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CHAPTER 2

A ‘GREAT GULF STREAM OF TODDY’

Opened in 1879 the complex of buildings erected by Walker’s in the Strand came to dominate the centre of Kilmarnock - John Walker & Sons illustrated brochure by A. Barnard, 1894

‘Like that great gulf stream of toddy which flows through my native land – softening our natural severity, tempering our old fanaticism, and modifying our rugged climate.’¹

ALEXANDER WALKER was in sole control of the family business for almost thirty years. During this time it was transformed from a grocery shop in Kilmarnock to a massive concern whose premises dominated the centre of the town and had offices in London and agents all over the world. By the 1880s it was, it was claimed, the largest single exporter of Scotch whisky, and also the most profitable. Blended Scotch whisky had grown to become the preeminent spirit in the world, the fashionable drink of choice in clubs, hotels, theatre bars, railway refreshment rooms and restaurants. Alexander Walker was a man of considerable business vision and organisational skills, keen to take advantage of these developing consumer trends, and anxious that his firm should provide for his growing family. When it came to growing the business, it was almost as if nothing was new enough, whether in terms of production, marketing or route to market. But his business principles were rooted in something far more old-fashioned: an overwhelming belief that quality (and value) was the principal and necessary condition for growth, something learned, no doubt, from his father.

As a remarkable collection of correspondence from the last ten years of his life reveals, although obsessed by his business Alexander was a rounded personality with a wide variety of interests. He maintained a close circle of friends and acquaintances in and around Kilmarnock and Glasgow to whom he was both generous and loyal, and often revealed to them concerns and anxieties about business affairs which he never shared with the small group with which he trusted the management of the firm, mostly men of Kilmarnock, including two of his sons. To them (and to others in matters of commerce, local affairs or religion) he could be stern, fierce, impatient, ill-tempered and forthright, with often a stinging turn of phrase. To write, as one obituarist did, ‘that he didn’t suffer fools gladly’, was to exhibit a masterful control of the understatement. ‘I am greatly perplexed’, Walker wrote to the manager of his London office in July 1886, about Thomas Inglis (manager of the Royal Caledonian Asylum in London), ‘as to how I am to get on with that “Bletherin bitch” Inglis as I am afraid I am very likely to lose my temper with such a loquacious gentleman.’² He described himself as being of a ‘mercurial temperament’.³ However beneath this gruff exterior he was modest and unassuming (‘I don’t like making an exhibition of myself’), caring, generous to a fault, sometimes deeply compassionate, occasionally romantic, and very often exceptionally humorous.⁴ Most of all he was driven by a passion to make the best blended whisky in the world.

When John Walker wrote his will in November 1846 he stipulated that Elizabeth and his three executors (all fellow business owners in King Street) would act as curators and tutors for the children, and were to oversee the estate until the youngest child, John, attained majority in May 1865.⁵ Alexander, by this time aged twenty and most likely already working for his father, took over the running of the business following John’s death in 1857 in a partnership with his mother and brother Robert, then aged seventeen. Young John may also have started working for the company sometime after 1861, when he was lodging in Glasgow as an ‘agent’s clerk, spirits etc.’.⁶ During this time the size of the business more than doubled (as did the value of the spirits and wines kept in bond) while the wholesale trade increased to around two-thirds of sales by value. But in November 1864 Robert Walker ‘retired’ from the partnership, setting up his own grocery shop briefly in King Street, before travelling out to Sydney.⁷ On 18 May 1865, the young John Walker’s twenty-first birthday, the partnership with his mother was dissolved, and Alexander, ‘having in terms of my late father’s will allotted all shares & funds belonging to the trust estate of my late father’, took sole ownership and control of the firm of John Walker & Sons with a capital of £840.⁸ Alexander had married Georgina Paterson, the daughter of an Edinburgh builder, in 1861 and was already the widowed father of a daughter, Mary, and two sons, John and George Paterson Walker, their mother having died from heart disease weeks after George’s birth in October 1864. The family were living in a new residential development of houses with large gardens, Wallacebank, on Wellington Street, not far from Elizabeth Walker’s house.

In the United Kingdom consumption of spirits, both domestic and foreign, had increased from 0.63 gallons per head in 1820, to 0.93 in 1860, although the consumption of whisky in Scotland had declined, partly due to its increased cost, and also the growing influence of the temperance movement that had its first stirrings in Scotland in 1829. Wine consumption had remained almost static. In Scotland in 1820, around 3.2 million gallons of spirits were distilled; in 1860 the figure stood at 13.3 million. Seven million gallons were grain whisky, 6 million malt whisky. In the same year over 1.5 million gallons of spirits were exported from Scotland to England. There were 125 distilleries in operation in Scotland (compared to 117 in 1820) but the size and scale of these would have made them unrecognisable compared to four decades earlier. Although not entirely absent, illicit distillation and smuggling had been almost wiped out since the changes in the law of 1823. Home consumption of imported spirits in 1860 stood at 5.5 million gallons, of which rum (3.7) and brandy (1.4) comprised the overwhelming quantity. And although per capita consumption had not grown, imports of wines increased from 5 million gallons in 1820 to 12 million in 1860, with Spain being the largest source (5.3) followed by Portugal (2.5) and France (2.4). As with spirits (particularly rum), many of these wines were re-exported from the United Kingdom. Beer production stood at over 20 million barrels in the country as a whole; Scotland produced only 816,000. The consumption of tea, still sourced almost exclusively from China, had more than doubled since 1820 to 2.67 pounds per person.⁹

