covering it with her skirt and remaining seated while the exciseman made his search.
Mary died in 1911 at the ripe old age of 92, and she attributed her lifelong good health to a daily dose of her own dram. In the years after the First World War, however, the frontier epoch had passed away and the increasingly resourceful authorities took a more active role in eradicating illegal whisky distilling in Southland, where many stills, including Mary’s own, were still in operation. One law enforcement official said, ‘Southland is absolutely notorious for the distillation of whisky, which everyone knows had been carried on here for over fifty years.’
The first successful prosecution was in 1924, when Alex Chisholm and Alexander McRae were fined $200NZ (£100). Then in 1928 came the Awarua case, when another illicit still was found and smashed, and a similar fine imposed to the case four years previously. But the cailleach’s own still was still bubbling away merrily. One Duncan ‘Piper’ McRae (no relation) had married the cailleach’s daughter and he carried on the production of whisky with her still, which then passed through further generations of the family. By 1928 intermarriage had brought it into the hands of Duncan Stuart, who operated the still at Otapiri Gorge.
Stuart was producing on a large scale, and it was his main employment. According to the Customs Department, he was making 10 gallons of whisky a month, representing a loss in customs revenue of $1260 a year. Selling the whisky at $4 a gallon brought him $10 – the equivalent of £5 a week – a tidy income in the 1920s. A massive fine of $1000 and confiscation of the still meant an end to the life of the equipment which had operated in Southland for almost 60 years – and for an untold number of years in Kintail before that. However there was one more chapter in the Southland whisky saga before it became history.
One of the problems facing excisemen in Southland was the thick cover of bush. This meant that smoke from the stills became dispersed through the leaf canopy and difficult to spot. Knowing there were stills operating in the Dunsdale area of Southland, the exisemen came up with a novel idea – aerial surveillance, by which they might hope to discern the dispersing clouds of smoke.
John Smith was the instructor with Southland Aero Club, and the Collector of Customs chartered him and his Gypsy Moth in 1934 to overfly the bush around Dunsdale where another family of McRaes, William, father and son, were under suspicion. Now this family of McRaes had a reputation. Back in the 1890s John McRae, also a whiskymaker had been accused of murder in a very murky case involving whisky and women. Though he had been acquitted here was clearly a family not to meddle with. Smith later recalled how he earned his fee, but avoided any personal problems.
He (the customs official) went straight up to the wall map and pointed out the spot where the still was set up and said ‘You know what to do.’ I knew what would happen if I flew over that place, it would be a bullet first and questions afterwards. There was a west wind blowing and I took the collector all around the Hokonuis till the turbulence made him ill, but I never went anywhere near that still.
Eventually though, the excisemen found the still, which McRae had set up just outside his farm on Maori Reservation land. When challenged he said, ‘It if is outside my boundaries, I would not know anything about it.’ Indeed, the evidence against the McRaes was mainly circumstantial, and when brought to court they were discharged by the jury. The police however, wrecked the still and this was really the end of the 60 or more years of Hokonui hooch.
It is just a pity that visitors cannot taste it any more, as reports of consumers in the past testify to its excellence. ‘It was just like whisky’, said one witness at a court case asked to describe its taste, and what higher praise could there be?
1Worth around £2.5m today.
2prunach = splintered.
3Preventive commander = gauger
4Fudgie = cowardly
5Yisk = hiccup
6Extract from Mackenzie of Seaforth’s letter to the Treasury in 1824. In it he asked for permission to establish a distillery at Stornoway, in order to end what he called, ‘The wicked and disastrous system of vexation and fines, and all the frauds and oppression caused by the excise system, which the ignorance and prejudice of the poor wretched tenantry would never view in any other way, recollecting or acting upon the knowledge that until a very short period, their landlord, by a very small pecuniary compromise with the Government, purchased for them a special immunity for carrying on illicit distillation, by farming the excise.’ (Italicised emphasis is the author’s). From Donald MacDonald, Lewis (2004 edn) p190. MacDonald states that ‘illicit distillation practically ceased’ in Lewis by the 1840s.
Ian R Mitchell has been a well-established writer of historical and mountaineering literature since the publication in 1987 of Mountain Days and Bothy Nights (co-authored with Dave Brown). This was followed by A View from the Ridge by the same authors which won the Boardman Tasker Award in 1991. His Scotland’s Mountains before the Mountaineers won the Outdoor Writers’ Guild Award for excellence in 1998, and his most recent work (co-authored with George Rodway) was the highly acclaimed 2011 biography of Himalayan pioneer Alexander Kellas, Prelude to Everest. Ian has mountaineered widely in both Europe and North America and his talks on his books and experiences have taken him to many Mountain Festivals on both sides of the Atlantic.
His former profession as a history teacher allowed him to cover other aspects of Scottish culture and he has contributed regularly to publications such as The Scots Magazine in which he has written about subjects such as whisky. This interest led him to compile Wee Scotch Whisky Tales.
First published by
an imprint of
Neil Wilson Publishing Ltd
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© Ian R Mitchell, 2015
The author asserts his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, as amended, to be identified as the Author of this Work.
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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-906000-79-0
Wee Scotch Whisky Tales Page 5
