Читать книгу A Long Stride - Nicholas Morgan - Страница 7

CHAPTER 1

TEA & WHISKY: A GROCERY SHOP IN KILMARNOCK

‘There is every probability that Kilmarnock will still further increase in wealth and population, and become a formidable rival to the famed “Metropolis of the West”’¹

Founded in 1820, John Walker’s shop in King Street, Kilmarnock, image c. 1830s

GIVEN THAT HE IS without doubt Kilmarnock’s most famous son, whose name is spoken every day by people around the world, surprisingly little is known about the life of John (later ‘Johnnie’) Walker. We do know that John was born at Todriggs Farm on the Caprington Estate, a few miles south-west of Kilmarnock, on 25 July 1805. Tradition has it that the Walker family had farmed at Todriggs for generations. A substantial stone-built farmhouse, currently derelict, stands on the site, but this may have post-dated John’s time there. John’s father, Alexander, had been born in 1780, and in 1804 married Elizabeth Gemmel. John was born the following year. Alexander died in 1819, aged only thirty-nine (relatively early deaths, as it was to turn out, were something of an affliction for Walker men), at which point the contents of the farm, now the property of John, were sold and in 1820 some of the proceeds invested in a grocery business in Kilmarnock as a source of income for John and his mother Elizabeth. Valued by Elizabeth, John’s maternal uncle Thomas Todd, his paternal uncle John (also resident at Todriggs), and neighbouring farmers Thomas Borland and Hugh Paton, the estate, including debts worth £120, totalled £537 15s. By far the largest component was cattle and calves valued at £236, and horses, sheep and swine (£50), although there was also seed corn, beans, barley and seed potatoes listed amongst everyday farming tools and implements.² Despite being a minor, John was technically able to run his business himself, but seems to have agreed to the wishes of his curators (his mother and uncles) that it initially be managed on his behalf by one Robert Caldwell, named in the first surviving inventory of the shop’s stock-in-trade in 1825, while John learned the skills of the grocery trade from him for the first few years.

By the time John Walker’s business was established in Kilmarnock the town was being described as ‘the largest and most elegant in Ayrshire . . . with a series of modern streets, little inferior to those of the New Town of Edinburgh . . . and [which] possesses to all appearances, many of the attributes of a great capital’.³ This was a result of a transformation over the previous fifty years or more, ‘from a mean village into a minor city’.⁴ The population, only 4,400 in 1755, was nearly 13,000 by 1821, making it the ninth-largest settlement in Scotland. With a haphazard arrangement of narrow streets, the old town had been dark and difficult to navigate: ‘It is easily enough got into,’ wrote one visitor in the 1790s, ‘but the devil himself had surely a hand in its formation, for I can’t for the life of me discover a way out of it . . .’⁵ Having obtained an Act of Parliament to improve the town, the burgh council literally opened up the old town from its medieval focus, the Cross, in 1804. To the south ran King Street (where the new Town Buildings were built in 1805) and to the north Portland Street and Wellington Street. The result was that ‘the town as a whole presented an air of comfort and elegance to the eye of a stranger and impressed him with a favourable impression of the taste and industry of the inhabitants’.⁶ And no doubt any stranger visiting Kilmarnock would also have been impressed not only by the dramatic improvements effected to the principal road to Glasgow, but also by the (horse-drawn) railway which ran from the town to Troon, built in 1812 in order to connect coal mines around the town to Troon Harbour, which had been substantially developed by the Duke of Portland, Kilmarnock’s principal landowner, the railway’s principal promoter, and the proprietor of the coal mines that fed the railway.⁷

A page from the inventory of Alexander Walker’s farm at Todriggs, near Kilmarnock, which John Walker inherited in 1819

Kilmarnock was surrounded by Ayrshire’s rich and much improved farmland, famous for its dairy produce, particularly Ayrshire (or Dunlop) cheese, it’s most valuable product, and cattle which were admired, and sent, all over the world.⁸ In addition the land around Kilmarnock was rich in mineral deposits, most notably iron and coal. Wool and leather had principally driven the growth of the town up to the 1820s, with weaving introduced in the early eighteenth century, and, in 1743, a large weaving manufactory set up in the town specialising in carpet production. Leather-working and boot and shoe manufacture began around the same time.⁹ Fluctuating trade conditions brought considerable economic insecurity, particularly to the weaving community, who were already threatened by the effect of increasing mechanisation.¹⁰ In 1821, of almost 2,700 households in the town, the overwhelming majority were dependant on the trades and industries that had been increasingly depressed since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and would continue to be till the middle of the century. With this came demands for assistance for the impoverished, a growing radicalism and demand for reform of the franchise, and the threat of ‘riotous proceedings’ and ‘outrages’, which the town council met with an equal mixture of relief programmes and repression.¹¹

King Street Kilmarnock in 1819, running south from Portland Street. John Walker’s shop was next to the Sun Inn, marked by the letter ‘b’

