Whisky

by Aeneas MacDonald

  Whisky found an honoured place in the commissariat of the Jacobite armies. It gave spirit and endurance to Montrose’s men on those marvellous marches with which they confounded the hosts of the Covenant; it comforted the kilted soldiery on the mad memorable raid on Derby in 1745 and ministered to the Prince himself when he was a hunted man.

  And, again, later in Chapter Two:

  Now dawned the heroic age of whisky, when it was hunted upon the mountains with a price on its head as if it were a Stuart prince …

  Yet it is hard, indeed impossible, to reconcile this choice of identity with his virulently anti-Catholic writings of this period. It seems improbable that Thomson the propagandist and advocate of home rule within the Union would have readily accepted a Catholic absolutist monarchy. For me it marks the romantic in the man and his ability apparently to reconcile two essentially contradictory opinions.

  STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS: MACDONALD’S SOURCES AND INFLUENCES

  Whisky has clearly been written at speed, and whisky itself is a metaphor for the wider condition of Scotland which, as we have seen, greatly concerned the young author. It is a journalist’s book, and a whisky snob’s book.

  There is no real evidence that he visited distilleries or spoke to distillers and, of course, there was relatively little source material available to him. But he felt that whisky mattered and wanted to make this case as part of his wider commentary on Scotland. He evidently saw the decline in interest and knowledge of whisky as symptomatic of the wider decline of Scotland—‘the decline of whisky as a civilised pleasure is linked with the decay of taste in Scotland’.

  As it turns out he was as wrong about the long-term future of whisky as he was about Irish Catholicism. Ironically remembered for a book he would have considered slight, it’s a further irony that the very blends he deplores eventually came to save the single malts that he celebrates so passionately. Without blending, many more distilleries would have been closed and their whisky lost for ever.

  But he does exhibit some considerable knowledge of the industry, so where did he acquire this? A close reading of the text, and comparison with other earlier books (albeit for a specialist trade audience), leads me to suggest that he had two major sources, though strangely he does not seem particularly aware of Alfred Barnard’s work The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kıngdom (1887) which is so highly regarded today.

  His major influences appear to have been T.F. Henderson’s Old-World Scotland; Glimpses of Its Modes and Manners (1893) where he draws on the chapter on Usquebagh and more importantly J.A. Nettleton’s 1913 work The Manufacture of Whisky and Plain Spirit. This is a lengthy and somewhat dry technical work but concludes with a thirty-page chapter ‘What is Whisky?’ which includes Nettleton’s thoughts on the work and recommendations of the 1908/09 Royal Commission on Whiskey. It is well worth reading in its own right. Suffice to say here that Nettleton was not impressed, and MacDonald follows Nettleton’s line of passionate disappointment very closely.

  Professor George Saintsbury’s Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920) has also clearly been studied carefully, though a mere eight pages in a work of near two hundred are devoted to whisky (we devoutly wish for more from Saintsbury but he is silent). However, there is a tantalising link to this esteemed Grand Old Man of Letters: as the long-serving Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, later Emeritus Professor, he was well known to (and may even have lectured) the two friends who founded the Porpoise Press.

  Kerr and Thomson approached him, then aged eighty, in 1922 for an essay for the fledgling Porpoise Press but were declined. Notes on a Cellar-Book had already enjoyed some success—is it fanciful to imagine him serving his young admirers a glass, or even exciting their youthful imaginations with daring talk of a whole volume on whisky?

  Certainly, MacDonald stands in awe of his old professor, describing him as ‘patriarchal’, one who has ‘not succumbed to the degeneracy of the age’, and quoting with reverence Saintsbury’s views on grain whisky (‘only good for blending, or for mere “drinkers for drunkee”’). Later, Saintsbury is repeatedly invoked as an authority beyond reproach.

  The book begins and ends with with a quotation from Another Temple Gone, a short story by C.E. Montague. Though all but forgotten today, Montague was sufficiently highly thought of in 1923 to be published by Chatto & Windus in a series alongside Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, Arnold Bennett, Hilaire Belloc, A.A. Milne, Clive Bell and Roger Fry—illustrious company indeed and Another Temple Gone remains a delightful read.

