and helping to reinforce and legitimise the social order of the day. On the King’s birthday shops were decorated with greenery, and shopkeepers stood at their doors ‘watching what was going on in the street’. The ‘chief event of the day’ was when the city fathers took to the balcony of the Town Buildings and ‘pledged the King’s health’: ‘Other toasts followed, and I remember’, wrote an onlooker, ‘how the common folks, assembled below on the street, used to look up to, and envy, these big-wigs - who occupied such an exalted station.’ After this they would adjourn to ‘the Sun Inn, kept by Mr John Murray, where the loyal health were drunk under all the usual demonstrations of joy’.12 Both the Old and New Statistical Account of Scotland lamented the number of inns and alehouses (around 150 by 1840), and regretted the ‘evidences of intemperance’.13 If Kilmarnock liked to drink, then so did Scotland. It has been calculated that in the 1830s the per capita consumption of spirits among the Scottish population aged fifteen years and more averaged a little under a pint a week, and drink permeated almost all aspects of daily business and leisure, even, as we shall see, shopping for groceries.14 Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus complained that whisky-drinking was the bane of Morayshire, from the poorest cottage to the most genteel breakfast table. In the urbanised Lowlands of Scotland, commentators criticised the consumption of cheap, ‘coarse and deleterious spirit’, rapidly distilled and principally from grain, rather than ‘pure’ malted barley.15
For those with a greater disposable income, there was already some nascent sense of connoisseurship or discernment when it came to choosing what whiskies to drink: ‘There are some places more famed for the goodness of their whisky than others, such as Glenlivet, Ferintosh, Campbeltown, Crieff, etc. of which intimation is given in the houses where it is sold upon tickets almost in every spirit dealer’s window in Glasgow, Edinburgh and other places.’16 Not that whisky was the only spirit of choice in early nineteenth-century Scotland. Apart from Speyside breakfast tables, it was rarely to be seen amongst the fine wines and cognacs of the gentry or aristocrats. In 1820s Glasgow, a city whose economic engine room was largely driven by sugar, slavery and smoking, long before smelting and shipbuilding came on the scene, ‘Rum punch, with the lemons and limes from Trinidad and Jamaica, was the ruling element at all dinner parties in Glasgow.’17 In Edinburgh in the 1820s rum too held sway: ‘It was computed that above 2000 private stills were constantly employed in producing molasses spirit. The common people got so universally into the habit of drinking this spirit, that when a porter or labourer was seen reeling along the street, the common saying was that he has got molassed.’18 Whether drunk by the dram, or in punch or toddies served by the half-mutchkin, the consumption of spirits was all-pervasive. ‘In no other country does spiritous liquor seem to have assumed so much the attitude of the authorised instrument of compliment and kindness as in North Britain.’19 Clearly for distillers, innkeepers and grocers, this was a considerable opportunity.
