Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder Read online

  McKenzie called to McIntyre and two seamen and led them in a splashing foray across the Water of Dullan, possibly hoping to outflank or ride around the attackers, but somebody shouted out, ‘There he is!’

  There was a volley of six or seven musket shots. Some passed very close to him; some kicked up fountains of earth around the legs of his horse and one ricocheted from a stone on the ground and knocked off McKenzie’s hat. Already skittish, his horse reared and fell. McKenzie was thrown and for a second he thought he had been hit. Another volley followed the first, with the shots hissing past and thudding into the ground. The horse recovered. McKenzie pulled himself into the saddle and re-crossed the water as jeering voices came to him.

  ‘McKenzie and his horse are all blown to atoms!’

  The attackers were only about sixty yards away, well within musket range. The two seamen returned quickly to their shipmates, but McIntyre was not so lucky. He threw up his arms and shouted, ‘Mr Mckenzie, I am hit!’ A musket ball had hit Peter McIntyre on the right side, passed though his body and emerged from his groin.

  McKenzie watched in horror as McIntyre fell. ‘For God’s sake, desist,’ he shouted out to the attackers, ‘for you have shot a man!’

  However, rather than desist, the attackers reloaded and fired a third volley. Somebody shouted, ‘Shoot the whole of the bastards!’

  Helping the grievously wounded McIntyre across the moor to the nearby Laggan farmhouse, McKenzie hoped they were safe, but the attackers followed. They surrounded the farm, pointed their muskets at the windows and threatened to finish the job they had started by burning the building down with the Excisemen inside. The smugglers eventually withdrew but with McIntyre wounded and an unknown number of hostile armed men in the neighbourhood, McKenzie thought it best to forget his search and return to Dufftown. Once his men were safe, McKenzie alerted the local authorities to pursue the attackers.

  The case came to the High Court in Edinburgh in July 1827, where the two Gordons appeared. Grant and Mackerran were summoned but failed to appear and were consequently outlawed. The Gordons may have wished they had also absconded when one of the judges, Lord Mackenzie, said this was ‘the most desperate and lawless case he had ever heard of’ and Lord Pitmully, the presiding judge, ordered them transported for the term of their natural lives.

  King of the Gaugers

  Although most accounts of whisky smuggling have the smuggler as the hero, there were also strong characters among the Excisemen. One of the most notable was a man named Malcolm Gillespie, who was one of the very few Excisemen to enter local folklore.

  In Scotland the Exciseman was often known as ‘the Gauger’, which may be from a Gypsy word and is probably the origin of the slang Scots word ‘Gadgie’ today. Sometimes known as the King of the Gaugers, or the Gauger of Skene – although it is likely that the smugglers had other terms for him – Malcolm Gillespie had a varied career even before he came to work in the Grampian and Moray Highlands. Born in Dunblane in Perthshire, Gillespie had originally intended to join the army, but he could not afford to purchase a commission so he turned his love of action and adventure into a career as an Exciseman instead. He started his work at the salt pans in East Lothian and moved to Collieston in Aberdeenshire, where he broke up a smuggling ring that was landing a thousand ankers of spirits a month. From Collieston he shifted along the coast to Stonehaven, where the problem was once again goods coming in from the sea. He was mentioned in an advertisement in the Aberdeen Journal of 25 February 1807, where he was involved in licences for game duty. Finally in 1812, after thirteen years of experience and triumph, Gillespie properly came against the whisky smugglers when he moved his theatre of operations to Deeside.

  These Highlands of Aberdeenshire and Moray were dangerous, with the Cabrach and Glenlivet seething with illicit distilling and the Excisemen hard pressed to keep a lid on things. Distilling here was on a nearly commercial scale, with the product sent in convoys of packhorses to the towns of the Lowlands. Often the smugglers carried weapons and were prepared to use them to defend their whisky from the Excisemen. Naturally, the Excisemen were usually armed with pistols and swords, and had the incentive that they got a percentage of the value of their captures.

