Whisky
Page 1
WHISKY
FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXX
BY THE PORPOISE PRESS, EDINBURGH
THIS EDITION PUBLISHED IN MMXVI
BY BIRLINN
10 NEWINGTON ROAD, EDINBURGH EH9 1 QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
PICTURE CREDITS
The author and publisher extend their grateful thanks to the following individuals and companies who have kindly provided period images for this edition. All copyrights are acknowledged. Facing page i Family Album of the late Mrs Anne Ettlinger. Facing page xviii, 52, 60, 65, 86, 91, 98, 111 Private Collection. Pages 6, 15, 71, 145 James & Linda Brown. Pages 7, 146 John Dewar & Sons Ltd. Page 33 The Kennetpans Trust. Pages 49, 95 Diageo plc Archive. Page 134—Old Matthew Giuseppe Begnoni, Whisky Paradise. Page 134—Abbot’s Choice & Crawford’s Sukhinder Singh Private Collection.
Page 143 Morrison Bowmore Distillers Ltd.
A NOTE ON THE COPYRIGHT
George Malcolm Thomson lived until May 1996 and thus copyright on the text of Whisky extends until December 2066. On his death the copyright passed to his daughter Mrs Anne Ettlinger, who on her death in May 2014 bequeathed it to Ian Buxton, the present copyright holder. Copyright in all Thomson’s other works remains with the family.
Main text, Appreciation, commentary and annotations
© Ian Buxton, 2016.
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978 1 78027 421 8
eISBN 978 0 85790 338 9
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record of this book is available on request from the British Library.
DESIGNED BY
Jules Akel
PRINTED BY
Livonia Print, Latvia
CONTENTS
AENEAS MACDONALD’S WHISKY—AN APPRECIATION
I. THE NATURE OF WHISKY
II. HISTORY
III. MAKING AND BLENDING
IV. GEOGRAPHY
V. JUDGING, PURCHASE, AND CARE
What sort of hivven’s delight is this you’ve invented for all souls in glory?
C.E. Montague
Sages their solemn een may steek,
An’ raise a philosophic reek,
An’ physically causes seek,
In clime an’ season ;
But tell me whisky’s name in Greek,
I’ll tell the Reason.
Robert Burns
George Malcolm Thomson
AENEAS MACDONALD’S
WHISKY
AN APPRECIATION
Ian Buxton
A TIMELESS CLASSIC
I NEVER MET Aeneas MacDonald, though I could and should have. The author was in fact alive and well when I first encountered this little book, but as it had been published in 1930 and his name never appeared in print again I simply assumed—if I thought about it at all—that he was dead. That’s what we all thought.
Secondly, there never really was an Aeneas MacDonald.
‘But why should I read this book?’ you ask. ‘It’s nearly ninety years old—why bother?’
It’s not an unreasonable question: by a conservative estimate there are considerably more than two hundred books about, or mainly about, whisky, and new works are added at an ever increasing pace—a dozen or more in the last year alone. You may well feel that the world doesn’t need any more books about whisky, and you could be right. Yet this was arguably the first. Doesn’t that pique your curiosity?
Yes, despite the fact that the first written record of Scotch whisky may be found as long ago as 1494 and distilling is described in the sixth century by the Welsh bard Taliesin, apparently (extraordinary omission) no one thought it of sufficient interest or importance to its drinkers to write on their behalf until 1930 when this slim volume appeared. Whisky’s slow renaissance began with its publication.
So for this alone Aeneas MacDonald deserves your attention, your respect and your time.
But there’s more. MacDonald still speaks to us today: his sense of what it means to be Scottish; of why whisky, especially good whisky, matters; and on how, when and why to drink whisky he is a sure-footed and certain guide. And, at its simplest, this is also a damn good read: with glass and bottle at your side you will look with new enjoyment on your dram and dawning respect at a text that, yes, is approaching its ninetieth year but remains as fresh as a new-drawn cask sample: bright, sparkling and full of rich promise.