  Other influences are apparent throughout the text and, though there will no doubt be several that I have missed or failed to trace, I have attempted to illustrate these in the annotations.

  THE CONDITION OF WHISKY IN 1930

  In part, Whisky is a gloomy read, full of pessimism and the lost glories of a bygone age albeit one that existed more in MacDonald’s imagination than historical fact. But what was the condition of whisky in 1930?

  The date is all the more significant, nay extraordinary, when we consider the distressed state of the industry. The name of Pattison’s still echoed ominously. This Leith and Edinburgh concern had driven ten other distillers into receivership, blackened the whole name of blending, and indirectly led to a Royal Commission on Whiskey following exposure at their criminal trial of the nefarious practices of their infamous blending vat.

  The Pattison brothers may have been in jail by 1901, but their malign influence cast a long and dark shadow. Then, scarcely recovered from the Pattison’s blending scandal and subsequent crash, Scotch whisky faced the triple challenges of the Great War, the Great Depression and Prohibition in the U.S.A., its most important market.

  Between the beginning of the century and 1930, when this little book was published, some fifty single malt distilleries were closed, many permanently (save but one was opened). The industry in Campbeltown, once the most prosperous in the country, teetered on the brink of extinction. Whisky, today such an icon of national identity, was then in unparalleled crisis.

  The Pattison brothers were indeed part of ‘A Big Boom’ which for them was to end in bankruptcy and imprisonment.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Before turning to Whisky’s continued cultural significance and contemporary importance, book collectors may appreciate a note on its somewhat tangled publishing history.

  There have been five editions, though only two are generally known.

  The original is the first U.K. edition, published by the Porpoise Press of Edinburgh in 1930. As described above, MacDonald/Thomson was one of the founders of the Porpoise Press but, by 1930, it had been largely transferred to Faber & Faber and this first edition was published under the supervision of George Blake and Frank V. Morley of Faber & Faber. Printing was by Robert Maclehose & Co. at The University Press, Glasgow, and the first in a long succession of Porpoise Press titles to be produced there.

  Whisky was published in an edition of 1,600—large by Porpoise Press standards, with a blue linen cover, paper title-slip on the spine and an attractive two-colour jacket. This, with the character affectionately known as the ‘Cask Boy’ or ‘Tipsy’ to his friends, was drawn by A.E. Taylor, who also contributed the distillery map. (Taylor also illustrated works by William Cobbett, A.A. Milne and others.)

  The same character also appears, but in monotone, on the dust jacket of the 1934 first American printing, published by Duffield & Green of New York on 25th January that year. The cover is brown linen, with gold lettering stamped on the spine for title, author and publisher, together with a decorative thistle. While the dust jacket illustration is the same, the plates appear worn, and some of the finer detail has been lost; A.E. Taylor’s initials and the date ‘30’ have been removed from the illustration and the advertisements for other Scottish fiction on the rear of the jacket have been dropped.

  This edition was also printed by Robert Maclehose & Co. at The University Press, Glasgow, and appears to be internally identi
cal to the U.K. version, with the exception of the distillery map. This has been simplified and redrawn with many of A.E. Taylor’s more artistic embellishments such as the fish, galleons in full sail and tiny sketches of bewhiskered kilted shepherds enjoying a dram removed. While much of the charm of the map is accordingly lost it must be conceded that it is now rather easier to read!

  Judging by the comparative ease with which it is possible to find copies of the American edition, the print run was greater. With the ending of Prohibition in December 1933, interest in drinks in the U.S.A. was very high, and, despite the recessionary times, it seems that Duffield & Green were persuaded to risk a larger number of copies.

  In 1953 Thomson declined a proposal from the Grove Press of New York for a new edition on the grounds that the text then required too extensive a revision. His identity remained a mystery.

  However, there is a further and very rare third edition which is of particular interest to both whisky enthusiasts and collectors of American literature: the Briefcase Breviary (December 1930) by Henry & Longwell of Garden City, Long Island.

  Frank Henry and Daniel Longwell were employees of the publishers Doubleday, who had offices and a printing plant in Garden City. One of Doubleday’s most renowned authors was Christopher Morley, eldest son of Frank Morley, an eminent Anglo-American Professor of Mathematics and the elder brother of Frank V. Morley, the director of Faber & Faber mentioned earlier.

