Wee Scotch Whisky Tales (7 page)

This was still frontier time in Southland, and the authorities could only make limited efforts to control illicit stills, of which there were many besides Mary’s. On one occasion officers came to her cabin and listened at the window to the conversation for clues – as the talk inside was all in Gaelic, they went away as mystified as when they had come. On another occasion the customs officers might have been more lucky, had Mary (now known as the
cailleach
) not sat down over a whisky barrel, covering it with her skirt and remaining seated while the exciseman made his search.

Mary died in 1911 at the ripe old age of 92, and she attributed her lifelong good health to a daily dose of her own dram. In the years after the First World War, however, the frontier epoch had passed away and the increasingly resourceful authorities took a more active role in eradicating illegal whisky distilling in Southland, where many stills, including Mary’s own, were still in operation. One law enforcement official said, ‘Southland is absolutely notorious for the distillation of whisky, which everyone knows had been carried on here for over fifty years.’

The first successful prosecution was in 1924, when Alex Chisholm and Alexander McRae were fined $200NZ (£100). Then in 1928 came the Awarua case, when another illicit still was found and smashed, and a similar fine imposed to the case four years previously. But the
cailleach
’s own still was still bubbling away merrily. One Duncan ‘Piper’ McRae (no relation) had married the
cailleach
’s daughter and he carried on the production of whisky with her still, which then passed through further generations of the family. By 1928 intermarriage had brought it into the hands of Duncan Stuart, who operated the still at Otapiri Gorge.

Stuart was producing on a large scale, and it was his main employment. According to the Customs Department, he was making 10 gallons of whisky a month, representing a loss in customs revenue of $1260 a year. Selling the whisky at $4 a gallon brought him $10 – the equivalent of £5 a week – a tidy income in the 1920s. A massive fine of $1000 and confiscation of the still meant an end to the life of the equipment which had operated in Southland for almost 60 years – and for an untold number of years in Kintail before that. However there was one more chapter in the Southland whisky saga before it became history.

One of the problems facing excisemen in Southland was the thick cover of bush. This meant that smoke from the stills became dispersed through the leaf canopy and difficult to spot. Knowing there were stills operating in the Dunsdale area of Southland, the exisemen came up with a novel idea – aerial surveillance, by which they might hope to discern the dispersing clouds of smoke.

John Smith was the instructor with Southland Aero Club, and the Collector of Customs chartered him and his Gypsy Moth in 1934 to overfly the bush around Dunsdale where another family of McRaes, William, father and son, were under suspicion. Now this family of McRaes had a reputation. Back in the 1890s John McRae, also a whiskymaker had been accused of murder in a very murky case involving whisky and women. Though he had been acquitted here was clearly a family not to meddle with. Smith later recalled how he earned his fee, but avoided any personal problems.

Eventually though, the excisemen found the still, which McRae had set up just outside his farm on Maori Reservation land. When challenged he said, ‘It if is outside my boundaries, I would not know anything about it.’ Indeed, the evidence against the McRaes was mainly circumstantial, and when brought to court they were discharged by the jury. The police however, wrecked the still and this was really the end of the 60 or more years of Hokonui hooch.

It is just a pity that visitors cannot taste it any more, as reports of consumers in the past testify to its excellence. ‘It was just like whisky’, said one witness at a court case asked to describe its taste, and what higher praise could there be?

¹
Worth around £2.5m today.

²
prunach
= splintered.

³
Preventive commander = gauger

⁴
Fudgie = cowardly

⁵
Yisk = hiccup

⁶
Extract from Mackenzie of Seaforth’s letter to the Treasury in 1824. In it he asked for permission to establish a distillery at Stornoway, in order to end what he called, ‘The wicked and disastrous system of vexation and fines, and all the frauds and oppression caused by the excise system, which the ignorance and prejudice of the poor wretched tenantry would never view in any other way, recollecting or acting upon the knowledge that
until a very short period, their landlord, by a very small pecuniary compromise with the Government, purchased for them a special immunity for carrying on illicit distillation, by farming the excise.’
(Italicised emphasis is the author’s). From Donald MacDonald,
Lewis
(2004 edn) p190. MacDonald states that ‘illicit distillation practically ceased’ in Lewis by the 1840s.

Ian R Mitchell has been a well-established writer of historical and mountaineering literature since the publication in 1987 of
Mountain Days and Bothy Nights
(co-authored with Dave Brown). This was followed by
A View from the Ridge
by the same authors which won the Boardman Tasker Award in 1991. His
Scotland’s Mountains before the Mountaineers
won the Outdoor Writers’ Guild Award for excellence in 1998, and his most recent work (co-authored with George Rodway) was the highly acclaimed 2011 biography of Himalayan pioneer Alexander Kellas,
Prelude to Everest
. Ian has mountaineered widely in both Europe and North America and his talks on his books and experiences have taken him to many Mountain Festivals on both sides of the Atlantic.

His former profession as a history teacher allowed him to cover other aspects of Scottish culture and he has contributed regularly to publications such as
The Scots Magazine
in which he has written about subjects such as whisky. This interest led him to compile
Wee Scotch Whisky Tales
.

First published by

an imprint of

Neil Wilson Publishing Ltd

www.nwp.co.uk

© Ian R Mitchell, 2015

The author asserts his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, as amended, to be identified as the Author of this Work.

All rights reserved

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-906000-79-0