Walker died at his house in India Street, Kilmarnock, on 19 October 1857, aged fifty-two years old. He left personal estate of £4,256, to be divided equally between his widow and his five children, instructing his trustees that one or more of his heirs were to take over his business in full, providing they met their obligations to their mother and siblings.70 Despite his relative anonymity during his lifetime, his apparent refusal to advertise or promote his business, and the possible damage inflicted on it by the Great Flood of 1852, the grocery was a prosperous, growing concern. The business he left, worth around £2,425 (his stock-in-trade being valued at some £1,400), was far bigger, and far more complex, than in 1825 (then worth a little over £200). On the traditional grocery side John held a much wider and more sophisticated range of goods and had added, for example, hams, preserves, sauces and pickles to his stock. He carried a wide range of teas, both in bond (worth £130) and ready for sale in the shop, including Imperial, gunpowder, Young Hyson, congou and pekoe. With these quantities and varieties, it seems certain that he was blending his own teas. He held bottled stocks of champagne, fortified wines and spirits as well as bulk of brandy, rum, sherry, bass ale and porter.
Whisky, however, overshadowed everything else, accounting for over half the value of the entire stock, some £750 (of which around £370 was under bond).71 The holdings were dominated by Campbeltown whiskies, now mostly forgotten names like Kinloch, Lochhead, Lochruan, Riechlachan, Springside and (the still very well known) Springbank. There were also Islay and ‘patent’ grain whiskies (unidentified). Geography, or rather proximity, apparently dictated what John used in his blends, possibly along with a local preference for the stronger flavours of the West Coast and island distilleries, relatively easily available through the ports of Troon and Ayr. In the shop there were six casks on the front of the counter selling different styles of whisky ranging in price from 10s. 10d. to 14s. per gallon, and also ‘aqua’ for sale in gallon jars and bottles. There can be little doubt that these would have been rudimentary blends of both malt and grain whiskies, strong in both alcohol and flavour and drunk most likely with warm water and sugar (and possibly lemon) as toddies. Elsewhere in the cellars and back rooms there were over 2,000 bottles, corks by the gross, and ‘jar labels’.72 Moreover, the extensive debts owed to John at his death by numerous creditors, over £800 in all, make it clear that he was conducting a wholesale as well as a retail whisky business, with substantial sums being owed by grocers, spirit-dealers and innkeepers in Kilmarnock and the surrounding area.73 The ability to offer and manage credit was a critical way of obtaining and retaining customers in the grocery trade; it was also fundamental to building the business further. If John’s inheritance had been a grocery shop, then his legacy was a whisky business with a grocery shop attached. Perhaps this is why John was described, for the first time, as a ‘Grocer and Spirit Merchant’ on his death certificate.
While it’s surprising that so little is known about Kilmarnock’s most famous son, the exact details of his business career obscured by time and a paucity of surviving documents, the picture we get at John Walker’s death is of a very well-established retail and wholesale whisky-blending business with both private and trade customers in and around the thriving industrial town of Kilmarnock. With this growing trade would have come an accrued knowledge and expertise in the field of whisky and whisky blending, the latter no doubt partly transferred from working with teas. And with the knowledge and expertise would also have come an expanding network of trusted business contacts. However, John’s principal asset was his hard won reputation, encapsulated in the name John Walker under which he had always traded, the name that guaranteed the quality of every bottle of blended whisky sold from the shop. As we shall see, circumstances which had contrived to limit the possibilities for growth in the blended Scotch whisky trade were about to change dramatically, and John’s business was perfectly placed to exploit these altered conditions. All it needed now was a leader of vision, drive and relentless determination to succeed.
CHAPTER 2
A ‘GREAT GULF STREAM OF TODDY’
Opened in 1879 the complex of buildings erected by Walker’s in the Strand came to dominate the centre of Kilmarnock - John Walker & Sons illustrated brochure by A. Barnard, 1894
‘Like that great gulf stream of toddy which flows through my native land – softening our natural severity, tempering our old fanaticism, and modifying our rugged climate.’1
ALEXANDER WALKER was in sole control of the family business for almost thirty years. During this time it was transformed from a grocery shop in Kilmarnock to a massive concern whose premises dominated the centre of the town and had offices in London and agents all over the world. By the 1880s it was, it was claimed, the largest single exporter of Scotch whisky, and also the most profitable. Blended Scotch whisky had grown to become the preeminent spirit in the world, the fashionable drink of choice in clubs, hotels, theatre bars, railway refreshment rooms and restaurants. Alexander Walker was a man of considerable business vision and organisational skills, keen to take advantage of these developing consumer trends, and anxious that his firm should provide for his growing family. When it came to growing the business, it was almost as if nothing was new enough, whether in terms of production, marketing or route to market. But his business principles were rooted in something far more old-fashioned: an overwhelming belief that quality (and value) was the principal and necessary condition for growth, something learned, no doubt, from his father.
As a remarkable collection of correspondence from the last ten years of his life reveals, although obsessed by his business Alexander was a rounded personality with a wide variety of interests. He maintained a close circle of friends and acquaintances in and around Kilmarnock and Glasgow to whom he was both generous and loyal, and often revealed to them concerns and anxieties about business affairs which he never shared with the small group with which he trusted the management of the firm, mostly men of Kilmarnock, including two of his sons. To them (and to others in matters of commerce, local affairs or religion) he could be stern, fierce, impatient, ill-tempered and forthright, with often a stinging turn of phrase. To write, as one obituarist did, ‘that he didn’t suffer fools gladly’, was to exhibit a masterful control of the understatement. ‘I am greatly perplexed’, Walker wrote to the manager of his London office in July 1886, about Thomas Inglis (manager of the Royal Caledonian Asylum in London), ‘as to how I am to get on with that “Bletherin bitch” Inglis as I am afraid I am very likely to lose my temper with such a loquacious gentleman.’2 He described himself as being of a ‘mercurial temperament’.3 However beneath this gruff exterior he was modest and unassuming (‘I don’t like making an exhibition of myself’), caring, generous to a fault, sometimes deeply compassionate, occasionally romantic, and very often exceptionally humorous.4 Most of all he was driven by a passion to make the best blended whisky in the world.
When John Walker wrote his will in November 1846 he stipulated that Elizabeth and his three executors (all fellow business owners in King Street) would act as curators and tutors for the children, and were to oversee the estate until the youngest child, John, attained majority in May 1865.5 Alexander, by this time aged twenty and most likely already working for his father, took over the running of the business following John’s death in 1857 in a partnership with his mother and brother Robert, then aged seventeen. Young John may also have started working for the company sometime after 1861, when he was lodging in Glasgow as an ‘agent’s clerk, spirits etc.’.6 During this time the size of the business more than doubled (as did the value of the spirits and wines kept in bond) while the wholesale trade increased to around two-thirds of sales by value. But in November 1864 Robert Walker ‘retired’ from the partnership, setting up his own grocery shop briefly in King Street, before travelling out to Sydney.7 On 18 May 1865, the young John Walker’s twenty-first birthday, the partnership with his mother was dissolved, and Alexander, ‘having in terms of my late father’s will allotted all shares & funds belonging to the trust estate of my late father’, took sole ownership and control of the firm of John Walker & Sons with a capital of £840.8