  In August 1814 Gillespie came into direct conflict with the Deeside smugglers. He had moved in on a cart that held around eighty gallons of whisky, but the four men who escorted it were not inclined to give in; they retaliated strongly. Gillespie was kicked to pieces, but managed to pull out his pistol and fire a single shot. The sound alerted people in the neighbourhood, who helped arrest the smugglers.

  Gillespie’s twenty-year career saw him collect forty-two wounds and account for some 6,500 gallons of whisky, plus 407 stills, over 160 horses, eighty-five carts and an amazing 62,400 gallons of wash, the raw liquid before it was made into whisky. There was violence on both sides. In one fight near Kintore near Inverurie in July 1816, Gillespie slashed a smuggler named Hay across the face with his sword, while another Exciseman was unfortunate enough to shoot himself in the groin.

  Gillespie had his own methods for success. Leaving the garrison of Corgarff and other military to concentrate on searching for the stills, Gillespie preferred to hunt down the smugglers as they transported the produce from the stills to the customers. In 1816, he bought a bulldog. In his memoirs, which were published after his death, Gillespie said the dog was trained to bite: ‘the horses one by one, till by tumbling some, and others by dancing, in consequence of the pain occasioned by the hold the dog had of them by the nose, the Ankers were all thrown from their backs’. Not surprisingly, the smugglers took their revenge. In an encounter at Carlogie near the River Dee, they shot and killed the dog.

  There are many other anecdotes about Gillespie, some perhaps even true. Local folklore tells of a farm called Seggiecrook near Kennethmont in Aberdeenshire, where a farmer named Donald Taylor, his wife, two sons and his daughter, Janet, mingled farming with whisky smuggling. At the time that Gillespie was on the prowl, the daughter was eighteen and well favoured in looks and figure; two attributes that could serve to distract even the most dedicated of Excisemen. There were also a couple of servants, including a herd called Peter Jamieson. On Banff market day Janet and Peter were left in charge of the farm when Janet saw a sheet hauled on top of a neighbour’s peat stack, which was the signal that an Exciseman was on the prowl. The illicit whisky was hidden beneath the floor of the bedroom, and Janet pushed the bed on top and moved a chest to the foot of the bed. At the same time she had Peter pile an assortment of farm tools against a door in the byre to make it appear as though she hoped to block any entrance there.

  Eventually Gillespie barged in, full of suspicion and bile. He poked in the chest at the foot of the bed and was on all fours looking underneath when Janet called him a ‘nasty ill-bred lout’ and threatened to throw the contents of a chamber pot over him unless he left her bed alone. Gillespie withdrew and searched the byre instead, finding nothing. Although the story is probably apocryphal, it serves to show the impact Gillespie had on the neighbourhood; he became a Sheriff of Nottingham character, with the smugglers as the heroic Robin Hoods.

  In March 1824 Gillespie got involved in a major battle with smugglers near Inverurie. According to Gillespie’s memoirs, there were twenty-five smugglers in the party, while he had only two men with him, although there were others within call. Gillespie shouted out to the smugglers to give up but they ignored him and carried on. In return, Gillespie shot one of the smuggler’s pack ponies. The smugglers retaliated with a rush at the Excisemen; one smuggler raised his club to batter Gillespie to the ground, but Gillespie shot him through the shoulder and within moments other Excisemen had collected and both sides set to in a major battle. Again in Gillespie’s own words: ‘Bloody heads, hats rolling on the ground, the reports of firing and other noise resembled the Battle of Waterloo, but in the end the lawless desperadoes were obliged to lay down their arms and submit to the laws of their country.’

 
; Both sides suffered casualties but the Excisemen won that encounter. However, each victory was also a small defeat, for as the number of seizures fell, so too did Gillespie’s income, so he could no longer afford the lifestyle he enjoyed. Rather than tighten his belt, he began to break the law and turned to forgery to supplement what was in reality a poor wage. On 30 April 1827 John Fyfe, a King’s Messenger, arrested Gillespie, who said, ‘Good God, I am a gone man. Let me out of the way for a short time and I will put all right.’ Unfortunately he was imprisoned instead and on 23 September 1827 he was tried, along with his clerk, John Skene Edwards. There were eight charges of forgery of bills for the payment of sums of money that varied from £15 and 15 shillings to £38 and 10 shillings. Mr McNeil, the defending solicitor, said that there was a great deal of prejudice against Gillespie in that part of the country; he asked that the trial be moved elsewhere. However, the judge refused and the trial continued.