Against this background a number of changes in the law were to be of particular significance to changing patterns of drink consumption, and particularly to the growth in the sale of Scotch whisky both at home and abroad, and to Alexander Walker’s business. In 1860 Gladstone slashed the duties on imported wines, subsequently eased licensing restrictions on restaurants and eating houses, and introduced a ‘Grocers’ Licence’ for the sale of wines. Excise duties on spirits in England and Scotland had been equalised in 1855; a few years before, in 1853, ‘vatting’, or the mixing of whiskies, had been permitted under bond; blending under bond was permitted by the Spirit Act of 1860, then the bottling of spirits under bond for export in 1864, and finally for home consumption in 1867.¹⁰ The effect of this was to open up the English and export markets to Scotch whisky, and to allow blenders to operate at scale without the need for the capital that was required whilst restricted to blending duty-paid whiskies.

Many have suggested that these changes alone were responsible for the development of blending (primacy in which is often attributed to Andrew Usher & Co of Edinburgh) and the growth of blended Scotch in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, as we have already seen, blending and mixing whiskies was a well-established practice as early as the 1820s, and by 1860 blended whisky was already the drink of choice for many. Charles Tovey, veteran of the wine trade and early drinks hack, wrote in 1864: ‘The prevalent notion among whisky drinkers, especially in Scotland, is that several varieties of whisky blended is superior to that of any one kind.’¹¹ Tovey also commented on the pervasive popularity of drinking ‘toddy’:

You may find it at the after-dinner table of the aristocracy, mingling its fumes with the odours of Lafitte or Romanee Conti [sic], and many a nobleman will leave the choicest wine to indulge in his glass of toddy. The middle classes and tradesmen most prefer it to any other spirit or wine. ¹²

Mixed to taste by each drinker at the table – in a ritual that, like tea, was surrounded with a degree of domestic paraphernalia such as toddy kettles, jugs, ladles and spoons – this combination of whisky, hot water and sugar (and sometimes a slice of lemon) ‘aids digestion [and] promotes cheerfulness, sociability and happiness’. It was also perhaps the most common ‘respectable’ form of whisky consumption (as opposed to ‘dram drinking’), and had become increasingly popular in Scotland in the 1840s and 1850s, partly due to the sometimes high duties on rum which had ‘induced the Glasgow citizen to give up his cold rum punch and betake him to hot toddy’.¹³ Such was its popularity that wine and spirit merchants produced ‘toddy mixtures’, some sweetened, which were possibly some of the earliest blended whiskies. In 1848 an Inverness newspaper advertised ‘old highland whisky for toddy, being a judicious mixture of the manufacture of the most favourite distillers’, while in Glasgow David Chrystal advertised ‘a fine old Toddy mixture free of flavour’, and John and Thomas Prentice in Greenock ‘a superior toddy mixture’ at 9s. 6d. a gallon.¹⁴ Few, however, promoted themselves as heavily as David M’Lachlan, from Laurieston in Glasgow, who explained that:

It has been proved beyond doubt that Highland Whiskies are only in perfection when the produce of several distilleries situated in different localities are blended or mixed together in certain proportions and as each distiller can only sell whisky of his own distillation great difficulty is experienced by gentlemen in selecting whiskies of the proper character to embody or infuse with each other so as to produce a glass of genuine toddy.

M’Lachlan’s toddy mixture was ‘designed to satisfy the greatest connoisseur as to its age and purity’. Available in gallon jugs or heavily branded bottles (partly to guard against imitation and counterfeit) by the dozen, and protected by registered trademarks, it was sold not only in Scotland but throughout England and Wales by the early 1860s. Notably, however, as the market for blended Scotch quickly developed, M’Lachlan dropped the reference to ‘toddy mixture’ in 1866 and was instead promoting ‘McLachlan’s Scotch Whisky’ in the Morning Advertiser, ‘blended in such proportions as to produce a mixture that no single whisky can ever equal’.¹⁵ However, as late as 1891 the Victualling Trades Review reported that ‘“Whisky Toddyology” is how a Glasgow publican intimates his ability to brew the national drink.’¹⁶

Two other factors were critical in shaping the competitive environment that Alexander Walker operated in, both at home and in export markets. The first was the decline in sales of brandy following the impact of the grapevine pest phylloxera, which first appeared in France in 1863. This infestation destroyed almost three-quarters of France’s vineyards by the late 1880s, and the subsequent decline in brandy consumption is often cited as the major reason for Scotch whisky’s success. However, although consumption of brandy peaked at 4.5 million gallons in 1876, falling to just less than 2.5 million in 1887 and ending up at 2.7 million gallons in 1900, the decline in volume was hardly catastrophic. A far greater issue for both the trade press and consumers was the decline in quality and reputation of much of what was sold as ‘brandy’, and the almost institutionalised adulteration of French spirit with German.¹⁷ Discussing this matter, the board of W. & J. Gilbey, the darlings of the wine trade establishment, agreed that should they use this spirit they would lay themselves open to have all the prejudices surrounding German Spirit levelled at them.¹⁸

Those who could find the real thing had to dig deep into their pockets to afford almost double what they would pay for a bottle of whisky. Far more dramatic was the decline in the consumption of sherry, a drink which was almost at the peak of its popularity. In 1871 a record 6 million gallons were consumed in the United Kingdom, after which consumption plummeted to a mere 1.5 million in 1900.¹⁹ ‘The ordinary sherry of commerce’, wrote the Saturday Review in 1873, which had complained about the way that sherry drinking had infiltrated both the counting house and the drawing room, ‘is about the most unwholesome thing under the sun, and everything should be done to discredit it.’²⁰ A perceived decline in quality, rumours of adulteration and falsification, the loss of favour amongst the medical fraternity, all contributed to this astonishing demise.

There can be no doubt that the seeds of the popular disfavour were laid at the time when the Sherry Trade seemed as stable as a rock, and extra profits induced the shipment of a class of article which brought a bad name to Jerez products, the goods being tarred with the same brush as the bad. Since the downward career was once started there has been no check, and popular taste has apparently taken up the cudgels against this once highly-esteemed beverage. ²¹

The decline in the consumption of these two favoured drinks of the genteel and bourgeois certainly opened a market for a competitively priced and palatable spirit whose quality and authenticity could be guaranteed. Of course the catastrophic decline in the sherry trade would also have another, less favourable impact on Scotch as the number of genuine sherry casks available for maturing both malt and grain spirit declined rapidly, just as Scotch production was increasing.²²

Sherry certainly featured heavily in the Walker business in 1866. Stocks in bond and in the shop were valued at just under £1,000 – not much less than the entire whisky stock, which were worth £1,113 - reflecting both the popularity of the drink, and Alexander Walker’s understanding of consumer tastes.²³ Although Alexander clearly had some personal understanding of the technical side of the wine trade, it was to be of diminishing importance to the business, as interest in sherry in particular fell away. In 1883 he complained that ‘I am so much over head & cats just now, and with several of my folks away their holidays I cannot get the wine trade looked to.’ Two years later, refusing an offer to purchase sherries, he confessed, ‘The fact of the matter is the wine trade gets no attention in this establishment.’²⁴

The whisky stocks held by Alexander Walker in 1866 certainly suggest that his Scotch whisky blending business was well established, although he was, like his father, reluctant to publicise his goods directly to consumers, making it difficult in the absence of complete records to know exactly what was being produced and sold, and in what quantities. The value of whisky stocks had increased by around a third since John died, and although there was still a very distinct West Coast flavour to the holdings, with Campbeltowns such as Springbank and Riechlachan, and Ardbeg and Laphroaig from Islay (with only a small quantity of ‘Glenlivet, duty-paid’), the largest single quantity was grain whisky from MacFarlane’s Port Dundas distillery in Glasgow. In the shop’s cellars there was one, if not two, large blending tuns of ‘whisky’ (this was, of course, still a year before bottling in bond for home consumption was allowed), whilst in the front shop there were casks of ‘whisky’ (graded No. 1 to No. 6) and dozens of bottles of ‘aqua’ ready for sale. At the back of the shop there was a profusion of dry goods, including small flasks, glass jars, bottles of all types, corks and bungs, labels and capsules, the latter required to seal bottles and guarantee the integrity of the contents.²⁵ The whiskies would have been sold at between 57% abv (proof) and 51% (10 under proof), weighty in both strength and flavour, despite the moderating character of the grain whiskies. The Campbeltowns, ‘though they would change in style dramatically later in the century’, were ‘distilled in stills of small size, and made from peat dried malt . . . [with] a flavour about it peculiar to itself, and which was much relished by consumers of that kind of spirits’, and were known to find a good market in Ayrshire.²⁶ The Islays, more so than today, would have been smoky, heavy and pungent. In all, then, blends not designed for the fainthearted, but rather for the toddy-drinking aficionados of Kilmarnock and the surrounding countryside. Others in the town’s grocery trade followed the same path, advertising the ‘finest Campbeltown whiskies’ and ‘excellent mixtures’ of Islays and Campbeltowns for toddy, and ‘superior toddy mixtures’.²⁷