If poverty and politics were potentially divisive forces in Kilmarnock’s life, then alcohol could be a cohesive factor, both uniting the town in celebration at high days and holidays, and helping to reinforce and legitimise the social order of the day. On the King’s birthday shops were decorated with greenery, and shopkeepers stood at their doors ‘watching what was going on in the street’. The ‘chief event of the day’ was when the city fathers took to the balcony of the Town Buildings and ‘pledged the King’s health’: ‘Other toasts followed, and I remember’, wrote an onlooker, ‘how the common folks, assembled below on the street, used to look up to, and envy, these big-wigs - who occupied such an exalted station.’ After this they would adjourn to ‘the Sun Inn, kept by Mr John Murray, where the loyal health were drunk under all the usual demonstrations of joy’.¹² Both the Old and New Statistical Account of Scotland lamented the number of inns and alehouses (around 150 by 1840), and regretted the ‘evidences of intemperance’.¹³ If Kilmarnock liked to drink, then so did Scotland. It has been calculated that in the 1830s the per capita consumption of spirits among the Scottish population aged fifteen years and more averaged a little under a pint a week, and drink permeated almost all aspects of daily business and leisure, even, as we shall see, shopping for groceries.¹⁴ Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus complained that whisky-drinking was the bane of Morayshire, from the poorest cottage to the most genteel breakfast table. In the urbanised Lowlands of Scotland, commentators criticised the consumption of cheap, ‘coarse and deleterious spirit’, rapidly distilled and principally from grain, rather than ‘pure’ malted barley.¹⁵

For those with a greater disposable income, there was already some nascent sense of connoisseurship or discernment when it came to choosing what whiskies to drink: ‘There are some places more famed for the goodness of their whisky than others, such as Glenlivet, Ferintosh, Campbeltown, Crieff, etc. of which intimation is given in the houses where it is sold upon tickets almost in every spirit dealer’s window in Glasgow, Edinburgh and other places.’¹⁶ Not that whisky was the only spirit of choice in early nineteenth-century Scotland. Apart from Speyside breakfast tables, it was rarely to be seen amongst the fine wines and cognacs of the gentry or aristocrats. In 1820s Glasgow, a city whose economic engine room was largely driven by sugar, slavery and smoking, long before smelting and shipbuilding came on the scene, ‘Rum punch, with the lemons and limes from Trinidad and Jamaica, was the ruling element at all dinner parties in Glasgow.’¹⁷ In Edinburgh in the 1820s rum too held sway: ‘It was computed that above 2000 private stills were constantly employed in producing molasses spirit. The common people got so universally into the habit of drinking this spirit, that when a porter or labourer was seen reeling along the street, the common saying was that he has got molassed.’¹⁸ Whether drunk by the dram, or in punch or toddies served by the half-mutchkin, the consumption of spirits was all-pervasive. ‘In no other country does spiritous liquor seem to have assumed so much the attitude of the authorised instrument of compliment and kindness as in North Britain.’¹⁹ Clearly for distillers, innkeepers and grocers, this was a considerable opportunity.

Before entering the grocery business it was normal for a boy to be apprenticed to the trade for between five and seven years, so it appears likely that around 1820, John Walker was indentured to Robert Caldwell to learn the complexities of the trade.²⁰ According to the Shopkeeper’s Guide, the virtues required of an early nineteenth-century grocer were relatively straightforward: early rising, self-denial, industry, arrangement, calculation, punctuality, perseverance, health, cheerfulness, courage and civility, good address, integrity and, last but not least, economy.²¹ In addition, grocers in the 1820s, despite the modern perception of the generality of their trade, required to learn specific skills and mysteries - bookkeeping, the law (particularly with regard to licences and excisable goods), salesmanship, window dressing, and the nature and qualities of the multiplicity of goods they dealt in. These could include tea, coffee, cocoa and chocolate, sugar, dried fruits and nuts, spices (including rice and grains), confectionery (preserved and crystallised fruits and peels, jams and juices), oils, pickles, sauces, hard cheeses, vinegars, and a variety of ‘miscellaneous’ household goods such as soaps, black lead, pipe clay and bath bricks.²² To this should be added, for the ‘grocer and spirit dealer’ (as was most common in Scotland), wines, fortified wines and liqueurs, spirits (British and foreign), and beers and porters. Critically the grocer had to learn how to select, store and care for this multiplicity of mostly imported goods, and in instances where quality was poor or had deteriorated, how to restore, or ‘improve’ their quality.²³ The grocer’s trade was not passive; through selection and receipt of goods to preparing, weighing or measuring for sale, it required a series of sometimes highly skilled interventions, all dependant on an understanding (within any category of goods) of flavour, relative qualities, and cost. One of the most important skills, which for some defined the grocer’s trade, was blending, or ‘the skills to enable them to change and alter’ goods ‘by mixture, confections, and possession of simple ingredients’.²⁴