  Knowing that conviction meant execution, Gillespie pleaded not guilty. In a trial that lasted fifteen hours, bill after bill was proved to be a forgery, with Gillespie having signed other people’s names. In one case a man named Joseph Low, who apparently signed the bill for £38 and 10 shillings said he could not write. In every other case but two, the real owners of the names denied all knowledge of the bills. Of the other two, one man had died before the date he was alleged to have signed the bill and the last man never existed. Gillespie had to wait for the verdict as one of the jury went walkabout, but when it came, it was guilty. Lord Pitmully said he was to be executed in Aberdeen on 16 November 1827. As his final days ticked past, Gillespie wrote a short account of his career; these memoirs remain as a reminder of the reality of an Exciseman’s life.

  However, Gillespie was not a man to go with a mere literary whimper. In 1896, nearly seventy years after his death, there was some controversy over the disposal of his corpse. It was supposed that his coffin was buried in the churchyard at Skene near the west door of the church, but there were rumours that the coffin was filled with stones and Gillespie’s body had been handed over to the anatomists for dissection.

  The Picture in the West

  Smuggling was also prolific in the western side of the Highlands, with Glasgow as the magnet. Open boats from Campbeltown sailed to the Broomielaw to take whisky to the city, while parties of armed men marched from Aberfoyle to Cowcaddens. It was thought that by 1820 about half the spirits consumed in the country had been smuggled so in 1823 the duty was reduced from six shillings and two pence per imperial gallon to two shillings and four pence three farthings to encourage legal distilling and discourage illegal smuggling.

  Although the situation cooled in the middle decades of the century, there were still occasional arrests, such as that of John Cameron from Knockandhu, who was fined £100 at Elgin Sheriff Court in July 1845. The kindly sheriff offered Cameron an alternative of six months in Elgin jail.

  The Later Years

  In October 1875 a large-scale smuggling operation was discovered, originating in Pitlochry. The first the excise knew of it was when some casks of Pitlochry whisky were sent without the required documentation. Two senior excise officials travelled north from London and inspected the local distillery. The manager, Alexander Connacher, appeared honest as he showed them around and handed them the keys to enter the warehouses where the whisky was stored until it was properly aged. The officials were quite happy with what they found, until they entered the bonded warehouse and checked the barrels. The first cask they inspected held only water, as did the second, so they searched for Connacher, who had left them to their work, to ask for an explanation. By that time, however, Connacher had gone, taking the books and accounts with him.

  At first the officials were unsure how barrels within a padlocked warehouse could be drained, but they persuaded Connacher’s assistant that he would be safe from prosecution if he told them how it was done. The assistant told them that rather than be seen entering the officially secured warehouse, Connacher had made a hole in the roof by unscrewing the protecting iron bars, and clambered down. Once he was inside the warehouse he bored a hole through the wall, inserted a tube and siphoned the whisky into an empty cask, which was buried under the ground outside. Connacher and his assistant refilled the empty cask with water by the same method.

  The officials found the cask of whisky underground, and more than thirty casks of water in the warehouse. Connacher and his assistant had been stealing whisky for about three months, selling the whisky they siphoned off and sending the kegs by rail but without any documentation. The officials checked the railway records to find to where the untaxed whisky had been dispatched, but as Connacher had absconded with his books, they could not find out the addresses of any future clients. A number of people, chiefly in Glasgow and Perth, were fined for receiving the stolen whisky, but Connacher vanished.

  There was a revival in illicit distilling in the 1880s and 1890s. Perhaps the activities of the Highland Land League had encouraged the people to once again challenge the law, but there was no doubt that the process of illegal distilling was once again widespread. The distillers followed the same pattern of selling their wares in local villages and towns as well as in the more major population centres of Scotland. The northernmost counties, the crofting lands, seemed to be the heartland of this new breed of illegal distilling.

  Even as late as the 1880s Applecross in Wester Ross was fairly remote and, as such, the inhabitants may have believed they were secure from the Excisemen. In 1886 the men of Alligin were less lucky than most as the Gairloch Exciseman and Mr McDonald, his supervisor from Dingwall, made a sweep of the area. They found a bothy concealed above the township of Alligin, and when they probed inside they found a large mash tub with 250 gallons of wash, as well as peat for a fire. The next day they found a second bothy at Lower Alligin with another forty gallons of wash.

  As the illegal distillation continued to grow, on 1 April 1887 the excise service established a preventative station at Bonar Bridge. Officers were based here to patrol the surrounding area, which had become a hotbed of illicit distilling. The Excisemen found they were struggling against a wild terrain, a people with close kin connections and a distinct dislike of paying the revenue. On the first week of the month, Mr Reid, the supervisor at Brora, backed by William Hughes and William Brown of the Bonar Bridge station, searched the hills above Fearn in Easter Ross. They found a large still only 300 yards above the main road from Ardgay to Dingwall. The distillers had chosen an excellent site, with a cleverly manufactured contrivance of zinc and wood bringing an abundance of fresh water from a nearby burn and easy access to the road. This was no small-scale operation; the Excisemen found two mash tuns, one capable of holding 350 gallons; the other 250; plus fermenting tuns of sixty gallons and a whole collection of equipment which would not have been out of place in a legal distillery. To ensure privacy the distillers had canvas to erect as a makeshift camouflaged tent around the still. There were also extensive piles of draff, which revealed that it had been in operation for some time. However, it was not all success for the excise. They failed to find the copper cooling coil, the most important utensil of all. They also found no whisky.

  Later that month the Excisemen launched an assault at Kilmachalmaig and Achnahannet in Ross. They came ten strong and found a number of illicit stills hidden in the hills. They returned in May and found nothing, which convinced them that the distillers had either been completely discouraged by the loss of their stills, or they had moved to another locality. The latter conclusion was correct. The more determined of the distillers had lifted their equipment and carried it, bag and baggage, into the neighbouring Rosehall area of Sutherland and were attempting to carry on business as usual.

  Two of the Bonar Bridge based revenue officers, William Hughes and William Brown, travelled the eleven miles to Rosehall and patrolled the dense woods. As it was approaching midnight on Saturday, 28 May 1887, they were on their usual searches around Ravenrock Cottage. They had followed the nar
row path down the west side of the gorge at Allt More, stepping carefully in the dark by the glint of a shaded lantern. The burn at the foot was low but still noisy as the two Excisemen moved on. They stopped as they heard two men talking loudly in Gaelic not far ahead. The Excisemen watched as the men descended the eastern side of the gorge, and then they splashed across the burn and walked along the eastern side before climbing up the slope, zigzagging to make the ascent easier.

  The two smugglers soon vanished in the dark, but as their voices faded, another pair suddenly emerged, walking in single file along a narrow path. The smugglers and Excisemen met each other head on, but the element of surprise was all with the Excisemen. They lunged forward and grabbed a smuggler apiece; Hughes’ victim carried a cask and fought back. Brown left his man to help Hughes, and the second smuggler fled into the dark.

  The cask that Hughes’ man carried was full of newly distilled whisky, which the Excisemen commandeered. They forced their prisoner to take them through the wood to the nearest road, where they saw another pair of smugglers. As soon as the Excisemen challenged, one of the smugglers ran, but Brown threw himself on the slower of the two and wrestled him to the ground. There was no doubting his occupation as he carried a copper coil on his back.

  The Excisemen questioned their prisoners and searched the area. They found two large fermenting tuns and a variety of pieces of equipment, as well as oatcakes and other essentials. The Excisemen destroyed everything except the coil and the whisky, which they took to Bonar Bridge. Brown and Hughes had caught the smugglers when they were at their most vulnerable, in the act of moving from one distilling bothy to another.