Wee Scotch Whisky Tales (6 page)

Leaving the second part of the reverend gentleman’s assertion aside for the moment, the first is undoubtedly accurate, and confirmed by other accounts which all state that the distilling was small-scale, never attaining the commercial magnitude of operations taking place at the same time, for example, on mainland areas like Donside in Aberdeenshire.

The main reason for this would appear to be, possibly, not only the superior moral quality of the Lewis population, but simply, lack of opportunity. Even more so than in remote mainland Highland areas, the market available for mass-produced illicit whisky was just not there; the population of the whole of the Outer Isles in 1800 was less than 10,000, and the logistics of getting any large amounts of illegally produced whisky off the island and to distant customers was simply beyond the capability and probably even the imagination of the largely monoglot and un-entrepreneurial Gaelic peasants of Lewis, moral though they undoubtedly were.

The owners of Lewis at this time were the Mackenzies of Seaforth, who encouraged and supported this illegal distillation, as a means of ensuring their rents were paid. Not only that, they appear to have negotiated a deal with the excise that allowed Lewis crofters the right to produce and sell more than they personally consumed. In a letter to the treasury dated 1824 (a year after the total overhaul of the distilling legislation), Stewart Mackenzie protested that this right had been withdrawn, and the harassment of the distillation subsequently was making it difficult for the tenants to pay, and Mackenzie to collect, their rents.
⁶

The late 1820s saw an increase in the efforts of the excisemen, which met with growing success with the arrests of crofters in Back, Coll, Barvas Habost, South Lochs, Shawbost and South Bragar, along with subsequent fines and imprisonment. Crofters retreated from the moors to remote caves.
Gheodha Beuc
(Noisy Cave) at the Butt of Lewis and
Geodha Thogallaich
(Brewing Cave) in Tolsta became the last refuges of the distillers though even they were not safe from small boats set into the narrow inlets from the revenue cutters. The effect on living standards of the suppression of illicit distilling was outlined by the then estate factor John Munro Mackenzie in 1851, ‘ … when times changed and whisky could no longer be made, those who did not change their occupation and become fishermen are now very ill off.’

Out of this dilemma came the first experiment with legal distillation in Lewis. Stewart Mackenzie himself set up a legal distillery, buy his tenants’ surplus grain off them (receiving the money back as rent!) and then turn that peasant produce into a profitable distilling enterprise. Lewis had plenty of water, plenty of fuel (peat) and surplus barley ... it seemed a good idea at the time, and Mackenzie poured the considerable sum of £14,000 into the venture. By 1833 the minister at Stornoway could write that amongst the ‘modern’ buildings in the town:

The works were situated at the Shoe Burn which lies in the grounds of the present Lewis Castle. One Mr Macnee was engaged as the chief distiller and became a well-liked fellow in the town, earning the nickname Thomas Mhor. This might have been due to the size of the drams he dispensed to the townspeople and sailors who bought whisky at the distillery. He apparently was giving measures greater than they had paid for! Efforts were made to supply the Glasgow market with the product, and there was even some discussion of appointing a London agent, but most of the whisky appears to have met the local demand of townsfolk and passing sailors in Stornoway.

It is often stated, and was recently re-affirmed in the
Stornoway Gazette
, that the Shoeburn Distillery closed just before or just after the Mathesons bought Lewis in 1844. However a perusal of the diary of the estate chamberlain, or factor, John Munro Mackenzie, from 1851, shows that this was not the case, and in fact expansion appears to have been the keynote. In March 1851 he recorded his search along the Laxdale River with a view to ‘fixing the site of Mill dam and lead [lade] for Distillery’.

Construction duly commenced and by December Mackenzie was able to note with satisfaction that the work was complete and that he had, ‘Remained at the Distillery all day seeing the men paid & arranged various matters with foremen.’ One of the men he mentions being the abovementioned chief distiller Mr Macnee. It is this clear that Shoeburn Distillery continued in operation well into the 1850s, contrary to received opinion, and that Matheson, a convinced temperance advocate, continued to produce and profit from whisky distillation at Stornoway for at least a decade after he purchased the island. One source gives 1857 as the date Matheson demolished the works and replaced it with stables. Lewis was not to become another Islay … possibly that local market was just too small and Stornoway just too far away from larger centres of demand (though the Orkney distilleries of this period flourished) for Shoeburn to survive.

