Life was tough for London’s upper classes in the mid-19th century. As the Great French Wine Blight devastated grape harvests across the Channel, gentlemen’s clubs across the British capital faced an unthinkable disaster. There simply wasn’t enough brandy to go round.

There was only one solution. Whisky. It wasn’t ideal, but it would do in an emergency. Suddenly, Britain and Ireland’s northern distilleries received a surge in demand. And the Scots, with the most distilleries, a pragmatic approach to blending and their enthusiastic adoption of the Coffey still (see Hot Rum Cow Issue 3) had most to gain.

Yet whilst Queen Victoria was fond of Scotland, many of her London contemporaries remained wary of this distant land of hairy-legged frontiersmen and knew little of the whisky produced there. There was therefore an opportunity to enlighten a curious audience of Home Counties whisky tipplers – and Alfred Barnard was the man to do it.

Barnard, an Essex-born merchant and journalist, was commissioned by drinks magazine Harper’s Weekly Gazette (the London-based ‘weekly organ of the wholesale wine and spirit trades’) to visit every far-flung distillery in Britain and report back to civilisation – a challenge he achieved with distinction.

Between 1885 and 1887, Barnard visited and documented all 161 whisky distilleries in Scotland, Ireland and England. Of these, 129 were in Scotland, from the Stromness Distillery in Orkney to the Annandale Distillery in Dumfries and Galloway. He also visited 28 Irish distilleries (of which just four survive) and four long-defunct English whisky operations: two in Liverpool, one in Bristol and the Lea Valley Distillery (described by Barnard as a five-mile tram-car ride from what is now the City of London’s financial district).

The fascinating book that resulted, The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom (serialised in Harpers Weekly Gazette), was a combination of travel writing and ‘distillery bagging’ way ahead of its time. Some have described it as the ‘bible’ of Victorian whisky distilleries, and many more have thumbed the pages of its five subsequent reprints, the most recent by Birlinn in 2003 and 2008.

The author’s travels between sites, accompanied by an illustrator and assorted hangers-on, ripple with joie de vivre, wry observations and fascinating insights into a bygone age. Yet the book does come with a warning – there is a Jekyll and Hyde element to Barnard, and parts of his book may bore you to distraction or, possibly, an emergency dram.

As soon as Barnard leaves his horse-drawn carriage and enters the doors of the distilleries, another writer emerges – one with an unhealthy obsession for measuring tapes. This is where we meet Barnard the bumbling geek. He is continually obsessed with providing detailed measurements of the equipment in the distilleries, and reciting capacity statistics. Yet, observations of genuine interest to the modern-day whisky anorak regarding the construction of the still and tasting notes for the whiskies themselves are oddly absent.

As soon as Barnard leaves his horse-drawn carriage and enters the doors of the distilleries, another writer emerges – one with an unhealthy obsession for measuring tapes

As a result, The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom is very much a book to be dipped into – unless your name is Richard Joynson. Joynson, who owned Loch Fyne Whiskies before selling it to The Whisky Shop in 2013, suspects he may be the only person to have read The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom from cover to cover. He wrote the introductions to both Birlinn editions and probably has as good a feel for the man behind the book as anyone.

In his beautifully written introductions, Joynson describes Barnard as “a maverick … a bon viveur … a man with a mission and a tape measure … a gentleman toff, a self-financing, fun-loving Victorian waster, on a bit of a skive with his chums travelling the kingdom’s most breathtakingly dramatic regions – all in search of a good dram.”

Joynson first stumbled across an original edition of Barnard’s book in the early 1990s and what first caught his eye was the section of adverts at the back for long-gone whisky retailers and distillery equipment manufacturers. But, as he delved deeper, he soon developed affection for Barnard.

“On first viewing, it looks rather a turgid, boring book,” says Joynson, speaking from his home in Argyllshire. “But once you get into it, you become enchanted and can quite happily ignore the statistics with a clear conscience.”

Admittedly, Joynson finds it astonishing that Barnard went to all that effort without offering the readers any meaningful tasting notes. After wading through the whole tome, the best he could find was a reference to a whisky that was “delicate in flavour, and smooth on the palate”. As Joynson writes in the 2003 introduction: “Hardly the descriptors of today’s adjective-encumbered presentation tubes.”

