Wee Scotch Whisky Tales

CONTENTS

Preface

1
Ferintosh: Sadly Lost?

2
A Riot Creates The Whisky Island

3
The Whisky Wars in Scotland

4
The Strathdon Dram: The One That Got Away

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

6
The National Bard and The National Dram

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

8
Lewis Whisky and the Case of the Illicit Still

9
The Last Distiller Had The Last Laugh

10
New Zealand Moonshine: The Hokonui Brand

Preface

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

Ian R Mitchell, Glasgow

1 Ferintosh: Sadly Lost?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which roughly translates as:

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