In fact, given today’s near obsessive interest in the subject, and the acknowledged importance of whisky to the Scottish psyche, national identity and economy, it seems quite remarkable that we should have waited so long for MacDonald. As he says, ‘whisky drinkers are not yet mere soakers, in spite of the scant attention paid to their enlightenment by the trade’ yet, until his work, the industry was a closed book to all but the insider. Thus, every subsequent writer on whisky, and every considered drinker, is in his debt.
THE MYSTERIOUS AUTHOR
But who was this Aeneas MacDonald? His name does not appear again and he would seem to have fallen silent after this single work, published initially by Edinburgh’s Porpoise Press.
The answer is a curious one, for ‘Aeneas MacDonald’ was the pseudonym of a very much more prolific and long-lived Scot, who adopted a nom de plume for just this one volume. He was, in fact, George Malcolm Thomson, a Leither by birth (yet one who claimed Edinburgh as his spiritual home), Dux of Daniel Stewart’s College and, after brief service as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Great War, a graduate of Edinburgh University.
Born in August 1899, Thomson had established the Porpoise Press in 1922 in partnership with his university friend Roderick Kerr and one John Gould, a sleeping partner whose investment of £5 made up the firm’s initial capital of £20. Gould parted company with the Porpoise Press, apparently amicably, in 1925.
However limited its assets, its aims were rather more ambitious: ‘a serious though modest effort to create a publishing house in Scotland of distinction for original work’. This bold manifesto was eagerly taken up by the Scottish press, the Scots Pictorial commenting favourably:
Everyday it is being borne more forcibly upon our minds that there is a great need for a Scottish literary and publishing centre such as the founders of the Porpoise Press are endeavouring to establish. For there are young literary men in Scotland whose work is known only to a small circle, because there is no proper medium by which it may be introduced to the larger public which may be eager to know it.
By 1930 the Porpoise Press had issued some forty-eight titles, mostly original poems and novels by Scottish authors including George Blake, Eric Linklater, Hugh MacDiarmid and Neil Gunn. Thomson himself had contributed two titles at this point: the broadsheet An Epistle to Roderick Watson Kerr (as Kerr had left Edinburgh to take up a position on the Liverpool Daily Post) and a Porpoise Pamphlet titled Will the Scottish Church Survive?
Thomson, by then an active journalist and author, had also written two other more significant works: Caledonia, or the Future of the Scots and The Rediscovery of Scotland, both through the London publishers Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. in 1928. The same publisher brought out his A Short History of Scotland in 1930.
WILL THE REAL GEORGE THOMSON, PLEASE, STAND UP?
The two earlier books on the economic condition of Scotland and his articles and broadcasts on BBC radio had attracted the attention of Lord Beaverbrook and, by 1930, Thomson had moved permanently to London to work first for the Evening Standard and subsequently across Beaverbrook’s empire.
But in acknowledging the Thomson of the 1920s and 1930s as Aeneas MacDonald we are obliged to confront a problem: in both his early books on the Scottish economy and political situation he displays an ugly and bigoted attitude to Scotland’s Irish-Catholic population that is blatantly racist. While nothing of t
his, mercifully, creeps into Whisky and, later in life, Thomson disavowed these views and claimed to regret them they have understandably and rightly sullied his reputation, and, so far as he is remembered at all in pre-war Scottish political life it is as the unacceptable face of a failed strain of proto-nationalism. It is a sorry legacy and a stain on his character that cannot be denied.
However, I believe that in the course of his long life we can discern three distinct George Malcolm Thomsons.
Before the war we find a passionate and angry young man, disenchanted by much in Scottish life and determined, through the creation of the Porpoise Press and, less admirably, through crude populist journalism of a deplorable kind, to change the direction of his country. At this time he was that strange beast: a nationalist who also favoured the Union with England and worked, sometimes overtly and sometimes behind the scenes, to influence the nascent movement for Scottish nationalism to accept home rule within the context of unionism. He also sought to improve Scotland’s social and economic conditions and, seen in that light, much of his early work is prophetic and a valuable record of pre-war Scotland. But he was mistaken in his analysis of the impact of Irish-Catholic immigration and, even when this was pointed out by contemporaries, he held stubbornly to a prejudiced and intolerant set of attitudes.