Matheson, the Christian evangelical teetotaller, had made his fortune supplying the Chinese market with opium from India and in the process turned a large proportion of China’s population into drug addicts; in addition it lead to that country’s bankruptcy. Matheson’s duplicitous nature was also shown in that while continuing to produce legal whisky, at the same time he tightened the screw against illicit distilling. His factor wrote clauses into tenants’ leases stipulating that the penalty for distillation of any kind was eviction.

Other factors possibly helped to strangle illicit distillation in Lewis. The island was fortunate – or unfortunate – in that the two excise revenue cutters which patrolled the whole Minch and Atlantic seaboards, pursuing smugglers and distillers, were based at Stornoway. Then there was the rise in the power of the Free Kirk from the 1840s on the island, which organisation would take a less latitudinarian approach to all things illicit – including illicit distilling – than their Church of Scotland predecessors, some of whom appear to have been involved in smuggling. (The Barvas minister was denounced to the gaugers in the 1790s for running an illicit still). Finally, given the small local demand and inability to meet the wider mainland demand, there was little financial incentive, but a great risk, in illicit distillation.

And so by 1850, the tradition of the illegal pot still had died out on Lewis. Maybe there was drinking going in the numberless moorland bothans for a century-and-a-half afterwards, but all due tax on the
craitur
imbibed had been paid … so goes the conventional wisdom. But then, where did that copper kettle left outside Abhainn Dearg come from? Rather than having given up illicit distillation, were the Lewis folk just smart enough to have avoided detection? The answer lies hidden in the trackless, misty moors of Eilean Fraoch.

9 The Last Distiller Had the Last Laugh

THOUGH DOUBTLESS THE odd sma’ still might yet be found in remote areas of the West Highlands, the last illicit distiller on a scale large enough to provide his main income must have been Hamish
Dhubh
Macrae of Monar, who retired from his calling a century ago. He and his father had outwitted the excisemen for over 60 years, and even in finally giving up his trade, Hamish had the last laugh.

Hamish’s father Alasdair and his wife had originally come to Loch Monar from Kintail in the 1840s. Monar is and was one of the remotest parts of the Scottish mainland, accessible only by drove roads and bridle paths. Alasdair built a house on an island at the western end of Loch Monar, and by having the ‘lum reekin’ before he was challenged, gained squatter’s rights. He also built a causeway to connect the little fortress to the mainland. But the fire in his house was not the only one Alasdair lit.

It seems that the Macraes had come deliberately to Monar to engage in the illicit production of whisky. Monar was 40 miles, and hard miles at that, from the nearest gauger’s office in Dingwall. Alasdair originally had bothies at a place called Cosaig at the lochside, but when he suffered the indignity of being arrested by the gaugers and taken to Dingwall for trial, he vowed never to be captured again, and to improve the concealment of his trade.

He rebuilt his stills high on the side of a mountain over-looking Loch Monar, called Meall Mor, and here Hamish his son was apprenticed to the trade by being posted with a spyglass to keep a lookout for the excisemen coming up the glen. On one occasion, when snow fell and Hamish did not want footsteps to reveal the location of the stills, he stayed for several cold and hungry days on the bothy, high on Meall Mor, until the snow melted.

Though Alasdair, and Hamish after him, grew a few potatoes and indulged in a spot of poaching his main income was from the whisky; the winter months were given over to distillation, and the summer ones to distribution. There were customers in the area; the local gamekeepers and shepherds living in Glen Strathfarrar, east of Loch Monar supplied outlets as did passing drovers and tinkers, more numerous in those days. But the Macraes also sold to local hostelries in the district, and even visited fairs at Dingwall and elsewhere, selling
The Pait Blend
under the noses of the authorities. The whisky was named after a knoll,
Pait
(Gaelic: a hump) just opposite their island home.

