Wee Scotch Whisky Tales (5 page)

There was a more serious side to this in that Burns, though here and elsewhere advocating self-restraint in drinking, himself was unable to practise what he preached, and became increasingly alcohol-dependent with time. In
Drink and the Devil
he gives full vent to his self disgust:

But Burns’ drunken over-indulgence brought him shame as well as depression. His misbehaviour at social gatherings, often amongst ladies of standing, haunted him. In a letter of apology to Mrs Robert Riddel, he wrote after such a debauch:

This contradiction in Burns is echoed in that, for much of the latter part of his life, he was actually an exciseman, or gauger, intent on suppressing the illegal alcohol trade, but unable to curb his own excessive use of the product.

Burns was the Ploughman Poet, a poor peasant farmer who failed to make ends meet from his pen, despite his fame. When struggling to make a living farming, he took up a part-time job as an exciseman at £50 a year. Given Burns’ attitude to whisky it is possibly unsurprising that from time to time he was lax in the execution of his duties.

On one occasion Burns entered the howff of an old dame suspected of selling illicit whisky and asked for a dram and some bread and cheese. When he offered to pay, the crone replied the he owed ‘Naething ava for the whisky, but saxpence for the bread and cheese.’ Laughingly Burns told her ‘Sin on, and fear not,’ and left the house. On another occasion he apprehended a whisky smuggler with his cart, and the man so moved Burns with the story of his poverty that the exciseman gave him a pound instead of arresting him.

In 1794 Burns moved to Dumfries, where his wages rose to £70 a year, more than ever he made from his poetry. That his heart was not in his work as a gauger was shown by the fact that in Dumfries he wrote the poem
The Exciseman
which celebrates the devil running off with the exciseman to the delight of the local population. The move to Dumfries was good for Burns’ income but bad for his drinking. Conviviality and alcohol were linked in Scotland at this time in a way that would make today’s binge drinkers appear temperate. Every social occasion, from Halloween to markets and fairs, was marked by excess alcoholic consumption. These were periodic indulgences for the lower classes but in the genteel Dumfries society Burns now moved in, steady, heavy drinking was the norm. One commentator wrote:

Unable to resist such temptation Burns’ addiction grew. In January 1796 after a visit to his favourite Globe Tavern, Burns fell asleep in the snow on the way home, catching a severe chill and rheumatic fever which was to contribute to his death later in that year – at the age of 37.

Burns wrote some of the finest love poems in any language, yet his treatment of women, who found him irresistible, was dreadful. He also wrote some of the best drinking songs ever, praising whisky in these above all other drink, but he was unable to enjoy the
craitur
without excess. Rabbie was a rogue, but he was aware of his flaws, of which women and drink were the main, and he hoped that, ‘Whatever may be my failings, may they ever be those of a generous heart and an independent mind.’ Indeed, they were. When we toast the ‘Immortal Memory’ of Scotland’s National Bard with the country’s national drink, let us note that he would have written many more wonderful songs had he used whisky as his servant, rather than as his master.

7 Whisky’s Awa: The Rise and Fall of the Temperance Movement in Scotland

CURRENT DEBATES ON ‘responsible drinking’ and on the cost and availability of alcohol have a long pedigree. Scotland, the birthplace of modern industrial whisky making, also saw the birth of the first of the temperance movements and an examination of their rise and fall might be of use in informing the present discussion.

The beginnings of large-scale whisky commercial distilling in 1824 was facilitated by the reduction of the duty on spirits from 7s to 2s 6d (12.5p) a gallon – and a consequent reduction in the price of whisky. Consumption of the
craitur
in Scotland increased from about two million gallons in 1822 to approaching seven million in 1829, accompanied by a consequent increase in drunkenness. For example, in Glasgow from 1871-4 some 125,000 people were arrested as ‘drunk and incapable’. Many people felt Something Had To Be Done.

Intemperance was an accepted part of upper-class Scottish society, but it had generally been conducted behind domestic doors or in private drinking clubs. The new urban working-class drunkenness on the other hand was manifested in public. Many early reformers were motivated by humanitarian impulses, but also by the fact that they felt the increasingly industrial society would be put at risk by workmen drinking, and that the middle classes would be taxed to pay the poor rates necessary to maintain the indigent drunken populace. From the outset the alcohol reformers target was the drink of the working man – and especially, their target was whisky. One sceptic commented that the rage against drunkenness was an ‘artful combination of the upper classes against the toiling portion of the community by keeping back whisky from the common people.’

The first temperance society in the world was set up in Maryhill, then a village just outside Glasgow, by James Dunlop. This movement’s target was whisky (and other spirits), and not the wine drunk domestically by the middle and upper classes, which was assumed to be ‘nutritious’. Dunlop was aided in his work by the millionaire Glasgow printer and bible publisher William Collins, who did not endear himself to working men by arguing that they should only drink water. Collins’ money funded hundreds of tracts and the issuance of the Temperance Society Record. Collins was an evangelical Christian who believed that drink was the cause of poverty, and of irreligion.

The early temperance movement was heavily religiously inspired. In 1842 an Irish priest, Theobald Mathew, led a procession of 50,000 people to Glasgow Green, where an estimated 80% of them signed a pledge to abstain from alcohol (though presumably not communion wine). Soon a whole range of societies burst into existence some advocating temperance (ie. a selective and moderate alcohol consumption) others increasingly becoming supporters of teetotalism, that is abstaining from all alcohol consumption, and still others going as far as prohibitionism, that is the banning of all production and sale of alcoholic drink.