By 1935 he appears to have matured and mellowed somewhat, perhaps influenced by life in London. His last pre-war book, Scotland: That Distressed Area, is more thoughtful, measured and balanced. It was well received at the time and went some way to restoring his reputation with contemporaries. If this work had been all he had written on the subject his name would be more highly regarded but, for all that he was not alone in his views on Irish immigration and Catholicism, the earlier bigotry remains an unsavoury episode and an uncomfortable reminder of a febrile time.
After the publication of this latter book his life moved to a new phase. Though he did not disagree with either Thomson’s views or his analysis, Lord Beaverbrook was apparently unhappy about its publication, and his employer took the view that Thomson’s talents should be reserved for the columns of his newspapers. Thomson was required to sign a new contract to that effect and from that date until he retired he did not publish anything in book form under his own name or any pseudonym.
Thomson enjoyed a long and successful career in journalism, interrupted only by work as one of Beaverbrook’s closest advisers in various wartime ministries. He was regarded as one of Beaverbrook’s closest, most long-standing and most trusted aides. Conducted largely in anonymity, this was an important part of his life and work but it was simply a precursor to the third phase of his work in which we see the mature Thomson working at full power until late in life.
His long retirement saw a burst of energy and creativity, with some dozen books, mostly well-regarded political commentaries and historical biographies and one novel, with a Jacobite theme, The Ball at Glenkerran (1982). After the passionate young Scot came the considered and professional journalist, carefully and discreetly serving his employer’s wishes (and on occasion directing his thoughts). This Thomson was to be followed by the prolific and successful author and amateur historian, and perhaps this is the closest that we come to seeing the real Thomson. It is, I imagine, how he would like to be remembered.
Having modestly declined a decoration for his wartime service and after a distinguished career in journalism, George Malcolm Thomson was appointed OBE in 1990 for services to literature (‘I thought they had forgotten me’, he observed). He died in May 1996, aged ninety-six. A Scot through and through, he remained in London until his death.
WHO WAS AENEAS MACDONALD?
As a young man, Thomson studied both history and English literature at Edinburgh University. Perhaps it is here that we find the roots of his life-long fascination with Jacobitism and his strong sense of national identity. Certainly the nationalist tone of the Porpoise Press fitted with the growing resurgence of native pride and a distinctive sense of a Scottish identity, as well as the acceptance of youthful ideas prevalent in intellectual circles after the First World War, as the writers of the Kailyard were pushed aside in favour of an increasingly self-conscious Scottish Renaissance.
Christopher M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) abandoned self-publishing and Neil Gunn moved from Jonathan Cape to the Porpoise Press in acknowledgement of its overtly ‘consciousness of Scottishness’, as George Blake expressed the zeitgeist. George Malcolm Thomson’s significance in all of this is for ever immortalised by Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s dedication to Thomson of his novella Cloud Howe (the middle part of the Scots Quair trilogy).
But why adopt a pseudonym in the first place? The question is easily answered: Thomson’s parents were strictly teetotal, and anonymity was necessary to avoid distressing his mother who felt particularly strongly on the subject as a consequence of her religious beliefs and work with the poor of Leith.
This, at least, is the explanation given by Alistair McCleery, who interviewed Thomson in August 1983 for a history of the Porpoise Press. Thomson himself, in private correspondence with Neil Gunn in November 1930, wrote:
Please keep my name out of ‘Whisky’ if you don’t mind … I have private reasons—and should hate people to think the P.P. existed to publish me alone.
Shortly afterwards he wrote again to Gunn:
My mother is coming down & as she is an ardent T.T. (Good God!). I am having my little dinner on Thursday 22nd in the Norwegian Club where the wine is good and abundant. You had better meet my wife, child & mother for tea!!
(‘For tea’ is heavily underscored in the manuscript.)
