nineteenth century Walker whiskies tended to be bottled at ‘proof’ or ‘10 up’ (10 under proof), the equivalent of 51.4% abv. In 1917 the wartime government introduced a standard strength of ‘20 up’, or 40% abv, which is now the minimum strength at which Scotch whisky can be bottled.
For all its simplicity, Scotch whisky plays a hugely important role in today’s Scottish economy. In 2018 the industry sold 95 million cases; American whisky (bourbons, Tennessee whisky and blends) sold 51 million, Canadian 28 million, Japanese (blends and single whiskies) 15 million and Irish whisky 10 million. Scotch whisky accounts for 10,000 jobs in Scotland and over 40,000 jobs across the United Kingdom. Some 7,000 of these jobs are in rural areas of Scotland, providing vital employment and investment to communities across the Highlands and Islands. Scotch whisky exports are worth £4.7 billion, representing 70 per cent of Scottish food and drink exports and 21 per cent of the United Kingdom’s. With almost 20 per cent of global Scotch sales, 3,000 jobs in Scotland support Johnnie Walker at over 50 operating sites, including 28 single malt distilleries the length and breadth of Scotland, and 1½ single grain distilleries (Diageo has a half share in the North British Distillery in Edinburgh). Over 2 million visitors to Scotland in 2018 included whisky distilleries in their itineraries; nearly 500,000 visited distilleries connected with Johnnie Walker.
Alexander Walker cared so much about his father that he named his firm after him; he cared so much about his own family that he was driven to increase the size and scale of his business to a degree that caused him sleepless nights and fits of anxiety. And he cared about his blends; he was passionate about his whisky. The quality of his whisky was the standard by which he measured himself. He had an obsession for quality (which he had no doubt inherited from his father) that was passed on to his sons, and which was written into the life blood of the business, and of the brand. It’s still at its heart today. It’s hard to be neutral about whisky once it gets into your blood, once it gets into your heart. This is a book written from a passion for facts, a passion for Scotch whisky, and a passion for the people who made it, and who make it today. It’s a book written from the heart. It’s a book about one of the simplest things, Scotch whisky, and in particular it’s a book about a small group of remarkable people, from a rather unremarkable town in the west of Scotland. In John Walker’s grocery shop one of them laid the foundations for a brand of blended Scotch whisky which set out on a long journey from Kilmarnock till it strode the world like a Colossus. A simple thing, a wonder of the world.
CHAPTER 1
TEA & WHISKY: A GROCERY SHOP IN KILMARNOCK
‘There is every probability that Kilmarnock will still further increase in wealth and population, and become a formidable rival to the famed “Metropolis of the West”’1
Founded in 1820, John Walker’s shop in King Street, Kilmarnock, image c. 1830s
GIVEN THAT HE IS without doubt Kilmarnock’s most famous son, whose name is spoken every day by people around the world, surprisingly little is known about the life of John (later ‘Johnnie’) Walker. We do know that John was born at Todriggs Farm on the Caprington Estate, a few miles south-west of Kilmarnock, on 25 July 1805. Tradition has it that the Walker family had farmed at Todriggs for generations. A substantial stone-built farmhouse, currently derelict, stands on the site, but this may have post-dated John’s time there. John’s father, Alexander, had been born in 1780, and in 1804 married Elizabeth Gemmel. John was born the following year. Alexander died in 1819, aged only thirty-nine (relatively early deaths, as it was to turn out, were something of an affliction for Walker men), at which point the contents of the farm, now the property of John, were sold and in 1820 some of the proceeds invested in a grocery business in Kilmarnock as a source of income for John and his mother Elizabeth. Valued by Elizabeth, John’s maternal uncle Thomas Todd, his paternal uncle John (also resident at Todriggs), and neighbouring farmers Thomas Borland and Hugh Paton, the estate, including debts worth £120, totalled £537 15s. By far the largest component was cattle and calves valued at £236, and horses, sheep and swine (£50), although there was also seed corn, beans, barley and seed potatoes listed amongst everyday farming tools and implements.2 Despite being a minor, John was technically able to run his business himself, but seems to have agreed to the wishes of his curators (his mother and uncles) that it initially be managed on his behalf by one Robert Caldwell, named in the first surviving inventory of the shop’s stock-in-trade in 1825, while John learned the skills of the grocery trade from him for the first few years.
By the time John Walker’s business was established in Kilmarnock the town was being described as ‘the largest and most elegant in Ayrshire . . . with a series of modern streets, little inferior to those of the New Town of Edinburgh . . . and [which] possesses to all appearances, many of the attributes of a great capital’.3 This was a result of a transformation over the previous fifty years or more, ‘from a mean village into a minor city’.4 The population, only 4,400 in 1755, was nearly 13,000 by 1821, making it the ninth-largest settlement in Scotland. With a haphazard arrangement of narrow streets, the old town had been dark and difficult to navigate: ‘It is easily enough got into,’ wrote one visitor in the 1790s, ‘but the devil himself had surely a hand in its formation, for I can’t for the life of me discover a way out of it . . .’5 Having obtained an Act of Parliament to improve the town, the burgh council literally opened up the old town from its medieval focus, the Cross, in 1804. To the south ran King Street (where the new Town Buildings were built in 1805) and to the north Portland Street and Wellington Street. The result was that ‘the town as a whole presented an air of comfort and elegance to the eye of a stranger and impressed him with a favourable impression of the taste and industry of the inhabitants’.6 And no doubt any stranger visiting Kilmarnock would also have been impressed not only by the dramatic improvements effected to the principal road to Glasgow, but also by the (horse-drawn) railway which ran from the town to Troon, built in 1812 in order to connect coal mines around the town to Troon Harbour, which had been substantially developed by the Duke of Portland, Kilmarnock’s principal landowner, the railway’s principal promoter, and the proprietor of the coal mines that fed the railway.7
A page from the inventory of Alexander Walker’s farm at Todriggs, near Kilmarnock, which John Walker inherited in 1819
Kilmarnock was surrounded by Ayrshire’s rich and much improved farmland, famous for its dairy produce, particularly Ayrshire (or Dunlop) cheese, it’s most valuable product, and cattle which were admired, and sent, all over the world.8 In addition the land around Kilmarnock was rich in mineral deposits, most notably iron and coal. Wool and leather had principally driven the growth of the town up to the 1820s, with weaving introduced in the early eighteenth century, and, in 1743, a large weaving manufactory set up in the town specialising in carpet production. Leather-working and boot and shoe manufacture began around the same time.9 Fluctuating trade conditions brought considerable economic insecurity, particularly to the weaving community, who were already threatened by the effect of increasing mechanisation.10 In 1821, of almost 2,700 households in the town, the overwhelming majority were dependant on the trades and industries that had been increasingly depressed since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and would continue to be till the middle of the century. With this came demands for assistance for the impoverished, a growing radicalism and demand for reform of the franchise, and the threat of ‘riotous proceedings’ and ‘outrages’, which the town council met with an equal mixture of relief programmes and repression.11
King Street Kilmarnock in 1819, running south from Portland Street. John Walker’s shop was next to the Sun Inn, marked by the letter ‘b’
If poverty and politics were potentially divisive forces in