a war in Africa and a war in Europe, for taking the money and living a comfortable life as a horse-breeder? Families also love their lore and legend, and there is no doubt that he who lives longest lives to tell the tale. Such was certainly the case with Sir Alexander Walker, whose often repeated (and occasionally wonderfully inconsistent) recollections of the past came to be one of the main sources for future copywriters and publicists interested in the ‘history’ of the brand.
At its simplest (and no one said Scotch whisky should be complicated), Scotland principally makes three kinds of whisky. The production of the first kind, single malt Scotch whisky, is a conversion process as starches from malted barley are converted into sugar in the mashing process, the sugars converted to alcohol by the addition of yeast during the fermentation stage, and the weak beer that results distilled (normally twice) in copper pot stills to produce a spirit of around 70% alcohol by volume (abv). This basic conversion process is the same for the production of the second kind, single grain Scotch whisky, except it is made from a mixture of malted barley and other cereals (normally wheat or maize), on a much larger scale than most malt whiskies, and in a continuous (rather than a batch) process using ‘Coffey’ or ‘patent’ stills rather than pot stills. The production of a single malt or a single grain Scotch whisky must take place at a single distillery. Once distilled, the spirit must, by law, be matured in Scotland in oak casks for at least three years before it can be called whisky. The third kind of whisky is blended Scotch whisky, the product of mixing together single malt and single grain Scotch whisky. Around the world today about 90 per cent of all the whisky that’s sold is blended; the remainder mostly single malt. Almost all of the single grain Scotch whisky that is made is used in the production of blends. Originally crude mixtures of two or three different single malt and single grain Scotch whiskies, blended Scotch whiskies today are often made from over thirty different individual whiskies, each brand closely guarding the secrets of its particular recipe. If a whisky carries an age statement on its label, then that must apply to the youngest whisky in the blend. The world’s largest-selling blended Scotch whisky variant is Johnnie Walker Red Label.
The origins of distilling in Scotland are obscure. Or, as Aeneas MacDonald wrote in 1930, ‘The origin of whisky is, as it ought to be, hidden in the clouds of mystery that veil the youth of human race.’2
And as befits a book concerned with the history of whisky in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when Scotch had been dragged kicking and screaming from illicit bothies in sequestered glens and licensed Lowland distilleries in the commercial heart of Scotland onto a world stage, that’s as far as we need to concern ourselves with the ‘olden days’. Suffice to say that when John Walker’s business commenced, production of single malt Scotch whisky was fragmented, pre-industrial, often illegal, and the quality of the product at best variable, often undrinkable without the addition of amelioratives. Single grain Scotch whisky, produced in highly capitalised but still technologically crude distilleries (the Coffey or patent still did not come into use until the 1830s), was sold raw and hot from the still for local consumption, and much was exported to London to be rectified as gin or as whisky, when it was known as ‘Scotch blue beer’. Scotch whisky was little known or appreciated outside of its locales. No one had really thought of ‘blended Scotch whisky’.
This book follows a broadly chronological narrative, beginning with the death of Alexander Walker in 1819, and the establishment of a grocery business in Kilmarnock the following year for his son John. Details of John’s career are sparse, for like his sons and grandsons he avoided the limelight. But whilst their careers are illuminated by voluminous series of business records, John’s remains in the shadows. And while it is a common belief, popularised in film and song, that the beginning is a very good place to start a story, this is one that in many respects starts not at the beginning, but rather like some Homeric epic, in medias res. And as the past collides with the present, it is hard to offer more than a summary of the defining events of the final decades of the tale. So as with a good sandwich, or a well-made pie, the diligent carnivorous reader will find that the meat is in the middle.
Over the past thirty years Diageo, and United Distillers before it, has invested heavily in building up the world’s largest archive of historical material relating to the alcohol beverage industry, the idea of Ian Ross, formerly of White Horse Distillers and John Walker & Sons and a scion of the family of William H. Ross, and Colonel Michael Burkham, formerly of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The John Walker & Sons collection is the largest component of this archive and spans a period from 1819 to the present day. For many years this material lay in the basement of a building at Hill Street in Kilmarnock, watched over like Smaug the dragon by the last of the Johnnie Walker blenders there, before being transferred to what is now the Diageo Archive. The bulk of the material in the collection dates from the 1880s onwards and tells us little about the critical decisions made by Alexander Walker, son of John, in the early years of the business. We are lucky to have a fragment of Alexander’s voluminous correspondence (‘I must confess that I am just about the worst correspondent you could possibly meet,’ he wrote to Daniel Wilson, a partner in Walker’s Sydney distributors, in November 1882) but sadly have been left with nothing so intimate from his sons.3 The carefully written minute books of John Walker & Sons Ltd, have survived, but financial and sales records are harder to interpret. The author, with some assistance, has created series of data relating to the value of sales, profitability and the like; due to his numerical failings and the opaqueness of some of the ledgers, these may not be perfectly accurate to the last digit, but there is no doubt that indicatively they absolutely reflect the development of the Walker business. Data for sales and business performance from 1985 are taken from International Wine and Spirits Record. The archives of the Distillers Company Ltd, which include details of the merger discussions between the ‘big three’ in the early twentieth century, and those of W. & A. Gilbey (the self-styled aristocracy of the wine and spirits trade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century), also held in the Diageo Archive, were invaluable to this study. Sir James Stevenson, Baron Stevenson of Holmbury, one of the most important characters in this story, was by his own admission an assiduous diary-keeper, but sadly neither diaries nor business correspondence have survived in the small collection of his papers deposited in the East Sussex Record Office by his family, which relate mostly to his period as director of the 1924 Empire Exhibition.
Despite its much greater profitability and marketing proficiency, the Victorian and Edwardian Scotch whisky business was something of a poor relation to the wine trade. Even the principals of a firm like Walker’s, who as we shall see had little time for the wine business, preferred the respectable designation of ‘wine merchant’ to that of ‘distiller’. The wine trade was replete with trade journals, many of which gave extensive (and not always favourable) coverage to the rise of blended Scotch whisky in the last quarter of the century, and the consequent demise and virtual disappearance of single malt from the shelves and counters of late Victorian and Edwardian bars and wine merchants. They also provide a telling commentary on the irresponsible financial speculation in whisky stocks (and later distilleries) that accompanied the rise of blends, and which so nearly brought the industry to its knees. By the late nineteenth century, the advertising industry in the United Kingdom was far more sophisticated than is generally imagined. Journals established in the early twentieth century gave extensive and normally thoughtful coverage to the development of whisky advertising and the crucial role of agencies and illustrators, and have provided critical insights into the Johnnie Walker story. For the record, these pioneers of the science and art of advertising spoke a language little different from that used by the marketing men and women of today. Those who decry the influence of marketing on Scotch whisky as if it was some late twentieth century arriviste should understand that without it Scotch whisky would be nothing today. Historical newspapers (both national and local) and illustrated weekly magazines often fill in the gaps in the absence of detailed business records, and certainly act as a barometer for the place of Scotch in the popular culture of the nation.
Of course, Scotch has its own secret language, a sort of Polari to keep insiders in, and outsiders out. When it comes to making whisky, the industry has words like ‘mashing’ and ‘fermenting’, but
