Scotch by Lockhart Robert Bruce

Author:Lockhart, Robert Bruce
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906476397
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
Published: 2012-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

The Walkers

My walk should be a jig.

FOR OUR next whisky magnate we must leave Perthshire and go to Ayrshire. It is a county of soft climate and hardy men who combine a practical genius for invention with a fine taste for serious literature and philosophy. Nor must I fail to mention their keen interest in politics. Independent and radical in their views, they know their facts, and dismal defeat awaits the Parliamentary candidate who comes unprepared to an Ayrshire town. The bubble of his complacency is soon burst, for the locals have a sturdy contempt for the type of oratory which seeks to mask ignorance. The miner reads his Marx, and I remember vividly how at question time after a lecture on the Soviet Union which I gave a few years ago, a local shoemaker tested my knowledge with a persistence which was the more effective because he was studiously polite and apparently open to conviction. I did not succeed in persuading him that he was wrong, but we had a pleasant talk after the meeting, and I left with considerable respect for his skill in debate.

Shrewd and thrifty, with an innate dislike of waste and extravagance, Ayrshire men have their feet firmly planted on the earth, and their share of worldly success has been great in relation to their numbers. Ayrshire is the country of Bruce and Burns, of Boswell, and George Douglas Brown, the author of The House with the Green Shutters, of John Galt, and John Macadam, the pioneer of modern road making. In Ayrshire John Knox at the age of 60 married the 17-year-old heiress of Ochiltree and Richard Cameron the Covenanter was slain, ‘leaving his name to a religious sect and to a renowned regiment in the British Army’.

Hard in business but generous in hospitality, the men of Ayrshire have as profound a knowledge of the legend and ritual of whisky as any Highlander. Within its borders are celebrated the most keenly attended of all the annual Burns Dinners, and at Kilmarnock was published the most famous and today most prized edition of the poet’s works. It was therefore fit and proper that Ayrshire should make its material, as well as its spiritual, contribution to Scotch whisky.

The opportunity and the contribution came when, in 1820, John Walker established himself as a grocer and wine and spirit merchant in King Street in the Royal Burgh of Kilmarnock. The little town was then in the very heart of progress, for it was the centre of the most important Scottish coalfields, and here in 1812 the first railway in Scotland was laid down in order to enable the output of coal to be handled quickly. A private concern, it ran from Kilmarnock to Troon. The promoter was the Duke of Portland, who owned most of the mines. With that railway I have a family connection, for my great-grandfather and my grand-uncle were factors to the Duke and had a supervising control of the construction.

John Walker, the son of farmer forebears, had his full share of Ayrshire grit and thrift.

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