Alasdair lived to the ripe old age of 97, and both he and his wife were carried back in their coffins for burial to the graveyard on Loch Duich in Kintail, by rough roads amounting to over 20 miles. The mountaineer, Revd AE Robertson, who took a photograph of Hamish and Mairi about 1905, knew the Macraes well and was told the story of their mother’s funeral. The porters were well supplied with illicit whisky that day, and one of them commented of Alasdair’s wife that ‘She was a big heavy woman too’ – adding that they required many stops for refreshment. One of these stops nearly led to a disaster, when the over-refreshed porters subsequently found themselves in Kintail – without the coffin – and had to return many weary miles to retrieve it.

Hamish carried on the good work after his father’s death. He was a colourful character, considering himself the equal of any, refusing to speak anything but Gaelic, and donning full Highland dress to visit the laird, Captain Stirling, at Pait Lodge (where a bottle reputedly changed hands) on Sundays. He and his sister Mairi were actually born at Monar and spent their entire lives there. Another brother, Alexander, emigrated to New Zealand and became part of an illicit whisky distilling dynasty in Southland (see
Chapter 10
).

Local people connived with the Macraes in the production of their whisky, sending runners ahead to warn them that the excisemen were on their way. On one occasion the gaugers were welcomed into a house in Strathfarrar, and entertained while news of their arrival was sent ahead. In the house the gaugers over-indulged in whisky (possibly Hamish’s own) and felt so hungover the next day that they abandoned their search and returned to Dingwall empty-handed and sorry-headed.

But by the early 1900s there were fewer illicit distillers to chase, and the noose was tightening, making it more difficult for Hamish to live off his trade. And he was getting old, and had also heard the wonderful news that Lloyd George had introduced old-age pensions. Captain Stirling prevailed upon Hamish to give the distilling up. But Hamish turned even his retirement to good use. While at a fair in Beauly he approached a couple of excisemen and informed them, that if he could receive the £5 reward, he would show them the location of some illicit stills. He then led the guagers to his own bothies, and pocketed the reward, while they delightedly took away the stills for destruction. The ruins of the bothies are still there on Meall Mor for those who search, but the Macraes’ island home was sadly submerged by the building of the Monar dam in 1959, and the raising of the water level.

Jamie and his sister retired to the old folks’ home at Kilmorack, and on their deaths were also taken back to Kintail for burial beside their parents – though this time they were transported by road, not carried on foot as their parents had been. The Macraes of Monar have passed into history and
The Pait Blend
into folklore, its famed taste a fond memory … unless there is still a bottle lying beneath the waters of Loch Monar?

10 New Zealand Moonshine: The Hokonui Brand

MARY McRAE SAILED for New Zealand on the emigrant ship The
Hydaspes
in 1872. Recently widowed, she took with her her four sons and three daughters, and her memories of her 45 hard years in Kintail, the MacRae heartland. She also took with her a wooden box marked ‘Household Goods’, which contained one of the most essential household items in Kintail at that time. This was a fine copper and brass whisky still, which was to have a colourful history once it was reassembled on her new holding in the Hokonui hills of Southland in New Zealand’s South Island.

She left behind in Kintail a conviction for illegal distilling, which had attracted to her – or rather to her son Duncan – a massive £650 fine, with an additional £150 for non-appearance at court, for operating a still on Kishorn island in Kintail. Mary’s husband had died the year before, and possibly dire economic necessity had driven her to illicit distilling to support her large family, as it did many others. There is no record of the fine being paid before Mary left Scotland, indeed such a sum would have been impossible for a poor Highland crofter to find.

The McRaes settled in the Southland district which was heavily populated by Scots, particularly Scots Highlanders, with many hundreds from Kintail itself. The locals still universally spoke Gaelic, played the classical bagpipe (
piobaireachd
), and had a taste for whisky – which was very expensive if imported. There existed a local hooch produced from the Cabbage Tree, but this deadly brew was more of a rum than a whisky, and Mary soon found a ready demand for her
craitur
when she started distilling again with her sons. At events in the local Celtic Society Hall and as far away as Invercargill at the Caledonian Sports Society’s Games, the Hokonui brand soon found a market.