The goods that grocers like John Walker offered to their customers ranged from the mundane to the exotic, from soap and starch to sweet almonds and orange peel. The latter sort were the ‘small luxuries that were increasingly important in the lives of consumers, both the middling sorts and the lower orders’, and reflected the significant changes that had taken place both in the consumption and availability of such luxuries during the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the nature of retailing itself.²⁵ Of all the goods that grocers handled, few had been such an engine of change as tea, still at this point sourced exclusively from China, and until 1834 sold in the United Kingdom through the monopoly of the East India Company. In 1820 the annual per capita consumption of tea was 1.22 pounds per person, which would almost double by the time of John Walker’s death in 1857. Imports averaged £29 million per year, a figure that had increased enormously since the Commutation Act of 1784 had drastically reduced duties on tea and ended a vast illicit trade in smuggled tea that (like the trade in smuggled whisky) was particularly strong in Scotland. Tea had also changed from being the drink that transformed manners, and shaped polite society, public spaces and domestic ritual (and even household furniture and tableware), to the drink that could be found at even the poorest table. Tea blending, although originally a luxurious, bespoke experience for the most exclusive customers to produce unique flavours to suit individual tastes, was at the heart of this democratisation of the drink.²⁶ Chinese tea varied in style and quality, from the black-leafed Bohea and congous, oolongs and scented pekoes, to the very finest green teas such as gunpowder (rarely sold as single varieties due to their costs).²⁷ From harvest to harvest, from year to year, and from variety to variety there could be an enormous variation in taste and quality, and price. Traders used a classification system that ranged from ‘Very Fine’ through ‘Ordinary’ to ‘Musty & Mouldy’ and ‘Dusty’.²⁸

One way for the dealer or grocer to deal with this continual variation was to mix, or blend, types of tea. Blending could also help improve the character of some of the less flavoursome varieties, in ways which were long understood by the trade: ‘One ounce of Pekoe in a pound of fine Souchong, gives an excellent flavour; as do two ounces of Pekoe to two pounds of Congou or Souchong, mixed equally together.’²⁹ Blenders were dependant at the outset on receiving pure tea in the very best condition from China. Yet a veil of secrecy shrouded tea growing and manufacturing in China in an attempt to prevent any possible loss of their global monopoly on its production. Despite the larger tea-houses sending representatives out to the Chinese mainland to gain both expertise and advanced knowledge of the quantities and qualities of tea that would be heading for London, some still felt that ‘no article of consumption is more subject to adulteration than the pleasant one which forms the principal ingredient of the tea table. It is not only adulterated by the Chinese vendor, but it undergoes sophistication by the Chinese artist.’³⁰ Tea might have been mixed with the leaves of other shrubs such as japonica, or cheap Boheas – the lowest quality of black tea – dyed to take on the appearance of more expensive green teas. Shipments damaged by saltwater in transit might be fumigated and dried before being mixed with Bohea. As more cheap teas were demanded by a less discerning clientele, so it became easier for the adulterers to flourish. It was estimated by a House of Commons committee that the value of adulterated tea put on the market in 1783 was £4 million (about £600 million today), when the value of teas sold by the East India Company totalled £6 million.³¹

The issue of adulteration became a cause célèbre in the period after the Napoleonic Wars when high demand for cheaper teas was frustrated by high duties, leaving the field open for unscrupulous purveyors of ‘poisonous and imitative teas’. At the same time a new breed of retailers, selling direct to consumers from London and through networks of local agents, exploited consumer fears of adulteration, and in nationwide newspaper advertising deliberately sowed the seeds of doubt as to the quality of blended teas. These disruptive businesses, promising teas ‘pure as imported’, ‘tried to arouse suspicion of a hallowed practice in the trade and asperse the honour and integrity of other dealers’ by undermining the legitimacy of the tea-blending process. Their legacy, an enduring suspicion (particularly among public health officials) that ‘blending’ was synonymous with ‘adulteration’ was to haunt Scotch whisky in both the nineteenth and twentieth century like Marley’s ghost.³²

Tea totalling £52 13s. 6d. was the second largest item by value in John Walker’s business by 1825: two chests of ‘fine tea’ (166 pounds), no doubt black tea and blended, and at around 6s. a pound the cheapest one might expect to buy, and two smaller canisters of green tea, Hyson at 10s. 6d. per pound and one of Twankay at 7s. 4d. (plus reams of ‘tea paper’ for packaging small parcels for customers). This was hardly enough stock to suggest that Caldwell and John had been blending tea commercially themselves by 1825 – more likely it was purchased from one of the large tea-houses in Glasgow or Edinburgh.³³ That’s not to say that they would have been unaware of the flavours and qualities of the various teas on offer, and the intricacies of blending them. In all likelihood they would also have been acutely aware of the importance of the art of blending teas, and of local preferences for tea styles, tastes which varied distinctly across Scotland.³⁴ Scotch whisky was the most valuable item in the shop at £64 13s. 3d. Amongst the small casks of rum, brandy, gin and ‘shrub’ there were two large casks, probably puncheons, of ‘aqua’ at two qualities – ‘No 1’ at 5s. 9d. per gallon, and ‘No 2’, at 6s. In addition there were 5 ‘small casks’, most probably octaves, of Islay whisky at 11s. 4d., and one from the newly built distillery at Largs, at 9s. 6d.³⁵ In total, by 1825, he held just over 175 gallons (including around 125 of ‘aqua’ and 45 of Islay), likely not enough in either quantity or variety to be commercially blending from, or at least not as it would be understood today.