In the Victorian period and well into the 20th century this now almost forgotten crusade against alcohol was a mass movement which had a great influence on politics. Christian groups continued to wage the campaign against the ‘demon drink’, greatly strengthened when the Salvation Army arrived in Scotland in 1879, with its lively open-air meetings and anti-alcohol message. But many other organisations rejected the simplistic view of drink causing poverty and argued rather that it was the other way round. The exploited working man had no hope and no escape except into drunkenness, and tackling poverty would lead to more success in combating alcohol abuse.

Movements such as the Independent Order of Rechabites waged temperance campaigns accompanied by the whole paraphernalia of uniforms and regalia that would provide colour in dull lives. The Rechabites were also a Friendly Society in the pre-welfare-state days, offering care for sickness and other benefits to those who practised temperance, and the loss of these if members lapsed. The Good Templars was another organisation which combined friendly society benefits with ritual and colour often inspired by Freemasonry, along with social activities and outings. It soon had a Scottish membership of 80,000, including one branch in Airdrie boasting over 4,000 members. The Band of Hope was an abstinence organisation, this time aimed at children and set up by William Quarrier, who established orphan homes.

The combined pressure of all these organisations began to bear legislative fruit. In 1853 a Licensing Act closed pubs on Sundays and at 11pm on weekdays, and the increasing power of the anti-drink lobby meant that it became difficult to get new licences. Women and children were also selectively banned from public houses. In Glasgow by the later 19th century under a succession of provosts including William Collins Jnr, alcohol was forbidden on council premises – a ban that lasted until 1960, and Collins made it clear that had the law of the land allowed, he would have introduced prohibition in Glasgow. This pressure reached its culmination in 1913 when the Temperance (Scotland) Act became law, allowing for local plebiscites on the sale of alcohol. In the 1920s over 40 areas in Scotland voted to become ‘dry’ – but as these were mainly middle-class residential areas, the effect was limited.

Initially many working-class reformers and trades unionists opposed the temperance movement as middle-class busybodies. But as the 19th century progressed the Labour movement more and more adopted the crusaders’ message against drink, which its leaders saw, not as the cause of working-class poverty, but as something which made it worse – and whose effects made working men less able to hear the socialist message of hope. Thus many of the early leaders of the Labour movement in Scotland such as Keir Hardie and John Maclean, were teetotal. The Co-operative movement – where working-class womens’ influence was strong – was especially down on drink, and it was not until 1958 that any of the branches of the SCWS were permitted to sell alcohol.

This alliance between Labour and temperance had a dramatic outcome in Dundee, where the radical socialist and prohibitionist Edwin Scrymgeour was elected to parliament in 1922 – beating Winston Churchill. While the men of Dundee might have been voting for Scrymgeour’s firebrand socialism, the women were supporting him for his plans to outlaw the manufacture of alcohol altogether; and alcohol for the working man still meant largely whisky in those days. Scrymgeour introduced his Prohibitionist Bill to parliament in 1923 where it failed by 335 to 14.

The failure of this one attempt to introduce prohibition into Britain was soon followed by its introduction into the United States of America. The disastrous consequences of this measure, with its massive increase in racketeering and its limited effect on alcohol consumption, meant that the ideas of prohibition were discredited, and the issue dropped from the political agenda. Trying to prohibit the production of alcohol is today seen as a hopeless cause, and, while individuals might themselves ‘Take the Pledge’, few of them nowadays would hope to persuade the majority of their fellows to do the same. Ironically though, today’s ‘sensible drinking’ mantra is quite close to that of the early temperance reformers, before they moved towards their less tolerant teetotal and prohibitionist positions.

8 Lewis Whisky and the Case of the Illicit Still

AT ABHAINN DEARG by Uig Bay on the Isle of Lewis, which location I personally hold to be the most beautiful place on earth, there was recently established the first legal distillery to operate on the Isle of Lewis for at least a century and a half. In a former fish-bait shed the ‘Spirit of Lewis’ is lovingly produced from local barley. What the distillery’s owners did not anticipate was that the enthusiasm for their enterprise would extend so far as to their finding an illicit still from the 1950s dumped outside the shed one morning, donated anonymously by someone who clearly wanted their project to succeed.

The brief Lewis experiment with legal whisky distilling had ended by the 1860s, but that illicit still is ‘proof ’ that the island’s distilling tradition had carried on many years after most people had assumed it had vanished. The distillation of spirits has as long a history in the Outer Isles as it does elsewhere in Scotland. When Martin Martin visited Lewis in about 1695, he commented:

Martin added that, ‘The trestarig and usquebaugh-baul are both made of oats’ and the use of oats for distilling is confirmed by the Revd JL Buchanan who visited Lewis a century later and noted that oats and not barley was the favoured grain. However by the mid-18th century natural selection had ‘created’ whisky as we now know it, as opposed to the various other spirits and cordials, and barley was being used for whisky distillation in Lewis just as elsewhere. The drink’s popularity grew amongst the townspeople of Stornoway, whose richer inhabitants were reported to be partly paying their maidservants’ wages in whisky – at the rate of a wine glass each morning! Its popularity also began to replace that of ale amongst the country people, but the main reason for domestic distillation was not the legally permitted one of personal consumption, but that of ‘paying’ the rent.

In the century before 1840, the main method a Lewis peasant had of getting money to pay his rent was to convert a part of his crop to whisky, sell it, and hand the money gained over to the landlord. In 1833 the minister of Stornoway Parish stated in the
New Statistical Account
that,