A Long Stride. Nicholas Morgan
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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