give your blend a character of its own, and differentiate it from that of your neighbour, you have to introduce some striking ingredient - striking enough to please your customers, not to excite their dislike! 44
With the redevelopment of the old town centre, and the continuing growth of Kilmarnock’s population, retailing had flourished since the Shop Tax of 1786, which had assessed only twenty-six businesses, perhaps a handful of which were grocers.45 As we shall see, by the time John Walker began in business some thirty years later the retailing trades had mushroomed. With a low cost of entry the grocery trade was highly aspirational for those who sought a path to both social and economic improvement, but the chances of failure were high. For John Walker, blending – of both tea and whisky – was soon to become the thing that defined his business and guaranteed him a lifetime of success, something that eluded so many others in the grocery business.
Despite having been in business since 1820, it is only in 1833 that the first of a handful of references to John Walker and his shop in Kilmarnock appears in the surviving public records. Rarely can the founder of what was to become a worldwide business have been so anonymous. It has been suggested that his first premises may have been in Sandbeds, running along the Kilmarnock Water parallel to King Street, but there is no evidence to support this.46 But in the 1833 directory of the town, the earliest that survives, John was listed as a ‘grocer and spirit dealer’ at 25 King Street; in the Register of Electors (newly compiled under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act) for the same year he is described simply as a ‘grocer’. With a single square-paned bow window fronting onto King Street, the shop and its cellar was one of the more valuable properties in the street.47 Close to Kilmarnock Cross, almost opposite the new council buildings (with the Flesh Market at its rear), and next door to the Sun Inn so beloved of the councillors ‘for demonstrations of joy’, this was an enviable position to capture the town’s more prosperous shoppers. ‘There are’, wrote one commentator, ‘two weekly markets, during which a degree of bustle and animation prevail, seldom seen in a provincial town. The inhabitants are accommodated with a convenient flesh-market, together with others for butter and cheese; that for meal has fallen into disuse, in consequence of the number of victualling shops in the town.’ The Cross, the traditional market place, was still the heart of the town; milk sellers would gather there in the morning, while in the afternoons (particularly on a Friday) a more varied selection of traders, with butter, eggs, poultry, fish, seasonal fruit and vegetables (‘I do not remember a single fruit shop being in the town at that time; potatoes were rarely sold by provision merchants’) and even treacle toffee, would take their place.48 Around the Cross and leading down the main thoroughfares were a variety of different shops: grocers, seedsmen, bakers, booksellers and printers, ironmongers, chemists and wine merchants, all of the same or relatively similar appearance, with ‘comparatively small bow windows, with small panes of glass’, all no doubt with ‘proprietors keenly alive to business . . . morning noon and night behind his counter with his apron on’, and most spotlessly clean, despite the dust which led the shopkeepers of Portland Street and King Street to petition the Police Committee, ‘pointing out the great necessity of watering the streets in droughty weather to prevent the goods in their shops being injured by dust which in other respects was a positive nuisance’.49 Inside, the shop would have been configured as much for social interaction as for commercial transaction. In addition to the show-cups to display teas and sugars, and the scales, weights, measures and paper required to dispense goods, Walker’s shop had ‘tumblers, dram glasses, and beer glasses’ to serve customers with drinks while they shopped (common practice in Scotland until the passing of the Forbes Mackenzie Act in 1853).50
In addition to tea, whisky, brandy and rum, the most valuable items in John’s shop were sugar and soap. He also sold a range of confections, preserved fruits and nuts, and a small selection of spices, coffee and rice. He was also brewing his own ginger beer. Commentators may have fancied that this improved Kilmarnock was as grand as the avenues and boulevards of Edinburgh’s New Town, but it has to be said that the stock in John Walker’s shop in 1825 was mean in both range and quality of goods compared to the inventories trumpeted in hand bills and newspaper advertisements by contemporaries in the capital’s new shopping paradise of Princes Street and the High Street.51 And there was no shortage of competition closer to hand. The 1833 Kilmarnock Directory calculated there were 230 ‘grocers and hucksters’ in the town, along with 105 inns, public houses and spirit-dealers; Pigot’s 1837 directory listed 38 established ‘grocer’s and spirit dealers’, nine of whom (not including Walker) were also wine merchants. As well as the Sun Inn, John’s immediate neighbours included the draper and haberdasher Hugh Craig, and tailors and clothiers John and Andrew Stewart. Across the road were the confectioner Hugh Beckett, Joseph Thomson the baker, and Isabella Young and her sister, straw hat makers. Including Walker’s, there were eight grocers in King Street, six in Portland Street, and a couple around the Cross.
We almost know more about some of these competitors than we do about John, who in a taciturn spirit that came to typify his family, refused the opportunity to promote his business in directories or newspaper advertisements. William Calderwood, a wine and spirit merchant in Regent Street (heading north-east from the Cross), advertised in 1833 ‘the following qualities: viz Arran, Islay, Campbeltown, and Common Malt Whisky’, and offered his ‘sincere thanks to his Friends and the Public in general, for the very liberal encouragement he has received in the Spirit, Porter, and Ale trade’; James Tyrie on Cheapside announced he had just ‘commenced business in the Spirit Line; and from his having formed a correspondence with the first distillers in Scotland, is enabled to sell at the following low prices: Good Malt Aqua at 6s 6d per gallon, Fine Malt Aqua at 7s, Superior Malt Aqua at 8s, Campbeltown at 9s, and Islay & Arran at 10s’.52
Walker’s most formidable competitors, however, were William Wallace & Co., who were based in Portland Street (the eponymous principal partner living in the large Hacket House in Hill Street), and William Rankin & Co., who in 1833 were close by at 30 King Street. Both were grocers and wine merchants, as well as ‘spirit dealers’. Rankin’s would later be described as ‘one of the oldest and most aristocratic businesses of the kind in the town’, being ‘patronised by nearly all the gentry of the town and surrounding district’.53 In a double-page advertisement in the 1846 Kilmarnock Post Office Directory (which listed 87 ‘Grocers, tea and spirit dealers’), William Rankin advertised an extensive range of ports and sherries, porters and beers. Whiskies, sold by the gallon, included Campbeltown, Islay, Glenlivet, Jura and Royal Brackla, as well as blends - ‘a mixture of finest whiskies, very old, much recommended’ – priced as high as his most expensive malts (10s. a gallon). He was also selling a variety of black and green teas, and a ‘very fine’ mixture of ‘the finest teas’. In the 1851 Ayr Directory, following the growing fashion for fortified wines, Rankin emphasised the quality, variety and relative cheapness of his bottled ports and sherries, urging ‘Gentlemen whose purchases have heretofore been chiefly confined to the larger cities of England and Scotland’ to try samples; his whiskies included old Glenlivets, Islays and Campbeltowns. William Wallace’s advert of the same year focused on Chinese teas, spices, dried fruits, nuts and provisions, and their extensive range of spirits, wines and beers.54 Both families were extensively involved in Kilmarnock society, two generations of the Rankins holding the office of postmaster, and the Wallaces being prominent in charitable affairs.55 As we shall see, these businesses continued to grow in the nineteenth century, although both would ultimately become part of John Walker & Sons.
An advert for William Rankin & Son of Kilmarnock in 1846, ‘one of the oldest and most aristocratic businesses of the kind in the town’
In 1833 John married Elizabeth Purvis, daughter of the gardener on the Caprington Estate where his father had farmed. We know that by this time John’s business must have been relatively successful, as he had qualified as a £10 householder to vote under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act, which in Scotland had admitted ‘small shopkeepers, weavers, shoemakers and other tradesmen’ to the electorate, now about 1 in 8 of the male adult population.56 For