And what exactly was the ‘aqua’, a term used through the nineteenth century (and occasionally into the twentieth) in the whisky industry in a bewildering variety of ways? By way of example, in March 1805 John Munro in Edinburgh offered his customers ‘Fine Old Aqua Shrub’. In December 1808 Robert Taylor, also in Edinburgh, was offering for sale 20 puncheons of ‘Old Grain Aqua’. In September 1821 over 800 gallons of ‘old Highland Malt and sugar aqua’ were being sold.³⁶ In November 1824, Thomas Miller of the newly built Abbey Hill distillery in Edinburgh announced that he had commenced making ‘Grain Aqua, and that early next month he intends to make Malt Whisky’.³⁷ Most likely, however, the ‘aqua’ in the Kilmarnock shop in the early 1820s was Lowland single grain whisky, ‘the long use’ of which, lamented a Scotsman editorial in June 1823, had ‘in some measure vitiated the taste of the people in Scotland’.³⁸ The prices charged elsewhere for grain whisky seem to match the Kilmarnock price for ‘aqua’. In 1823 the Genuine Tea Wine and Spirit Warehouse in Edinburgh’s High Street offered the following for sale by the gallon to its discerning clientele:

Plain Grain Whisky 6s;

Good Old Grain Whisky 6s 6d;

Fine Old Grain Whisky 7s;

Very Fine Grain Whisky 7s 6d;

Strong Grain Whisky 8s;

Double Strong Grain Whisky 8s 6d.

Further up the road, James Hardie’s Genuine Tea, Wine, Foreign and British Spirit Warehouse advertised ‘Fine Grain Whisky’ at 6s. to 7s. per gallon, and ‘Fine Strong Grain Whisky’ at 7s. 6d. to 8s. per gallon.³⁹ There was certainly no shortage of pot-still grain whisky on the market, albeit much of it was still being shipped to England for rectification into gin. Both the techniques and economics of production of whisky from ‘raw grain’ were fully understood, as were in particular the economies of scale that resulted from producing raw grain spirit in larger distilleries as opposed to the typical Highland small stills, highly prized for the production of full-flavoured single malt whisky.⁴⁰

The blending of grain and malt whisky was also a common and well-understood, if unspoken, practice which it is impossible to think was not influenced by the skills of the tea blender, given shared practitioners and a common approach of blending light and heavy, the expensive with the less expensive, the good with the less good. Giving evidence to the Royal Commission on Whisky in 1908, James Mackinlay of Leith recalled a handbook in the firm’s office that showed that ‘blending or mixing was a very old affair’.⁴¹ Alexander Peddie’s The Hotel Inn Keeper Vintner and Spirit Dealer’s Assistant, published in Glasgow in 1825, was intended for the young publican and innkeeper so that:

He will rise by easy steps to be a proficient in the art of making, mixing, managing, flavouring, colouring, and bottling of wines, foreign and British spirits, porter and ales; and will be capable of producing liquor of every description, pleasing to the eye, and grateful to the palate; which at all times will command a run, and the respect, attention, and support of the public.

Unlike the many similar London-published handbooks which offered guidance on how to manage, preserve and ‘improve’ stocks, and manufacture a bewildering variety of compounds and cordials which barely (if at all) mentioned whisky, Peddie dedicated a whole chapter to the subject. He explained how whisky ‘may be mixed up in such a way to be of considerable advantage to the seller, and be as equally good, agreeable and palatable, to the buyer’. Peddie’s exemplar recipes were simple, merely offering different proportions of either grain or malt, and not going to the level of particular makes or styles. The overriding importance of quality and age, both in the grain and malt whiskies used, was essential, ‘as two bads will never make a good’, and the ‘whiskies should be bought from the distiller as old as possible’. If both were of a high quality, ‘two thirds of grain whisky may be added to one third of malt whisky . . . without the mixture being known by those who reckon themselves judges’. The longer the blend could be kept in the cask, the better it would become, and ‘by the mellowness it acquires by age . . . it is impossible to know it from that extracted from malt’. Small beer and even strong ale could be added to give additional richness and a tinge of colour (‘There are a great many people fonder of a dram that has received a tinge than that which is clear and transparent’), but porter would have the effect of making the spirit too dark, like a brandy. A good quality blend could easily be sold as a malt whisky, ‘and no judge whatever will know that it is so’, the blenders intent being to produce something that was ‘wholesome and good for the consumer’. Blends, Peddie concluded, were ‘not only palatable, but highly beneficial and conducive to health as they change the effect which a perpetual round of sameness would have on the system’.⁴²

In addition to pleasing both his customer and his pocket there was another reason why a grocer or spirit dealer might choose to think of producing their own blends of whisky, or for that matter, tea. A grocer might well possess all those virtuous prerequisites demanded by the Shopkeeper’s Guide, and the particular skills of his trade, but in a crowded market, over and above service (including, importantly, the offer of sales on credit), distinctiveness was the key to both survival and success. In larger towns and cities with more and wealthier shoppers and more heavily capitalised businesses, this might be achieved through an extensive range of goods with some exclusive lines; in smaller communities a unique and well-priced popular blend of tea or whisky might just be enough to guarantee customer loyalty. Authorities on the subject were clear what commercial benefits a distinctive blend could bring:

The chief objects to keep in view in making up a blend are that . . . it shall possess a flavour which shall please the taste of your customers and at the same time be sufficiently distinctive to make the blend your own spécialité, and he who secures these objects at the least cost will be the most successful blender.⁴³

Our grocer will aim to give his blends a distinctive character if he finds he can do so. The aim of the smart houses is to produce a blend which customers cannot find elsewhere . . . this is the secret of success with most of the best known blends and blenders . . . to give your blend a character of its own, and differentiate it from that of your neighbour, you have to introduce some striking ingredient - striking enough to please your customers, not to excite their dislike! ⁴⁴

With the redevelopment of the old town centre, and the continuing growth of Kilmarnock’s population, retailing had flourished since the Shop Tax of 1786, which had assessed only twenty-six businesses, perhaps a handful of which were grocers.⁴⁵ As we shall see, by the time John Walker began in business some thirty years later the retailing trades had mushroomed. With a low cost of entry the grocery trade was highly aspirational for those who sought a path to both social and economic improvement, but the chances of failure were high. For John Walker, blending – of both tea and whisky – was soon to become the thing that defined his business and guaranteed him a lifetime of success, something that eluded so many others in the grocery business.

Despite having been in business since 1820, it is only in 1833 that the first of a handful of references to John Walker and his shop in Kilmarnock appears in the surviving public records. Rarely can the founder of what was to become a worldwide business have been so anonymous. It has been suggested that his first premises may have been in Sandbeds, running along the Kilmarnock Water parallel to King Street, but there is no evidence to support this.⁴⁶ But in the 1833 directory of the town, the earliest that survives, John was listed as a ‘grocer and spirit dealer’ at 25 King Street; in the Register of Electors (newly compiled under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act) for the same year he is described simply as a ‘grocer’. With a single square-paned bow window fronting onto King Street, the shop and its cellar was one of the more valuable properties in the street.⁴⁷ Close to Kilmarnock Cross, almost opposite the new council buildings (with the Flesh Market at its rear), and next door to the Sun Inn so beloved of the councillors ‘for demonstrations of joy’, this was an enviable position to capture the town’s more prosperous shoppers. ‘There are’, wrote one commentator, ‘two weekly markets, during which a degree of bustle and animation prevail, seldom seen in a provincial town. The inhabitants are accommodated with a convenient flesh-market, together with others for butter and cheese; that for meal has fallen into disuse, in consequence of the number of victualling shops in the town.’ The Cross, the traditional market place, was still the heart of the town; milk sellers would gather there in the morning, while in the afternoons (particularly on a Friday) a more varied selection of traders, with butter, eggs, poultry, fish, seasonal fruit and vegetables (‘I do not remember a single fruit shop being in the town at that time; potatoes were rarely sold by provision merchants’) and even treacle toffee, would take their place.⁴⁸ Around the Cross and leading down the main thoroughfares were a variety of different shops: grocers, seedsmen, bakers, booksellers and printers, ironmongers, chemists and wine merchants, all of the same or relatively similar appearance, with ‘comparatively small bow windows, with small panes of glass’, all no doubt with ‘proprietors keenly alive to business . . . morning noon and night behind his counter with his apron on’, and most spotlessly clean, despite the dust which led the shopkeepers of Portland Street and King Street to petition the Police Committee, ‘pointing out the great necessity of watering the streets in droughty weather to prevent the goods in their shops being injured by dust which in other respects was a positive nuisance’.⁴⁹ Inside, the shop would have been configured as much for social interaction as for commercial transaction. In addition to the show-cups to display teas and sugars, and the scales, weights, measures and paper required to dispense goods, Walker’s shop had ‘tumblers, dram glasses, and beer glasses’ to serve customers with drinks while they shopped (common practice in Scotland until the passing of the Forbes Mackenzie Act in 1853).⁵⁰

In addition to tea, whisky, brandy and rum, the most valuable items in John’s shop were sugar and soap. He also sold a range of confections, preserved fruits and nuts, and a small selection of spices, coffee and rice. He was also brewing his own ginger beer. Commentators may have fancied that this improved Kilmarnock was as grand as the avenues and boulevards of Edinburgh’s New Town, but it has to be said that the stock in John Walker’s shop in 1825 was mean in both range and quality of goods compared to the inventories trumpeted in hand bills and newspaper advertisements by contemporaries in the capital’s new shopping paradise of Princes Street and the High Street.⁵¹ And there was no shortage of competition closer to hand. The 1833 Kilmarnock Directory calculated there were 230 ‘grocers and hucksters’ in the town, along with 105 inns, public houses and spirit-dealers; Pigot’s 1837 directory listed 38 established ‘grocer’s and spirit dealers’, nine of whom (not including Walker) were also wine merchants. As well as the Sun Inn, John’s immediate neighbours included the draper and haberdasher Hugh Craig, and tailors and clothiers John and Andrew Stewart. Across the road were the confectioner Hugh Beckett, Joseph Thomson the baker, and Isabella Young and her sister, straw hat makers. Including Walker’s, there were eight grocers in King Street, six in Portland Street, and a couple around the Cross.