  Christopher Morley was a distinguished American journalist, novelist and poet with more than fifty books of poetry and novels to his credit, including the best-selling Kıtty Foyle (1939), which was made into an Academy Award-winning film (Ginger Rogers for Best Actress; the film also enjoyed two further nominations). Known for his habit of carrying a briefcase stuffed full of books, Morley collaborated between 1928 and 1931 with Henry and Longwell to create their own imprint, designed to issue limited editions of slim volumes they considered interesting, largely for their friends. In mock salutation to Morley’s briefcase, these were known as ‘Briefcase Breviaries’ and were published by the ‘firm’ of Henry & Longwell.

  The edition is bound in yellow boards, with a device resembling a shark’s fin in black repeated across the cover. Produced on high-quality laid paper, with a page size of 5½ by 8 inches, a total of 307 copies were printed. Each copy is individually hand-numbered and signed by the four protagonists immediately following the title page.

  Whereas Henry, Longwell and Morley’s signatures appear confident and flowing, that of Aeneas MacDonald is more tentative and formal. On all the copies I have verified the signature clearly reads ‘McDonald’—a mistake unlikely to have been made by someone signing their own chosen alias and moreover a particularly improbable error for a passionate Scot. Did Thomson actually sign these copies or, as now seems more probable, did an American amanuensis perform this duty? If so, some minor literary subterfuge has just been uncovered.

  I have been able to firmly locate fewer than thirty copies of this Henry & Longwell edition with certainty (it appears occasionally in the catalogues of American antiquarian booksellers, though the price has risen substantially in recent years). Delightfully, copy number one remains in Christopher Morley’s library at the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Of the surviving copies, many are inscribed by Morley to the recipient. This, and the fact that Morley, not the author, retained the first numbered copy speaks eloquently of Morley’s role in this little adventure and his enthusiasm for the book itself.

  His place in the story of Whisky does not end there. In February 1934 in the Saturday Review of Literature, he ‘puffed’ the American launch in the following terms: ‘Duffield & Green have published in full Aeneas MacDonald’s admirable little panegyric on Whisky, one chapter of which was once privately issued under the furtive imprint of Henry and Longwell … “Aeneas MacDonald” is an alias of a well-known Scottish writer whose other works are of an ecclesiastical nature.’

  The reference to MacDonald as an ‘ecclesiastical’ writer is an in-joke by Morley for those literary friends who shared the secret, a droll reference to Thomson’s Porpoise Pamphlet Will the Scottish Church Survive? and the intense discussion of Scottish religious life in his earlier published works.

  It conveniently also served to throw others off the scent—successfully, as the true authorship has never been widely known. Ingenious attributions include Archie MacDonnell, Scottish humourist and author of England, Their England (with its introduction by Christopher Morley). However, the link with Morley is a plausible connection, and, at the very least, the initials work and the putative author is a distinguished Scot of letters!

  Morley’s was not the only review. The New York Tımes of 4th February 1934 contained a long and generous notice by Edward M. Kingsbury (himself a 1926 Pulitzer prizewinner). It is headlined ‘A Great, Potent, Princely Drink’ (alluding to MacDonald’s opening paragraph) and subtitled ‘Mr Aeneas MacDonald’s Golden Treasury of Whisky Lore is Airy, Witty, Full of Sound Knowledge and Touched With Poetry’.

  Kingsbury quotes extensively from the text and, in rapturously praising the work, describes Aeneas MacDonald as follows:

  The author of this little poem, essay, history, geography, treatise and manual is admirably named as well as fitted for this task of love. The Highlands speak to him. Like his Roman predecessor, he brings back the old pieties and gods. There is something epic as well as georgic in his strain.

  He goes on to applaud MacDonald’s ‘subtle imagination’, commends many of MacDonald’s remarks ‘to our own distillers’ (i.e. the American producers of bourbon and rye) and concludes: ‘This is a small volume, but there are plenty of those who will love it. It is airy, witty, full of sound knowledge and practical wisdom.’