Strangely, despite the evidence of the correspondence, his recent biographer George McKechnie thinks this unlikely. In fact there may have been several motives for his adoption of a pseudonym, including reaction to his earlier Caledonia, or the Future of the Scots. Published in 1928, this attracted a certain controversy, with Thomson described as ‘the best-hated man in Scotland’ (though this extravagant description may have owed something to an enthusiastic publisher aware of the value of controversy).
This book, and its immediate and more fully developed sequel, The Re-Discovery of Scotland, show Thomson disillusioned with Scotland and all its works. With their discredited and shameful attacks on Irish immigrants and the Catholic faith both are hard to read. Caledonia, indeed, is little more than a diatribe: passionate and forceful at its best, it is hard to avoid seeing in it the disappointment of a young man whose ambitious plans for the Porpoise Press had been dashed by the provincial Philistinism of dour Edinburgh (a city he found ‘dominated socially by a caste of sport-talking lawyers, doctors and insurance officials’—The Re-Discovery of Scotland).
Certainly his thoughts were already turning to London by 1928 and, with sentiments such as ‘(Scotland) is a land of second-hand thoughts and second-rate minds’, he was unlikely to win friends at home. There will have been many who heartily wished this brash young man on the first train to King’s Cross.
Is it fanciful, therefore, to attribute a wish to avoid associating the opprobrium then attaching to the Thomson name to Whisky or, indeed, the Porpoise Press itself? These were sensitive times in the life of the venture: in recognition of the partners’ burgeoning careers, largely out of Scotland, the house was being sold to Faber & Faber, and it may have been thought prudent to avoid courting unnecessary controversy.
Certainly this was a bitter pill for Thomson—much space in his two earlier books is given over to castigating a lack of domestic industry and the dominance of England in Scottish life. To have to relinquish the Porpoise Press to a London house must have seemed a betrayal.
However, as late as April 1930, he still harboured ambitions for the Porpoise Press, even under new ownership. Attempting to recruit Neil Gunn as an author, he wrote:
the books will make Scotland take us seriously but the pamphlets … will fill a gap in a Scotland which has no serious press.
Be that as it may, the name Aeneas MacDonald would have meant m
ore—indeed would have been richly symbolic—to Thomson’s contemporaries, especially those with strong nationalist leanings. A pseudonym is not casually chosen. In adopting this identity Thomson tells us something of himself: a Jacobite, a believer in lost causes, a patriot and also a survivor.
For the original Aeneas MacDonald played a small but pivotal role in one of the most romanticised yet blood-soaked episodes in Scottish history: the ’45, a venture as ill-considered as it was daring. He was one of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s ‘Seven Men of Moidart’— the Parisian exiles who sailed from Nantes in July 1745 with Prince Charles Edward Stuart to raise his standard at Glenfinnan. More potent yet for this association, the Jacobite party first landed in Scotland on the island of Eriskay on 2 August 1745—Thomson’s own birth date 154 years later and a link of which he was no doubt keenly aware from an early age.
MacDonald had two roles in the expedition: intending to go to Scotland on his own business affairs, he was persuaded to accompany Charles in order to win over his brother Donald of Kinlochmoidart and his many relatives and, more famously, he became the expedition’s banker. However, despite Prince Charles Edward Stuart lodging at MacDonald’s home in Paris, he was a reluctant convert to Charles’ cause, and energetic pleading was required to gain his support.
Distrusted and insulted by the ferocious Highland clan chieftains, MacDonald nonetheless followed ‘Charlie’ to the bitter end. However, luckily for him, he did not stand at Culloden; expecting a consignment of Spanish gold he was in Barra to collect this as the Duke of Cumberland directed the butchery.
Later he was captured, and stood trial for High Treason in Southwark in December 1747, where he was found guilty. The jury’s recommendation for mercy being ignored, he was condemned to death but pardoned and released, whereupon he returned to France.
In dressing in Jacobite clothing then, Thomson consciously takes on an identity entirely sympathetic to his own Scottish Renaissance, and there are more than passing references to the ’45 in MacDonald’s text: