Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder Read online

  So at the turn of the century the Highlands were at a crossroads. The old days of the clans were gone. The future of deer farms, large sporting estates and mass eviction was looming. A bevy of landlords old and new would try and bring industry to even the remotest of glens. Some industries worked, others did not. However, some of the old patterns of the land remained: there were cattle drovers and farmers, crofters and shepherds. There were also thousands of fishermen and seamen on the coast, soldiers going to or returning from the furthest corners of the Empire, carters and coachmen, factors and gamekeepers, ghillies and teachers, tailors, doctors and tinkers. But this was not a land of despondent victims, waiting for the demise of the culture that an industrialising world had rejected. The Highlanders were a spirited and vibrant people who fought back with every limited means they could. There were riots against Clearance and riots to prevent grain ships leaving harbours as the population faced starvation. Sheriff officers bearing eviction notices were ambushed and repelled so the police, army, navy and marines had to be used to control an angry population. There were upsurges in illicit whisky distillation and whisky smuggling; there were huge numbers of Highlanders involved in the fishing industry and a trickle of returned emigrants trying to install new life into the glens.

  Hidden among the scattered population and infesting the dark neuks of the towns, waiting in lonely townships, huddled in black houses and crowded clachans, were the criminals. Every community and every age has its share of the ne’er-do-wells and the unsavoury; the nineteenth-century Highlands were no exception. The glens and islands were home to thieves and rapists; there was assault and poaching, sheep stealing and embezzlement, cruelty and deceit and sorrow. There were some dark and sordid murders and some high-profile killings that were reported in all the national press.

  This book cannot tell all the story of Highland crime in the nineteenth century, but it will attempt to draw a picture of the underside of Highland life. It will not cover the great sweep of history that is well catalogued and documented, but the small personal day-to-day tragedies that added to the life burden that ordinary people had to carry. For the sake of this book, the Highlands is taken to mean the geographical area north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, the area in which the majority of people spoke Gaelic, and not the present day, much smaller political area known as the Highland Region. Each tale and anecdote is true; each one was vastly important to the person or people concerned. Most can be mirrored in today’s society, for although technology may alter standards and styles of living, crime, like people, basically remains the same.

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  The Whisky Wars

  If one was to mention smuggling, probably the most immediate image to spring to mind would be a darkened cove with a band of men carrying kegs of brandy ashore by moonlight. That was probably fairly accurate for England, but in nineteenth-century Scotland smuggling was just as clandestine but much more home based. The practice of illicitly distilling whisky in the Highland glens and carrying it across great tracts of lonely hill and moor to the customers was so widespread that at times it was a boom industry. Naturally, the government was opposed to this practice, as every gallon of illicit whisky – known as ‘peat reek’ because of the smell of the fuel used in the distilling process – robbed the exchequer of taxes. There was a small army of revenue men based in the Highland towns and patrolling the glens, often backed by military or naval forces, and sometimes there were armed encounters between smugglers and the customs officers, or Excisemen. Robert Burns’ poem ‘The deil’s awa’ wi’ the Exciseman’ caught the public spirit of the times perfectly, although he wrote in the late eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth.

  The geography of the Highlands was perfect for illicit whisky distilling. The area was remote, tangled and rough, with a plethora of clean water and fields of barley for the raw product, and peat for boiling the copper still on. Add to that a great number of under-employed people with no great love for governments that had mistreated or neglected them for generations, and it was no wonder that many Highlanders paid no heed to the Excise Laws.

  Taxes for War and Whisky Distilling

  The first excise act was passed in 1644, with a tax of two shillings and eight pence Scots on ‘everie pynt of aquavytie or strong watterie sold within the countrey’. As a Scots pint was the equivalent of around four English pints and Scots money was considerably less than its English equivalent, the tax was not quite as burdensome as it might appear. There was a political reason for the tax: the Scottish parliament had become involved in the civil war in England and the tax was to raise revenue to pay the Scottish armies that helped defeat King Charles I. However, when that war was over, the tax not only remained in place but was increased by stages. Although the tax was partly intended as a tool to try and curb excessive drinking, it succeeded only in driving distillation underground.

  The history of whisky distilling in Scotland is long and complex. Many books have been written about it, but suffice to say that legal and illegal distilling thrived side by side in the Highlands. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was possible to buy a copper still of ten gallons capacity, complete with the worm or coil, for £5 in Campbeltown. Illegal stills could be sited anywhere, in caves by the sea, in the midst of peat moorland or in a cottage in a township, and nearly everywhere in the islands. Distilling was a co-operative operation with women often heavily involved and, in the Isles, the crofter-fishermen carrying the produce to the mainland towns.

  Although they were often hampered by an inability to speak Gaelic, the Excisemen eventually became expert in tracking down the stills. However, finding the stills was not enough; the Excisemen had to destroy the cooling coils to really deal a shrewd blow to the distillers. During the French wars between 1797 and 1815, the tax rose again; recession followed and illegal distilling became a necessity rather than a luxury. In 1814 duty rose again and much larger wash stills – the containers in which the whisky was distilled – were made compulsory for legal distillation. It became much harder for small-scale legal stills in the Highlands, so illegal distillation flourished.

  From that date onward the Highlands became a battleground between smugglers and the law. The distillers could make large profits, but from 1822 they also faced frightening penalties with fines up to £100, which was about twice a year’s pay for a skilled man. That year the Illicit Distillation (Scotland) Act virtually declared war on illicit distillation, with the huge fine plus new powers for the Excisemen. The following year duty was decreased and a license system for legal distillation announced. Legal distilleries began to flourish.

  Whisky Still

  © Author’s Collection

  Travellers and visitors to the Highlands often commented on the practice of illicit whisky distilling. For instance, in his book A Tour in the Highlands and Western Islands, published in 1800, John Leyden said that ‘the distillation of whisky presents an irresistible temptation to the poorer classes.’ In 1814 Walter Scott visited the Hebrides. He thought the people of Eigg were unfriendly until they realised the vessel he was on was a Lighthouse Commission yacht and not a revenue cutter. But spare a thought for the Excisemen; they had a rough job and the natives could get restless where whisky and their livelihood were concerned.

  A Venial Crime

  In the Inverness Circuit Court of October 1807 the Lord Justice Clerk gave his opinion on whisky smugglers: ‘Smuggling is too commonly considered a very venial crime. It is considered only as cheating the King but in truth it is theft of a very aggravated kind and is attended with consequences much to be deplored.’ To paraphrase the words of the Lord, he said that ‘smuggling can only be committed by gross perjury by the traders or by hiring or suborning his servants to commit perjury. In other cases it can only be committed by acts of falsehood and forgery’ or by ‘outrageous and determined violence, often attended with bloodshed and murder’. Smuggling, he claimed, ‘tend[s] more to corrupt the morals of the people than perhaps all our oth
er vices and passions put together’. His Lordship may have had a point.

  In January 1809 John and Donald Robertson of Blair Atholl realised that the local Excisemen were getting far too close to their illicit stills, and they took direct action. John Robertson was the principal as the two attacked the officers, but he could not stand alone against the forces of the law. At the Perth Circuit Court in May that year John was fined fifty shillings and imprisoned for three months and Donald was fined twenty shillings and imprisoned for one month, with neither man being released until the fine was paid.

  A few years later, in October 1812, the Excisemen made a determined attempt to stem the flow of illegally distilled whisky by holding special excise courts in the towns of Inverness, Tain and Cromarty. The Justices of the Peace hit the accused with a succession of fines of £20 and more, which was an almost unbelievably high sum for ordinary people.

  Fighting the Smugglers

  In the early 1800s the Excisemen’s pay was enhanced by the amount of seizures they made, so it was in their interests to keep a steady flow of seizures but not to destroy the industry completely, or they would lose a lucrative source of income. There were various difficulties involved in catching the smugglers. Firstly there was the terrain, for the Highlands are notoriously wild and in these days of few roads and sparse traffic the whisky was often smuggled over the hills on the backs of ponies. The second point was the danger, for the whisky convoys were often guarded by men every bit as rugged as the countryside. The third point was the clientele, for the whisky was bought by even the highest in the land, so a sheriff judging smugglers might well have a keg or two of peat reek stored in his cellar.

  There was one celebrated instance where an unnamed professor at St Andrews was given a present of some illicit whisky by a student of divinity. The news spread and an entire convoy of carts set out from the glens of Perthshire, with their whisky cargo concealed by freshly cut peat. The smugglers disposed of the whole cargo and left with £60, more than a year’s wages for a skilled man.

  The guardians of the stills and convoys were so eager to defend their charges that Excisemen in the early period were often in danger of their lives. Whisky could be distilled in virtually any part of the Highlands but in some areas, illicit distilling was just a way of life. At the beginning of the century Glenlivet was probably the area most renowned for illicit distilling. At its height, there were an estimated two hundred small stills working openly in the glen. Nearly every cottage in Glenlivet harboured a still and the Excisemen were apprehensive to enter. If they tried to make a seizure, the entire population – men, women and boys – would attack them with sticks and stones. Parties up to twenty strong would leave the areas in broad daylight, travel to the Lowlands and go into the towns and cities at night. They carried horns of whisky and stout cudgels for defence if the Excisemen should chance upon them, but there was also a code of loyalty that seemed unique to the Highlands. Once a man had drunk with the smugglers he would never betray them: it was unheard of.

  There were also rumours that some Excisemen were open to bribery. The distillers imported barley from low country farms in Banffshire and Moray so there was employment for men and horses, and rents for small farms rose as the distillers made large profits. The trade was at its greatest during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars when the government was occupied with foreign affairs and had little time or money to expend on domestic matters. At times there were up to 200 nine or ten-gallon ankers a week being sent from Glenlivet to Aberdeen, Perth and Dundee.

  Further north, in Ross there was an underground movement with the wives of illicit smugglers passing whisky and farm produce to the wives of Excisemen in return for information on future operations. In August 1826 the Collector of Excise sent a letter to a meeting of landowners at the Court House in Inverness. He said that illicit distilling had ‘greatly increased’ in the country that year with the Strathglass area particularly notorious. The Collector also said that without the support of landowners or their factors it was not safe for his officers to attempt a seizure. He said that when the duty was reduced, sales of legally distilled whisky rose but when duty was high, legal sales slumped. At that same meeting there was mention that the revenue cutter Atlanta was stationed in the Moray Firth and had helped to cut smuggling.

  There was no knowing when the Excisemen and smugglers would meet face to face. For example, on 16 February 1821 John Mackenzie, the farmer at Drum of Clunes, was walking with his son and a cart near Nairn. Neither was very happy when they walked straight into David Munro and George Mackay, because Munro was an Exciseman and Mackenzie’s cart contained barrels of peat reek. Munro demanded to search the cart; Mackenzie refused and there was a scuffle as the Excisemen pushed forward their case and the farmer and his son resisted strongly. Sometime during the struggle Mackay took his stick and delivered an almighty crack to Mackenzie’s head. The farmer collapsed and died the next day. When the case was brought to court the jury found Mackay not guilty.

  The Redcoats Are Coming

  With whisky smuggling endemic throughout Scotland, the government realised that the Excise service was not able to cope on its own. The military was once more sent to the Highlands to support the civil power in the attempt to erase the peat reek from the braes and glens. The army was stationed at various places in the Highlands and on the Highland border with, for instance, a body of cavalry at Coupar Angus to watch the traffic from the Angus glens to Dundee. It must have been an unpopular duty for the redcoats, stationed in lonely garrisons among the hills and knowing the locals did not want them there.

  One of these garrisons was at Corgarff Castle in upper Strathdon. Today Corgarff is easily visible to drivers on the B973; if they are misguided enough to take their attention from one of the trickier passes over this stretch of the highland hills. In the nineteenth century this was a wild and lonely place, with great rounded hills and rising moorland, mile after mile of bleak heather where the smugglers drove their packhorses from still to market.

  The castle was built around the middle of the sixteenth century, modernised in the eighteenth after the Jacobite troubles, and then rented to a local farmer in 1802. By 1827 the army was based at Corgarff and patrolling the passes and hills in the war against the smugglers. Two officers and fifty-six men of the 25th Foot were based there for four years, some in the old barrack rooms in the castle and others in the cottage nearby. The very fact of their presence shows how seriously the government viewed whisky smuggling.

  There were also bodies of men known as ‘cutters’ or ‘excise detectives’ who acted as the hired muscle and information gatherers for the Excisemen. Yet all these precautions were useless until the government passed a law that fined the landowner or farmer on whose land illicit distilling was carried out. Another wild area was the Cabrach.

  Battle at the Cabrach

  The Cabrach is still a lonely area tucked away on the borders of Moray and Aberdeenshire, sparsely populated and wild when the weather is rough. In the eighteenth century it was still mildly dangerous to cross, while even in the nineteenth, when Great Britain was the foremost industrial nation of the world and a leading light of civilisation, the Cabrach had a reputation for lawlessness. The area was close to Dufftown, set at the northern fringe of the Grampian Hills and at the very heart of the whisky smuggling business. Not only was it an excellent area for distilling, with desolate hills and an abundance of good water near good farmland, it was also where the smuggling routes began to the southern cities.

  In 1827 the whisky wars were at their height. In February of that year the Excise decided to have a detailed examination of the hills around the Cabrach and Dufftown to crack down on the many illicit stills. Donald McKenzie, the Riding Officer of Excise based at Elgin, was the leading man, and he called in nautical help in the shape of Peter McIntyre, who commanded the revenue cutter Atlanta. The Excisemen based themselves in Dufftown and shortly after nine in the morning of 6 February McKenzie mounted his horse
and led them toward the Cabrach. McKenzie and McIntyre were supported by the boatswain and nine men from Atlanta. Six of the crewmen carried muskets; the others had to make do with cutlasses. They were crossing the bridge over the Water of Dullan when they noticed a party of about twenty men on the opposite side. Some of the men were armed and were flitting around in a small patch of woodland. McKenzie advised his men to take no notice but to continue with the task. They marched into the parish of Auchendoun and were approaching Laggan farm when a local man called out that they had best return, adding, ‘There is hot work before you, lads.’

  Again McKenzie told his men to carry on and not even to reply to the man. A few moments later a young girl also gave the same advice, saying the Excisemen ‘had better go back as they are waiting for you in the wood’, but McKenzie refused to listen. That decision proved to be a massive mistake, as the men in the wood launched an assault.

  The attackers were all local men. They included James and William Gordon from Mortlach near Dufftown, James Grant and James Mackerran. With no provocation except the presence of the Excise, they lifted their muskets and fired. The shots crashed out, with the balls passing so close the Excisemen could hear the whistle of the lead. There was instant pandemonium. The cutter’s crew were seamen, brave in the screaming nightmare of a high seas storm but lost here in the whispering hills; some stopped dead and refused to go any further, but others were more determined and loaded their muskets for retaliation. The gunfire had unsettled McKenzie’s horse so the Exciseman had to fight to retain his seat, but he was a brave man and was determined to press ahead and complete his duty.