We almost know more about some of these competitors than we do about John, who in a taciturn spirit that came to typify his family, refused the opportunity to promote his business in directories or newspaper advertisements. William Calderwood, a wine and spirit merchant in Regent Street (heading north-east from the Cross), advertised in 1833 ‘the following qualities: viz Arran, Islay, Campbeltown, and Common Malt Whisky’, and offered his ‘sincere thanks to his Friends and the Public in general, for the very liberal encouragement he has received in the Spirit, Porter, and Ale trade’; James Tyrie on Cheapside announced he had just ‘commenced business in the Spirit Line; and from his having formed a correspondence with the first distillers in Scotland, is enabled to sell at the following low prices: Good Malt Aqua at 6s 6d per gallon, Fine Malt Aqua at 7s, Superior Malt Aqua at 8s, Campbeltown at 9s, and Islay & Arran at 10s’.⁵²

Walker’s most formidable competitors, however, were William Wallace & Co., who were based in Portland Street (the eponymous principal partner living in the large Hacket House in Hill Street), and William Rankin & Co., who in 1833 were close by at 30 King Street. Both were grocers and wine merchants, as well as ‘spirit dealers’. Rankin’s would later be described as ‘one of the oldest and most aristocratic businesses of the kind in the town’, being ‘patronised by nearly all the gentry of the town and surrounding district’.⁵³ In a double-page advertisement in the 1846 Kilmarnock Post Office Directory (which listed 87 ‘Grocers, tea and spirit dealers’), William Rankin advertised an extensive range of ports and sherries, porters and beers. Whiskies, sold by the gallon, included Campbeltown, Islay, Glenlivet, Jura and Royal Brackla, as well as blends - ‘a mixture of finest whiskies, very old, much recommended’ – priced as high as his most expensive malts (10s. a gallon). He was also selling a variety of black and green teas, and a ‘very fine’ mixture of ‘the finest teas’. In the 1851 Ayr Directory, following the growing fashion for fortified wines, Rankin emphasised the quality, variety and relative cheapness of his bottled ports and sherries, urging ‘Gentlemen whose purchases have heretofore been chiefly confined to the larger cities of England and Scotland’ to try samples; his whiskies included old Glenlivets, Islays and Campbeltowns. William Wallace’s advert of the same year focused on Chinese teas, spices, dried fruits, nuts and provisions, and their extensive range of spirits, wines and beers.⁵⁴ Both families were extensively involved in Kilmarnock society, two generations of the Rankins holding the office of postmaster, and the Wallaces being prominent in charitable affairs.⁵⁵ As we shall see, these businesses continued to grow in the nineteenth century, although both would ultimately become part of John Walker & Sons.

An advert for William Rankin & Son of Kilmarnock in 1846, ‘one of the oldest and most aristocratic businesses of the kind in the town’

In 1833 John married Elizabeth Purvis, daughter of the gardener on the Caprington Estate where his father had farmed. We know that by this time John’s business must have been relatively successful, as he had qualified as a £10 householder to vote under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act, which in Scotland had admitted ‘small shopkeepers, weavers, shoemakers and other tradesmen’ to the electorate, now about 1 in 8 of the male adult population.⁵⁶ For the record, John chose not to vote in the election of 1837, but in 1844 and 1852 he cast his ballot in favour of the successful candidate, the Liberal Edward Pleydell-Bouverie.⁵⁷ In this he may have been influenced by the experience of William Forrest, a grocer and spirit dealer in King Street, and then Portland Street, who had cast his vote in 1837 for the successful Tory candidate, John Campbell Colquhoun. Forrest subsequently fell foul of radical sentiment, a lesson to Kilmarnock shopkeepers that knowing your customers’ politics was as important as knowing their taste:

His shop for a number of days was almost deserted; nay, more, it was, to use a modern phrase, boycotted and guarded by a rabble of louts, who while they loudly clamoured for liberty to themselves, yet threatened to maltreat those who exercised their liberty of spending their money where they thought they were likely to be best served . . . a poor old man who had ventured to enter the shop and purchase a small quantity of tea and sugar, after he came out was followed . . . and sadly abused by a miserable miscreant⁵⁸

The Walkers’ first daughter, Margaret, was born in 1835, followed two years later by Alexander, and then Robert (1839), Elizabeth (1841) and John (1844). By this time the business must have been prospering; since 1835 the family had been living in a house in the northern fringes of the town off the Kilmaurs Road, with a domestic servant and a shop-worker (seventeen-year-old David Rud) employed by John. Sometimes described as ‘Walker’s Land’ and later called ‘Glenbank’, this was a newly built property in India Street, owned by John, where the family remained until his widow died in 1890.⁵⁹ This was a fashionable and developing part of town, away from the congested centre, with modern houses and substantial gardens (John, it was said, was a keen horticulturalist). Three of the houses in the street, including the Walkers’, had an annual value of £19, one of £16, and the remaining three of £10. Their neighbours were a teacher, an auctioneer, an ironmonger, two seedsmen and a hatter. In 1851 Robert, Elizabeth and John were all still attending school, though it’s possible that by now Alexander, aged fourteen, was already working in his father’s shop. Both Robert and John followed him into the family firm.⁶⁰

An undated silhouette of John Walker

John Walker was now in his prime, but unlike so many other successful small business owners he eschewed the temptations of local politics, trade associations and civil society, choosing instead to focus on his shop, his family, and his garden. Compared to the many colourful local worthies whose stories fill the pages of James Walker’s Reminiscences of Old Kilmarnock, John remains a mere cipher. This studied reticence was a trait inherited by his eldest son in both personal and business matters, and by his grandsons. The only image of John is a silhouette of uncertain provenance, which bears a striking similarity to a portrait that can be seen hanging on a wall in a painting of John’s grandson George Paterson Walker. It shows a smartly turned out, strong-featured man with fashionable long sideboards in late-Regency dress, with a high velvet collared jacket and an even higher-collared shirt and cravat. Not extravagant, and by no means a dandy, but very fastidious. Appearance was everything in the grocery trade, from shop window to the shop counter, and as the master of ceremonies presiding over the shopping experience, the shopkeeper was no exception. From what few family paintings and portraits survive it’s clear that John’s male descendants, in addition to inheriting his reserve, also shared his very particular dress sense.⁶¹

Between the 1820s and 1850s Kilmarnock was transformed by the arrival of steam power, railways and heavy industry. The population had increased from some 13,000 in 1821 to 18,000 in 1831, and 21,000 in 1851. Whilst shoe, carpet and woollen manufacture remained important, mechanisation (much of it home-grown) had slowly supplanted many of the old craft skills. There was an undoubted spirit of innovation about the town, whether from landowners such as the Duke of Portland with his pioneering of tile-drainage (and tile manufacture) or the artisan Thomas Morton, whose inventions revolutionised carpet-production, and who later started the manufacture of telescopes in the town.⁶² The arrival of the railway from Glasgow in 1843 was critical; it cut a swath through the north of the town and was followed by foundries and locomotive works, established by Andrew Barclay and the Glasgow and South-Western Railway amongst others. Outside of Kilmarnock the Portland Ironworks was established at Hurlford in 1846. The tramway from Kilmarnock to Troon was rebuilt the following year to allow steam locomotives to haul coal from the mines surrounding the town to the expanded harbour there. In 1852 manufacture began of the Kennedy Patent Water Meter, invented by Thomas Kennedy and John Cameron, a local clockmaker. Two years earlier the Kilmarnock Water Company had been established to provide piped water to businesses and private homes in the town, a gas company (in which John Walker was a modest investor) having been set up in 1822 to provide, amongst other things, lighting for the town’s shops and offices.

Growth was not unabated, hardship continued in times of depression, and in the 1840s the town council found itself again setting up soup kitchens and make-work schemes for the unemployed, mostly from the textile industries. Following food riots in Glasgow in March 1848, during which businesses were attacked and looted, and five protestors shot by troops, a crowd gathered at Kilmarnock Cross, ‘hallooing, and yelling, and smashing lamps’ and breaking shop windows before being dispersed by baton-wielding special constables, with a ‘few of the turbulent or ringleaders being lodged in gaol’.⁶³ However, despite the privations of the poor the growth of the ‘comfortable classes’ was remorseless; as one historian wrote, ‘Many neat and beautiful residences have been built within the last few years . . . which give ample evidence of a prevailing taste for the elegancies and refinements of life.’⁶⁴ Such ‘tastes for elegancies’ were catered for by firms such as Daniel MacDougall’s Kilmarnock Confectionary Warehouse in King Street, which advertised in the most extravagant terms ‘confectionaries of every description’, for ‘dinners, routs, balls, suppers, banquets and soirées’.⁶⁵ John Walker tried to tempt genteel customers not with advertising but with a window display of brazil nuts, figs and plums, boxes of fancy soaps, bottles of sultana sauce, jars of marmalade and Brighton biscuits, but perhaps surprisingly no alcohol.⁶⁶

This polite Kilmarnock society could not have anticipated the storm that would descend on the town in July 1852, when the Great Flood of Kilmarnock laid waste to ‘fields, bridges, mills, dams, houses, gardens and orchards’. The dramatic storm resulted in torrents of water running off the moors and fields into the tributaries that fed the Kilmarnock Water, leaving a trail of destruction as the spate headed for the town itself at about four o’clock in the morning of 14 July. At the Kilmarnock Foundry in the north-east of the town, buildings were destroyed and workers’ housing flooded to the depth of ten feet, as occupants fled from their beds. Similarly machinery and goods were destroyed at Laughland, Roxburgh and Gilchrist’s woollen factory, whilst a ‘huge boiler’ from another factory was carried away by the water: ‘buoyant as some canoe, it sailed along, adding to the intense sublimity of the scene, yet filling the spectators with horror’. As the waters raced to the town centre and Flesh Market Bridge, on which stood the council chambers and prison, their destructive velocity was increased by the narrowness of the water course and the tight bends as it passed under the town buildings and down Sandilands Street. ‘To those who could look upon it without thoughts of danger, King Street presented a novel spectacle. It was converted into a broad river, which rolled along in sullen grandeur, carrying upon its waves trees, planks of timber, tubs, casks, chairs and other articles.’ No doubt some of these tubs and casks belonged to John Walker, ‘as a vast quantity of goods belonging to all, from the Cross downward, was greatly damaged or destroyed’. In all, about £15,000 of damage (equivalent to over £2 million today) was sustained in the town in about two hours, the provost and magistrates establishing a subscription fund for the ninety-nine families ‘of the poorest classes . . . totally unable to withstand the loss of clothing, furniture and damage to their dwellings’.⁶⁷ One popular story has it that John Walker’s entire stock was destroyed as the flood submerged the rear shop and cellars that backed on to Sandbeds, forcing him to make ‘a fresh beginning’, dismissing his shopman and working only alongside his wife.⁶⁸ The evidence, however, tends to suggest otherwise. John may have lost stock in the 1852 flood but the fact that his business, only five years later, held stock worth £1,434, and had £1,140 cash in the bank indicates either a truly miraculous recovery, or a far less traumatic outcome.⁶⁹

John Walker died at his house in India Street, Kilmarnock, on 19 October 1857, aged fifty-two years old. He left personal estate of £4,256, to be divided equally between his widow and his five children, instructing his trustees that one or more of his heirs were to take over his business in full, providing they met their obligations to their mother and siblings.⁷⁰ Despite his relative anonymity during his lifetime, his apparent refusal to advertise or promote his business, and the possible damage inflicted on it by the Great Flood of 1852, the grocery was a prosperous, growing concern. The business he left, worth around £2,425 (his stock-in-trade being valued at some £1,400), was far bigger, and far more complex, than in 1825 (then worth a little over £200). On the traditional grocery side John held a much wider and more sophisticated range of goods and had added, for example, hams, preserves, sauces and pickles to his stock. He carried a wide range of teas, both in bond (worth £130) and ready for sale in the shop, including Imperial, gunpowder, Young Hyson, congou and pekoe. With these quantities and varieties, it seems certain that he was blending his own teas. He held bottled stocks of champagne, fortified wines and spirits as well as bulk of brandy, rum, sherry, bass ale and porter.

Whisky, however, overshadowed everything else, accounting for over half the value of the entire stock, some £750 (of which around £370 was under bond).⁷¹ The holdings were dominated by Campbeltown whiskies, now mostly forgotten names like Kinloch, Lochhead, Lochruan, Riechlachan, Springside and (the still very well known) Springbank. There were also Islay and ‘patent’ grain whiskies (unidentified). Geography, or rather proximity, apparently dictated what John used in his blends, possibly along with a local preference for the stronger flavours of the West Coast and island distilleries, relatively easily available through the ports of Troon and Ayr. In the shop there were six casks on the front of the counter selling different styles of whisky ranging in price from 10s. 10d. to 14s. per gallon, and also ‘aqua’ for sale in gallon jars and bottles. There can be little doubt that these would have been rudimentary blends of both malt and grain whiskies, strong in both alcohol and flavour and drunk most likely with warm water and sugar (and possibly lemon) as toddies. Elsewhere in the cellars and back rooms there were over 2,000 bottles, corks by the gross, and ‘jar labels’.⁷² Moreover, the extensive debts owed to John at his death by numerous creditors, over £800 in all, make it clear that he was conducting a wholesale as well as a retail whisky business, with substantial sums being owed by grocers, spirit-dealers and innkeepers in Kilmarnock and the surrounding area.⁷³ The ability to offer and manage credit was a critical way of obtaining and retaining customers in the grocery trade; it was also fundamental to building the business further. If John’s inheritance had been a grocery shop, then his legacy was a whisky business with a grocery shop attached. Perhaps this is why John was described, for the first time, as a ‘Grocer and Spirit Merchant’ on his death certificate.

While it’s surprising that so little is known about Kilmarnock’s most famous son, the exact details of his business career obscured by time and a paucity of surviving documents, the picture we get at John Walker’s death is of a very well-established retail and wholesale whisky-blending business with both private and trade customers in and around the thriving industrial town of Kilmarnock. With this growing trade would have come an accrued knowledge and expertise in the field of whisky and whisky blending, the latter no doubt partly transferred from working with teas. And with the knowledge and expertise would also have come an expanding network of trusted business contacts. However, John’s principal asset was his hard won reputation, encapsulated in the name John Walker under which he had always traded, the name that guaranteed the quality of every bottle of blended whisky sold from the shop. As we shall see, circumstances which had contrived to limit the possibilities for growth in the blended Scotch whisky trade were about to change dramatically, and John’s business was perfectly placed to exploit these altered conditions. All it needed now was a leader of vision, drive and relentless determination to succeed.