of the successful candidate, the Liberal Edward Pleydell-Bouverie.57 In this he may have been influenced by the experience of William Forrest, a grocer and spirit dealer in King Street, and then Portland Street, who had cast his vote in 1837 for the successful Tory candidate, John Campbell Colquhoun. Forrest subsequently fell foul of radical sentiment, a lesson to Kilmarnock shopkeepers that knowing your customers’ politics was as important as knowing their taste:
His shop for a number of days was almost deserted; nay, more, it was, to use a modern phrase, boycotted and guarded by a rabble of louts, who while they loudly clamoured for liberty to themselves, yet threatened to maltreat those who exercised their liberty of spending their money where they thought they were likely to be best served . . . a poor old man who had ventured to enter the shop and purchase a small quantity of tea and sugar, after he came out was followed . . . and sadly abused by a miserable miscreant58
The Walkers’ first daughter, Margaret, was born in 1835, followed two years later by Alexander, and then Robert (1839), Elizabeth (1841) and John (1844). By this time the business must have been prospering; since 1835 the family had been living in a house in the northern fringes of the town off the Kilmaurs Road, with a domestic servant and a shop-worker (seventeen-year-old David Rud) employed by John. Sometimes described as ‘Walker’s Land’ and later called ‘Glenbank’, this was a newly built property in India Street, owned by John, where the family remained until his widow died in 1890.59 This was a fashionable and developing part of town, away from the congested centre, with modern houses and substantial gardens (John, it was said, was a keen horticulturalist). Three of the houses in the street, including the Walkers’, had an annual value of £19, one of £16, and the remaining three of £10. Their neighbours were a teacher, an auctioneer, an ironmonger, two seedsmen and a hatter. In 1851 Robert, Elizabeth and John were all still attending school, though it’s possible that by now Alexander, aged fourteen, was already working in his father’s shop. Both Robert and John followed him into the family firm.60
An undated silhouette of John Walker
John Walker was now in his prime, but unlike so many other successful small business owners he eschewed the temptations of local politics, trade associations and civil society, choosing instead to focus on his shop, his family, and his garden. Compared to the many colourful local worthies whose stories fill the pages of James Walker’s Reminiscences of Old Kilmarnock, John remains a mere cipher. This studied reticence was a trait inherited by his eldest son in both personal and business matters, and by his grandsons. The only image of John is a silhouette of uncertain provenance, which bears a striking similarity to a portrait that can be seen hanging on a wall in a painting of John’s grandson George Paterson Walker. It shows a smartly turned out, strong-featured man with fashionable long sideboards in late-Regency dress, with a high velvet collared jacket and an even higher-collared shirt and cravat. Not extravagant, and by no means a dandy, but very fastidious. Appearance was everything in the grocery trade, from shop window to the shop counter, and as the master of ceremonies presiding over the shopping experience, the shopkeeper was no exception. From what few family paintings and portraits survive it’s clear that John’s male descendants, in addition to inheriting his reserve, also shared his very particular dress sense.61
Between the 1820s and 1850s Kilmarnock was transformed by the arrival of steam power, railways and heavy industry. The population had increased from some 13,000 in 1821 to 18,000 in 1831, and 21,000 in 1851. Whilst shoe, carpet and woollen manufacture remained important, mechanisation (much of it home-grown) had slowly supplanted many of the old craft skills. There was an undoubted spirit of innovation about the town, whether from landowners such as the Duke of Portland with his pioneering of tile-drainage (and tile manufacture) or the artisan Thomas Morton, whose inventions revolutionised carpet-production, and who later started the manufacture of telescopes in the town.62 The arrival of the railway from Glasgow in 1843 was critical; it cut a swath through the north of the town and was followed by foundries and locomotive works, established by Andrew Barclay and the Glasgow and South-Western Railway amongst others. Outside of Kilmarnock the Portland Ironworks was established at Hurlford in 1846. The tramway from Kilmarnock to Troon was rebuilt the following year to allow steam locomotives to haul coal from the mines surrounding the town to the expanded harbour there. In 1852 manufacture began of the Kennedy Patent Water Meter, invented by Thomas Kennedy and John Cameron, a local clockmaker. Two years earlier the Kilmarnock Water Company had been established to provide piped water to businesses and private homes in the town, a gas company (in which John Walker was a modest investor) having been set up in 1822 to provide, amongst other things, lighting for the town’s shops and offices.
Growth was not unabated, hardship continued in times of depression, and in the 1840s the town council found itself again setting up soup kitchens and make-work schemes for the unemployed, mostly from the textile industries. Following food riots in Glasgow in March 1848, during which businesses were attacked and looted, and five protestors shot by troops, a crowd gathered at Kilmarnock Cross, ‘hallooing, and yelling, and smashing lamps’ and breaking shop windows before being dispersed by baton-wielding special constables, with a ‘few of the turbulent or ringleaders being lodged in gaol’.63 However, despite the privations of the poor the growth of the ‘comfortable classes’ was remorseless; as one historian wrote, ‘Many neat and beautiful residences have been built within the last few years . . . which give ample evidence of a prevailing taste for the elegancies and refinements of life.’64 Such ‘tastes for elegancies’ were catered for by firms such as Daniel MacDougall’s Kilmarnock Confectionary Warehouse in King Street, which advertised in the most extravagant terms ‘confectionaries of every description’, for ‘dinners, routs, balls, suppers, banquets and soirées’.65 John Walker tried to tempt genteel customers not with advertising but with a window display of brazil nuts, figs and plums, boxes of fancy soaps, bottles of sultana sauce, jars of marmalade and Brighton biscuits, but perhaps surprisingly no alcohol.66
This polite Kilmarnock society could not have anticipated the storm that would descend on the town in July 1852, when the Great Flood of Kilmarnock laid waste to ‘fields, bridges, mills, dams, houses, gardens and orchards’. The dramatic storm resulted in torrents of water running off the moors and fields into the tributaries that fed the Kilmarnock Water, leaving a trail of destruction as the spate headed for the town itself at about four o’clock in the morning of 14 July. At the Kilmarnock Foundry in the north-east of the town, buildings were destroyed and workers’ housing flooded to the depth of ten feet, as occupants fled from their beds. Similarly machinery and goods were destroyed at Laughland, Roxburgh and Gilchrist’s woollen factory, whilst a ‘huge boiler’ from another factory was carried away by the water: ‘buoyant as some canoe, it sailed along, adding to the intense sublimity of the scene, yet filling the spectators with horror’. As the waters raced to the town centre and Flesh Market Bridge, on which stood the council chambers and prison, their destructive velocity was increased by the narrowness of the water course and the tight bends as it passed under the town buildings and down Sandilands Street. ‘To those who could look upon it without thoughts of danger, King Street presented a novel spectacle. It was converted into a broad river, which rolled along in sullen grandeur, carrying upon its waves trees, planks of timber, tubs, casks, chairs and other articles.’ No doubt some of these tubs and casks belonged to John Walker, ‘as a vast quantity of goods belonging to all, from the Cross downward, was greatly damaged or destroyed’. In all, about £15,000 of damage (equivalent to over £2 million today) was sustained in the town in about two hours, the provost and magistrates establishing a subscription fund for the ninety-nine families ‘of the poorest classes . . . totally unable to withstand the loss of clothing, furniture and damage to their dwellings’.67 One popular story has it that John Walker’s entire stock was destroyed as the flood submerged the rear shop and cellars that backed on to Sandbeds, forcing him to make ‘a fresh beginning’, dismissing his shopman and working only alongside his wife.68 The evidence, however, tends to suggest otherwise. John may have lost stock in the 1852 flood but the fact that his business, only five years later, held stock worth £1,434, and had £1,140 cash in the bank indicates either a truly miraculous recovery,