  Similarly, George Currie reviewing for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle suggested that ‘It should be savored leisurely, rather than gulped’. Sound advice.

  Christopher Morley, Neil Gunn and Edward Kings-bury were not the only contemporaries to appreciate the book. The poet T.S. Eliot gave a copy to his close friend and mentor Harold Monro, of the Poetry Bookshop, inscribing it personally.

  A lengthy hiatus followed the 1933 American edition until I was able to persuade Edinburgh’s Canongate Books to issue a facsimile edition in October 2006. This fourth and final public edition is now out of print.

  Finally, the distillers John Dewar & Sons produced their own strictly limited facsimile edition in 2012 for private circulation. However, the edition you now hold is the first to be illustrated with period material and provided with annotations intended to be helpful to the twenty-first century reader.

  TODAY’S RELEVANCE AND APPEAL

  We have established that contemporary reaction was favourable, even if further editions did not appear immediately. But what is this to us? The world of whisky is very different from 1930. Ownerships have changed along with distilling practice—today less than one-quarter of the Scotch whisky distilling industry remains in Scottish ownership, something that MacDonald would doubtless deplore and see as further evidence of Scotland’s decline.

  But, despite this gloomy statistic, whisky has staged a recovery that would have amazed MacDonald. Publications on whisky abound. What can Mr Aeneas MacDonald’s Golden Treasury offer us today? Poetry, for one thing. Too many of today’s whisky books are little more than lists: handsomely produced, well illustrated and comprehensive to a fault but with the soul of a draper’s catalogue. Others might be mistaken for material straight from the distillers’ own well-funded publicity machine, and a third category distributes marks out of a hundred to Glen This, Glen That and Glen The Other with the mechanical certainty of a drab provincial accountant.

  Why any one ‘expert’ should be relied upon any more than the distiller’s puff escapes me: in MacDonald’s philosophy the enthusiastic drinker should learn and, thus informed, judge whisky for himself with ‘his mother-wit, his nose and his palate to guide him’. Wise words.

  We may list the faults
in MacDonald, but he never once lacks for poetry. A love of whisky permeates his soul. Time is transcended by passages of lyrical beauty, and we are transfixed by the soaring spirit and graceful imagination of a true acolyte. Written in haste, sorrow and righteous anger, Whisky is simply a joy to read.

  But we live in an age of league tables and cost-benefit analysis, where passion is distrusted and spreadsheets thought to contain the very secrets of our universe. Surely, in a world where an inventory of mash tun capacities passes for an initiation into the sacred mysteries of the still, MacDonald has nothing to teach us? What, you may ask, can I learn from this book?

  Reader, take courage, for if utility is all you seek there is value still in these pages. Here, for example, we will find the first practical instruction in nosing and tasting whisky, MacDonald’s guidelines for which, even including the selection of glassware, are reliable to this day.

  In these pages, long-lost distilleries are brought to life and their merits discussed: the student will find much of value in the description of Islay and, even more poignant, Campbeltown whiskies. MacDonald’s description of the Campbeltowns as ‘the double basses of the whisky orchestra’ is still quoted today and remains the classic descriptor of these ‘potent, full-bodied, pungent whiskies’. How we now slaver for these lost glories! What the student of the cratur would not give to taste Rieclachan, Glenside or Benmore in their pomp!

  He reminds us, too, that whisky has changed. ‘The convenient proximity of a peat bog is an economic necessity for a Highland malt distillery’ is not a sentence that could, in truth, be written today, and, in its very matter-of-factness, speaks volumes of the change in the taste of our drams. So, too, the thought that Highland malts will have the effect on men leading a sedentary life of making them liverish.

  This particular myth—that malt whisky is too demanding for the effete office worker and demands the vigorous outdoor life of the Highlander of popular imagination—has passed into mythology. (We might note, en passant, that it sits curiously from one who lived by the pen for some seventy years.) It reappears as late as 1951 in Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart’s Scotch: The Whisky of Scotland in Fact and Story and S.H. Hastie’s From Burn to Bottle (published by the Scotch Whisky Association also 1951), and you may catch, from time to time, a faint echo repeated even today as a spurious endorsement of the ‘manly’ qualities of various single malts.