John Walker & Son’s grocery shop in Portland Street, Kilmarnock, c.1906

Over the next fifteen years the scale of the business was transformed. By 1880 the total Annual Balance increased more than fourfold to £42,000; the value of stock-in-bond, now dominated by whiskies, sevenfold. The wholesale trade was six times bigger than ‘retail’, and now specified export sales.²⁸ The business had long outgrown John’s shop in King Street. The shop had moved to Portland Street in the early 1870s, and in 1873 Alexander had purchased property for use as a bonded warehouse in Croft Street, which ran north-east from the Cross; he had also purchased, but let, the adjoining Commercial Hotel. Within five years this space too had become inadequate. In 1873 Walker had begun to purchase residential properties in ‘the unsavoury locality known as the Strand’ (which ran north-east from Cheapside and converged with Croft Street), where ‘a few wretched thatched cottages lingered in the shade of the Laigh Kirk’.²⁹ In 1878 the old buildings were cleared and he began the construction of what was to become a massive bonding, blending and bottling complex, with a cooperage, case-making department, stores and stables, that would dominate the centre of the town. It should be said it’s not entirely clear how these building projects were financed although the cost of building was certainly written off partly against profits. Walker’s very well-connected lawyer, James McCosh of Dalry, was also critical in sourcing heritable loans to support these projects, a particularly challenging task in the wake of the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878.³⁰

These first striking buildings were designed ‘in a French renaissance style’ by a young Kilmarnock architect, Gabriel Andrew, who became house-architect for Alexander Walker, with a drawing office in the Croft Street property.³¹ The first phase, ‘fitted up with the most approved modern appliances’, was opened in February 1879, comprising a bonded warehouse on four floors, which also contained two 2,000-gallon blending vats ‘for mixing the well-known Highland Blend which has taken the name of Kilmarnock to almost every portion of the world’. The hydraulic lift that connected the four floors, ‘where every arrangement has been made for the safety of the workers at the hoists’, was the wonder of local journalists, and an example of ‘liberality with which every requisite detail has been attended to’. Next door, existing buildings had been repurposed as the bottling warehouse, and ‘introduced into Kilmarnock an entirely new industry, that of box making and packing’ (which was carried out in the old Croft Street Bond), required to produce several hundreds of cases each week. Offices were also built for the Inland Revenue, ‘a want that has long been felt - a public office near our market place where officers can be readily seen’, meaning that the general revenue business would no longer need to be conducted at the George Hotel.³² In 1881 the offices in the Strand and Croft Street were connected by telephone, the first in the town.³³

Alexander Walker’s original Old Highland Whisky label, produced in the Court of Session in Edinburgh as evidence in a trademark dispute in 1882

As the newspapers correctly observed, the engine behind the company’s growth was their ‘well-known Highland Blend’, known to the business as John Walker & Sons’ Old Highland Whisky, and to the trade and consumers variously as John Walker’s Old Highland Whisky, Walker’s Kilmarnock Whisky, or simply John Walker’s Whisky, a brand name he had been using since the mid-1860s. ‘Old Highland’ was a Scotch whisky generic that had been used since at least the late eighteenth century and into the mid-nineteenth, in a trade which avoided the word ‘blended’ wherever possible for fear of accusations of adulteration. It became for many wine and spirit merchants a useful shorthand (like ‘toddy mixture’ had been) to indicate a blend of malt and grain whiskies.³⁴ For some, with a nod and a wink, it also conjured up the notion of ‘the good old days’ of smuggled whisky, and played on the belief, common at the time, that the illicit was often going to be better than the legal article. It was perhaps the first of a number of increasingly romantic descriptions that blenders deployed to describe their whiskies (‘The real Mountain Dew: the best old Highland Whisky’ was being advertised for shipment from Aberdeen to Newcastle in 1855) which earned increasingly scornful comment from those in the trade press fighting a losing battle to uphold the primacy of single whiskies over blends.³⁵

For Alexander Walker the brand was in the name, ‘John Walker & Sons’, of which he was fiercely proud, and the personal guarantee of quality that went with it. And it was also in the place. In 1874 Walker registered the copyright of his label for Old Highland Whisky (and at the same time a label for ‘Old Irish Whisky’) at Stationers’ Hall in London. He also registered the Kilmarnock coat of arms as a trademark. The labels were designed by Smith Brothers of Kilmarnock.³⁶ The label was subsequently registered under the new Trademark Act in 1877, claiming first use since before 1867.³⁷

Even in a market in its earliest stages of development, Alexander Walker had chosen a ‘get-up’ (as the whisky trade calls the packaging of a product) that would stand out from competitors’. As was explained in the Court of Session in Edinburgh in 1881, John Walker & Sons had ‘for a number of years past used a peculiar trade mark label for their whisky, and the bottles have been made up in a particular manner, with the intention of rendering the complainer’s whisky easily recognisable in the market’. ‘The bottle’, it continued,

is made of clear greenish glass, has the label affixed to it in an oblique or slanting way near the middle of the bottle, and has a capsule in white metal, with a black stamp on the top, bearing the arms of Kilmarnock, with the letters ‘W & S’ on the shield, and the words ‘J Walker & Sons, Kilmarnock’, round the margin of the impression. There is also on the side of the metallic capsule in black raised letters the words in cursive writing, ‘John Walker & Sons’, and these words run in a slanting or oblique direction. ³⁸

And of course in addition to the label being in an ‘oblique or slanting way’, designed to capture the eye’s attention, it was very often on an equally distinctive square bottle. The iconic square bottles were most likely being used in some markets from the time of introduction of the label in the 1860s and they first appear in the London stock records in 1874.³⁹ Square bottles were not entirely new; they were widely used for patent medicines and cures, for table sauces, and traditionally for gin. However, square bottles were unusual for Scotch and highly distinctive in a sea of round bottles. By the 1870s Walker’s were also not the only company using them for whisky. They were relatively expensive to produce but in turn provided packaging optimisation during shipping and may have offered some savings in freight costs. Unfortunately the use of the iconic square bottle was not without issue, as we shall see later. But combined with the oblique or slanting label, the impact on shelf, or for that matter on showcards or mirrors, was outstanding and instantly recognisable, then as it is now. Between Alexander Walker and his designers at Smith Brothers, they had produced one of the most enduringly distinctive alcohol ‘get-ups’ ever designed.

John Walker & Sons of course had long ceased to be a one-man business. As early as 1862, when Robert was still a partner, the firm was looking for ‘a young man, who has been two or three years at the Grocery, or Grocery, Wine and Spirit Trade’.⁴⁰ John Walker, Alexander’s younger brother, had started working for the firm as a traveller in the 1860s, dying in 1875 aged thirty in Rothesay, where he may have been sent to attend to his health.⁴¹ Around 1867 John Blaikie, formerly a grocer and wine merchant in Glasgow, had joined Alexander in Kilmarnock as a commercial traveller. Shortly afterwards James Boyd joined as a bookkeeper or cashier. Archibald Stevenson became manager of the shop in Portland Street at some point in the 1870s. These three, like so many others in the business, would never leave. The move to the bond in Croft Street would have required numerous hands, even more so the new premises in the Strand. Moreover, around 1873 Alexander Walker opened a London office at 3 Crosby Square, off Bishopsgate, adding more employees and more complexity to his role as general manager, but critically opening up huge opportunities to expand the business in both the English and export markets. This, above all, was probably his biggest gamble. For what was in effect a new product, blended Scotch needed visibility, and London was the city that led fashions and consumption trends for the rest of the world.

London was not wanting in long-established wine and spirit merchants jealously eyeing the potential profits that blended Scotch could bring, or other pioneers from Scotland like Greenlees Brothers, who were trying to make London their own. John Blaikie moved to London to manage the Walker office there, at least initially on a fifty-fifty profit share with Alexander, but it proved to be a difficult business to establish. Looking back in 1886, Alexander wrote to his son George that ‘I am glad that you say that the prospect of our London business is so bright. I never expected anything else since I first started there but no one but myself knows the hard work I had to make it.’⁴² Blaikie’s first few years witnessed a succession of bad results which nearly exhausted his principal’s fragile-enough mood and caused Blaikie to offer effusive and repeated apology: ‘I now enclose balance as at Saturday and am really sorry it shows so badly. I am very sorry it shows so badly . . . I know you will be very much disappointed’ (1874); ‘I had fully expected a more satisfactory one for the trade we have been doing . . . I can only hope that by this time next year if all’s well to show a better sheet’ (1875); ‘I now enclose balance sheet as at 1st Feb and am sorry to say it does not show well these beastly bad debts have completely swamped any little profit that would have been’ (1876); ‘herewith note of balance which I am sorry to say is very far behind. I have been pushing about for cash and have not got it’ (1877); ‘Yours read! . . . I have no doubt this next year will show a different result and will guarantee that there is not £20 of bad debt as unless I find they are A1 I won’t sell’ (1878). The problem it seemed was not finding business - ‘our Old Highland seems to have got a hold and there is no question about it keeping the same’ – but in managing it.⁴³ And Blaikie, in Alexander’s eyes, was wanting in the sense of urgency that drove him: ‘You will see that I am writing this in a temper but you will bear in mind what I have said in the past and realise that I worry every day for money.’⁴⁴

Scotch whisky may have been distilled in the Highlands and blended in the Lowlands of Scotland, but as Alexander Walker realised, its reputation would be made in London. The difficulty he faced was finding the right people: trusted salesmen who could open accounts and collect their bills, and customers who could be relied upon to pay their bills. He also had to manage John Blaikie, whose judgement he sometimes doubted. There were two sides to the business: wholesale selling in London to the increasingly important railway companies, catering and restaurant houses such as Spiers & Pond, and individual hotels and public houses; and then private clients. The intent here was not just to sell casks, cases and bottles, but also to achieve visibility for the brand in the right places and with the right people. Blaikie’s first salesman, Mr Cocks, rarely made a profit so great were his expenses; he was then seduced by the apparent entrée into the world of London’s social influencers that a certain John Piper seemed to promise, engaging him first on commission, and then on the payroll, despite the fact that John Kilgour, Walker’s accountant in Kilmarnock, warned in April 1882 that ‘Mr Piper’s connection may ultimately be of little profit, as just now it is absorbing a large amount of Capital, with very slow return, and consequently tending largely to our present tight financial position here’. Like all salesmen, Piper talked a good game. He did count some society names among his customers, such as Lord Beresford and Baron Ernest de Caters, but with annual accounts totalling £1,411 of which £1,119 was unpaid, Walker soon became ‘sick and tired of promises of large results in the end’, determining to send Kilgour to London as Blaikie had signally failed ‘to let Piper understand that you really are the man in charge’. Piper continued to open up new accounts unabated whilst miserably failing to bring in outstanding debts, and much to Alexander’s annoyance allegedly blurred the lines between his Walker business and private customers. At the same time as seeking legal advice from his lawyer and fixer, McCosh, on how proceedings with Piper might work in Chancery, he wrote to Kilgour with some resignation that though the affair was ‘looking blacker and blacker . . . there is no use in losing temper, paper and ink in my trying to help you. Make the best or worst of his “splendid connection” as he called it, and we must just submit as there is no use in crying over spilled milk.’ At the end of 1883 he wrote to the lawyer Edward Upton in London: ‘The connection has not been at all a satisfactory one, and while it has paid Mr Piper it has been a serious loss to John Walker & Sons’, the London accounts for that year showing ‘heavy losses sustained through Mr Piper’s connections’.⁴⁵ Under the circumstances it was hardly surprising that Walker turned to a trusted son of Kilmarnock, James Hodge, to turn the London trade around.

For Walker’s, London was also a hub from which to develop their export trade in the 1880s, surrounded as they were at Crosby Square by merchants and commission agents whose commercial webs of interest, and entrepreneurial appetites, spread all over the world. The beginnings of Walker’s export business are unclear, but treasured tales of bottles of whisky secreted in Kilmarnock carpets and shipped all over the world, like Cleopatra being rolled in a rug and taken to Caesar, bear little scrutiny. In 1881 Alexander Walker claimed to have exported about 57,000 12-bottle cases which, along with bulk shipments in casks, amounted to 126,000 gallons of whisky. Old Highland Whisky was being sent from Glasgow, Liverpool and London to agents and wholesale merchants in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Townsville, Launceston, all the principal ports of New Zealand, South Africa, and the West Indies, to Alexandria, Honolulu, Bombay, Calcutta, Karachi, Penang, Singapore, and ‘many other ports’. Of all these markets, Australia was the most important.⁴⁶

According to correspondence of John Blaikie the company had been doing business in Australia with the Bank of New South Wales since at least 1867. It is also possible that having left the business in Kilmarnock, Robert Walker travelled to Australia in the 1860s with the intention of developing the trade there.⁴⁷ Sadly it’s hard to disaggregate details of the export side of the Walker business from the surviving records of the 1860s to 1880s, so we have only a fragmentary picture for the most part. However, given the prodigious sales already achieved by 1880, and the sustained export growth that was to follow, it’s clear that the world beyond the United Kingdom was a key part of Alexander’s vision for his business from the start.

It is quite likely that the earliest shipments of whisky from Kilmarnock to Australia and elsewhere were casks sent on consignment with ships’ captains taking the risk and responsibility for their sale on arrival in port, along with a share of the receipts. Scotch whisky was certainly well established in the colony, and advertised for sale as early as 1832 (and no doubt well before), when ‘superior Scotch whisky’ from Thomson Elmsie & Co, proprietors of the Gilcomston distillery in Aberdeen, was consigned for auction in Sydney. At this point distilling was illegal in New South Wales, yet despite high duties, ‘spirits were abundant’.⁴⁸ However, it was only following the well-publicised gold strikes of the 1850s in New South Wales and Victoria that Scotch imports visibly increased, just as the laws around exports were to be liberalised in the United Kingdom. Starting in Australia, and then moving through the colonies, Scotch exports grew in line with the mineral wealth and unrestrained appetite for luxury consumables that gold created. In 1847 ‘the only batch of genuine Islay and Campbeltown whisky’ was on sale in Sydney, where demand ‘was great’. In July 1857 hogsheads and quarter casks of ‘Mitchell’s whisky’, ‘Paisley whisky’, ‘Dundas Hill whisky’, Islay and Scotch whisky, plus cases of bottled Islay, Campbeltown and ‘Scotch malt whisky’, were being auctioned in Melbourne, alongside Old Tom and Geneva gins, Hennessy, Martell and a host of other upmarket alcoholic beverages.⁴⁹ In 1856 Mason Brothers, importers of china, crockery and glassware into Sydney, were advertising ‘fine Scotch malt whisky’; they went on to sell ‘Jamison’s’ Irish whisky, Campbeltown and Fettercairn malt whiskies, ‘Mason’s Old Scotch Malt, specially distilled for the Australian market’, Cameron’s Inverness Whisky, Old Davanah Highland Whisky and ‘the favourite brand’, Macfarlane’s whisky (‘in bottle’), before advertising Walker’s Old Highland Whisky in 1874.⁵⁰ By 1879 (if not before) they were sole agents for Walker’s in New South Wales, from which point their fates would be closely and occasionally painfully intertwined for well over a decade.⁵¹