Before entering the grocery business it was normal for a boy to be apprenticed to the trade for between five and seven years, so it appears likely that around 1820, John Walker was indentured to Robert Caldwell to learn the complexities of the trade.20 According to the Shopkeeper’s Guide, the virtues required of an early nineteenth-century grocer were relatively straightforward: early rising, self-denial, industry, arrangement, calculation, punctuality, perseverance, health, cheerfulness, courage and civility, good address, integrity and, last but not least, economy.21 In addition, grocers in the 1820s, despite the modern perception of the generality of their trade, required to learn specific skills and mysteries - bookkeeping, the law (particularly with regard to licences and excisable goods), salesmanship, window dressing, and the nature and qualities of the multiplicity of goods they dealt in. These could include tea, coffee, cocoa and chocolate, sugar, dried fruits and nuts, spices (including rice and grains), confectionery (preserved and crystallised fruits and peels, jams and juices), oils, pickles, sauces, hard cheeses, vinegars, and a variety of ‘miscellaneous’ household goods such as soaps, black lead, pipe clay and bath bricks.22 To this should be added, for the ‘grocer and spirit dealer’ (as was most common in Scotland), wines, fortified wines and liqueurs, spirits (British and foreign), and beers and porters. Critically the grocer had to learn how to select, store and care for this multiplicity of mostly imported goods, and in instances where quality was poor or had deteriorated, how to restore, or ‘improve’ their quality.23 The grocer’s trade was not passive; through selection and receipt of goods to preparing, weighing or measuring for sale, it required a series of sometimes highly skilled interventions, all dependant on an understanding (within any category of goods) of flavour, relative qualities, and cost. One of the most important skills, which for some defined the grocer’s trade, was blending, or ‘the skills to enable them to change and alter’ goods ‘by mixture, confections, and possession of simple ingredients’.24
The goods that grocers like John Walker offered to their customers ranged from the mundane to the exotic, from soap and starch to sweet almonds and orange peel. The latter sort were the ‘small luxuries that were increasingly important in the lives of consumers, both the middling sorts and the lower orders’, and reflected the significant changes that had taken place both in the consumption and availability of such luxuries during the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the nature of retailing itself.25 Of all the goods that grocers handled, few had been such an engine of change as tea, still at this point sourced exclusively from China, and until 1834 sold in the United Kingdom through the monopoly of the East India Company. In 1820 the annual per capita consumption of tea was 1.22 pounds per person, which would almost double by the time of John Walker’s death in 1857. Imports averaged £29 million per year, a figure that had increased enormously since the Commutation Act of 1784 had drastically reduced duties on tea and ended a vast illicit trade in smuggled tea that (like the trade in smuggled whisky) was particularly strong in Scotland. Tea had also changed from being the drink that transformed manners, and shaped polite society, public spaces and domestic ritual (and even household furniture and tableware), to the drink that could be found at even the poorest table. Tea blending, although originally a luxurious, bespoke experience for the most exclusive customers to produce unique flavours to suit individual tastes, was at the heart of this democratisation of the drink.26 Chinese tea varied in style and quality, from the black-leafed Bohea and congous, oolongs and scented pekoes, to the very finest green teas such as gunpowder (rarely sold as single varieties due to their costs).27 From harvest to harvest, from year to year, and from variety to variety there could be an enormous variation in taste and quality, and price. Traders used a classification system that ranged from ‘Very Fine’ through ‘Ordinary’ to ‘Musty & Mouldy’ and ‘Dusty’.28
One way for the dealer or grocer to deal with this continual variation was to mix, or blend, types of tea. Blending could also help improve the character of some of the less flavoursome varieties, in ways which were long understood by the trade: ‘One ounce of Pekoe in a pound of fine Souchong, gives an excellent flavour; as do two ounces of Pekoe to two pounds of Congou or Souchong, mixed equally together.’29 Blenders were dependant at the outset on receiving pure tea in the very best condition from China. Yet a veil of secrecy shrouded tea growing and manufacturing in China in an attempt to prevent any possible loss of their global monopoly on its production. Despite the larger tea-houses sending representatives out to the Chinese mainland to gain both expertise and advanced knowledge of the quantities and qualities of tea that would be heading for London, some still felt that ‘no article of consumption is more subject to adulteration than the pleasant one which forms the principal ingredient of the tea table. It is not only adulterated by the Chinese vendor, but it undergoes sophistication by the Chinese artist.’30 Tea might have been mixed with the leaves of other shrubs such as japonica, or cheap Boheas – the lowest quality of black tea – dyed to take on the appearance of more expensive green teas. Shipments damaged by saltwater in transit might be fumigated and dried before being mixed with Bohea. As more cheap teas were demanded by a less discerning clientele, so it became easier for the adulterers to flourish. It was estimated by a House of Commons committee that the value of adulterated tea put on the market in 1783 was £4 million (about £600 million today), when the value of teas sold by the East India Company totalled £6 million.31
The