A Long Stride. Nicholas Morgan
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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