Mason Brothers had been established in Sydney in 1854 by Robert Mason, who also had mercantile businesses in London (where he resided) and Glasgow, and his brother Gavin.⁵² They were importers of a wide range of durable domestic goods and ironmongery, and from the 1850s began to develop a business as wine and spirits distributors in New South Wales. Of the three partners resident there, James Cullen, James Gould and David Wilson, Cullen, who had been there since 1870, was a cousin of Alexander Walker, and it may have been this kinship that brought Old Highland Whisky into their portfolio of brands, which also included Sorin cognac, Cork Distilleries Irish Whisky and Gayen’s Schiedam schnapps.⁵³ Robert Walker, described as a ‘merchant’, was still in the city in 1874, and despite illness was involved in some work with Mason’s.⁵⁴ Unlike the home market, Walker’s whiskies were advertised with increasing frequency in the local press – by Mason Brothers themselves, by hoteliers and retailers, and even in editorials purchased in new magazines like the Bulletin, where witty bon mots were to be found scattered through their pages (‘Favourite study of Solicitor’s Clerks? Walker on whisky bottles’).⁵⁵ ‘I am still of opinion that you charge us pretty sweetly for this,’ wrote Walker to Cullen; ‘It takes a big slice off the profits.’⁵⁶ But the market was exceptionally competitive and as in other colonies agents demanded allowances (which they rarely got) for the sort of promotional activity that Walker’s would never have allowed in the home market. Advertising increased, and became more sophisticated (for example, with illustrations of the Old Highland bottle), during and following the Sydney Exhibition of 1880, which saw Walker’s Old Highland Whisky win its first major international award, very quickly heralded not just in the press (‘Walker’s Whisky – Special 1st Prize!’) but also on a foot label added to the bottle.⁵⁷ These sought-after third-party endorsements, discussed in more detail later, were of huge importance in establishing the reputation of brands in overseas markets, and distinguishing them from the competition.

Mason’s also developed an early sponsorship vehicle for the brand, the Walker Whisky Trophy, donating £300 as prize money for a professional sculling race on the Parramatta River; sculling was a popular sport in Australia with a large following. Won by Elias Laycock, who had professional victories behind him both in Australia and England, the sponsorship was in place, explained Cullen, because ‘something was due to the colony, and they should do what they could to encourage manly sports’. Speaking of his ‘relative’, Mr Walker (who no doubt abhorred such extravagant expenditure) had ‘expressed a regret that he could not be personally present on the occasion but wished it every success’.⁵⁸ Gibbs, Bright & Co., who were agents for the brand in Victoria, were equally active in growing its sales.⁵⁹

Medal from the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879-80: ‘Walker’s Whisky - Special 1st Prize!’

Despite occasional losses on shipments, and concerns about the management of Mason Brothers following the death in London of Robert Mason in 1881, the Australian business remained of critical importance.⁶⁰ In 1879 Walker had launched a new brand there, ‘Glencairn’, in bulk and in bottle, to work alongside Old Highland Whisky against the competition: he ‘meant it to be totally different from OH, so that it would not interfere with it and yet be a whisky in value which no other house could compare with . . . it is distinct, has a character of its own’. The response from the market was not encouraging (nor apparently in London, where it was sold but without gaining much traction).⁶¹ He sought to protect the reputation of Old Highland by preventing agents undercutting each other on price in disputed territories – ‘I think this is the law we must lay down and stick to’ – and was determined to defend his trademarks.⁶² In November 1882, on the advice of his Glasgow lawyer (‘the best authority in Scotland on such matters’), he raised an action in the Court of Session in Edinburgh against an Edinburgh merchant, claiming that he had sent whisky to Australia under the name ‘James Walker’s Edinburgh Old Highland Whisky’, with labels designed and positioned on their bottles in order to deceive consumers – much to the damage of Walker’s business. They also sought an injunction against the merchant and his distributor in New South Wales to the same effect. Despite the best advice, success was not assured, ‘but’, said Walker, ‘in my opinion the exposure would do us as much good as if we did [win the case]’. The defendants attempted to defuse the issue first by withdrawing the labels, and then arguing that neither the wording nor appearance of Walker’s whisky (‘generally known in the Colonies as Walker’s Kilmarnock Whisky’) was particularly unique, but Walker was determined to carry the matter through ‘to strengthen the hands of Masons & others’, ultimately winning both actions.⁶³

Alexander Walker certainly had good personal reason to protect the business that he had created so quickly. He had remarried in 1867, and since then his new wife, Isabella McKimmie, had delivered seven children: three sons (Alexander, Thomas and James) and four daughters (Helen, Isabella, Elizabeth and Margaret), to add to the three borne by his first wife: Mary, John (or Jack) and George. In 1873 Alexander had begun building a large new house with an equally large garden in London Road which the family moved into two years later – it was named Piersland House after a farm that had belonged to his wife’s family (and which Alexander later acquired). After Margaret’s birth he wrote to his cousin in Sydney: ‘That makes four sons [he had apparently forgotten one!] and five daughters[;] I sincerely hope the number is completed now as the responsibility is no small one and will necessitate the sale of a good lot of Old Highland to keep matters straight.’⁶⁴

He also had an ongoing responsibility to financially support his brother Robert and his family in Sydney.⁶⁵ Alexander had acquired Marine Cottage in Troon in the late 1870s, and in 1883 feued a substantial piece of ground in the same town from the Duke of Portland’s estate and began the construction of Crosbie Tower, a large mansion with substantial grounds to the designs of Gabriel Andrew. He also sought to develop the adjacent site: ‘I was just a little afraid that some speculator would put down some garrison next to Crosbie Tower which I did not at all care for.’⁶⁶ Gardening was a passion for Walker (he was Honorary President of the Kilmarnock Horticultural Society) and he exhibited at local shows – in 1881 his ‘collection of stove and greenhouse plants and model flower garden (with rockery)’ were the focus of attention.⁶⁷ At Troon he took great personal interest in the construction of an ‘Orchard House’ at Crosbie Tower (‘Which I can show my friends’); he wrote to Henry Norrie, an old Kilmarnock acquaintance who had been agent at the Union Bank there, ‘with regard to the vandas [a type of orchid] I must tell you that I have no accommodation for them. You are altogether mistaken about the Orchid Glass. It is an Orchard House I am erecting and will have plenty to fill it.’⁶⁸ Both houses were also built with sufficient stable space to allow Alexander to indulge his interest in keeping and breeding cobs, both for show and for driving. His success at the former was not always fully acknowledged, as he complained after one particularly successful year: ‘The proprietor of the Kilmarnock Standard here is a very strong radical and because I take an interest in the other paper he did not even mention them; he has heard plenty about it since.’ It was also his pleasure not just to take his small coach down to his offices in the town from Piersland House, but also, like a free spirit, to take to the open road with his wife: ‘In a day or two we are off for a ten-day drive with the two cobbs, just our two selves with the coachman and a lad.’⁶⁹

The house at Troon also allowed Alexander Walker to indulge in his passion for golf (‘the golf and the shooting I have takes up all of my spare time’).⁷⁰ It was literally built next door to the newly established Troon Golf Club (now Royal Troon), of which he was a founder member, jealously guarding the interests of Troon and Kilmarnock members against the much-resented incursions of Glaswegians, who he criticised for trying to take over its management.⁷¹ Crosbie Tower, and Piersland House in Kilmarnock, were the focus for both domestic and business entertainment. For despite his occasional misanthropic outbursts it’s clear from his correspondence that, alongside his family, Alexander Walker relished nothing more than good company and companionship, and shared food and drink.⁷² Few visitors were discouraged, but sometimes for all its critical importance in oiling the wheels of the business the duty of hospitality took a heavy toll. ‘I am beginning to think that my health is of more importance to me than other people’s enjoyment,’ he complained. ‘We have had to do so much entertaining to Colonials & Cockneys etc.,’ he wrote in October 1885,

that we hardly knew what it was to have a quiet day to ourselves, the consequence being that I am not all the man I should like to be and I am determined that I shall never attempt to do anything of the kind again. It seems so different entertaining strangers whom you may never see again compared with your real friends.

Blaikie, aware of the ‘constant stream of visitors’ to Scotland, apologised that the irrepressible Robert McKilligin, of R. Marquis McKilligin & Co., a frequent visitor to the London office in search of sherry and a biscuit, and an important customer, ‘told me he intended to look you up as he is a chap not calculated to forward one’s work’. On the other hand a visit from Bernard Lewis, who held the company’s New Zealand agency, promised little distraction: ‘I daresay he will be a bit of a bore but we must get through it as best we can.’⁷³ Family and friends were much preferred: ‘We had a great party last night, about 50 I suppose. They seemed to enjoy themselves well, which was all that was wanted. Kept me a little from sleeping but that was no matter’. ‘With the youngsters here,’ he wrote to William Calder early in January 1886, ‘all around it has been parties, parties, every night. I expect we shall have the result of it bye and bye.’ And generosity did not only extend to hosting. At Christmas in particular gifts of wine and whisky were carefully dispatched to friends and customers; game from the shoot he rented was sent to London ‘to distribute as judiciously as possible’; Kilmarnock cheese was a very special gift. But for all his love of whisky and good wines, of local cheese, freshly shot game, pork pies and even snails and frog’s legs, it was something far more simple that stole his heart, as he wrote to a friend at Christmas 1888: ‘It occurred to me that you might still have a Scotch tooth in your head and I have sent you a small box of Kilmarnock shortbread. I always tell my wife it is one of the shortest roads to heaven that I know of.’⁷⁴