“I think he was probably stumbling around looking for something to say and he came up with the wrong bit,” says Joynson today. “We would rather know the shape of the stills than the length of the pipes.

“Once you get into it, you become enchanted and can quite happily ignore the statistics with a clear conscience”

“He keeps referring to his travelling companions,” Joynson adds. “I wonder whether he took a couple of chums and turned up at the distilleries saying, ‘What ho! Any chance of a refresher?’ and got taken around. Of course, distillery managers wouldn’t have known what to do with an alien like that anyway – they’d never had a surveyor or a historian or anything like that. It was all very innovative stuff.

“As he gets through the book, he does become more knowledgeable and starts asking pertinent questions. But no one had ever done anything like that before and it probably wasn’t until the 1980s that Michael Jackson really set the standard for the whisky writing that we know today.”

Barnard subsequently went on to give the beer industry the same treatment, penning a similarly mammoth tome entitled The Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland. Originally published in four volumes, the book covered 113 breweries – each of which apparently paid 25 guineas to be included. Barnard’s confidence in his writing was increasing, but his tape measure remained a constant companion.

This got Joynson thinking. While he was looking for inspiration for the label illustration for his Loch Fyne blended whisky, he investigated the ruins of Glenfyne Distillery in Ardrishaig which, in Barnard’s time, had been called Glendarroch Distillery.

“I sat down with a computer-aided design programme and drew the distillery from Barnard’s descriptions which, together with the illustrations of Glendarroch from the book, I sent off to an artist. The artist came up with what turned out to be a bloody accurate representation of the distillery, compared with original photos I found of the site. So Barnard wasn’t talking nonsense – he had described the buildings perfectly.”

Who was Alfred Barnard?

Documents of the day list Alfred Barnard’s occupations variously as ‘soap exporter’, ‘author’ and ‘gentleman’. He married a grocer’s daughter called Fanny Ruffle, lived to the ripe old age of 81 and, between 1885 and 1887, he drank lots of whisky.

When Birlinn first decided to reprint The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom, little was known of Barnard’s life but Richard Joynson unearthed more of his story through the detective work of Barnard’s great-great-nephew Andrew Barnard and great-grandson Michael Billinghurst.

Barnard, who had six brothers and one sister, came from a Baptist family in the small Essex town of Thaxted. His father was a draper and his wife Fanny came from a similar background in the nearby village of Great Sampford.

Yet, by the time Barnard married Fanny, he was based in Kensington, trading in ‘toilette soap’. The pair had three children and moved frequently, their addresses suggesting increasing wealth and upwards mobility. By 1871, they were living in Kingston upon Thames in Surrey, with Barnard described as a wine merchant.

Following the whisky and beer books (which Barnard researched whilst in his 50s), he seems to have become an author/publisher for hire, producing guides for individual distilleries. He also continued his association as a writer with Harper’s Weekly Gazette, for which his son Harold had been appointed Company Secretary. Indeed, in 1902 the owners of the Gazette decided to sell shares in the business and Arthur came on board as an investor – a move he would later regret and a decision that marked the beginning of a painful downturn in his fortunes.

David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a champion of the temperance movement, sharply increased levies on liquor and measures to control licensed premises. These sanctions, combined with an economic slump, hit the drinks industry hard and the value of Barnard’s shares tumbled.

Worse was to come. After a brief but severe attack of pneumonia, his son Harold died at the age of just 40. Eight years later, the Gazette went bust and was taken over by creditors – Alfred’s investment was lost. And the following year his eldest daughter Theodora died suddenly at the age of 49.

Shortly after these shattering events, Alfred and Fanny moved to a modest area of South Croydon, close to their surviving daughter Edith. Alfred had by now retired and memories of charging around Scotland in a pony and trap must have been treasured yet distant.

Four months after the outbreak of the Great War, Barnard lost his wife to heart problems. It was a war that Alfred never emerged from. He died in May 1918 and is believed to be buried with Fanny in Croydon Cemetery. For all his earlier wealth, Barnard left no will. Yet his books continue to bequeath whisky and beer lovers a valuable glimpse into another time.

Campbeltown – off with their heads

One of Alfred Barnard’s most effusive sections in the book covers his trip to Campbeltown in south-west Scotland, where he visited no fewer than 21 distilleries (of which only two survive today – Springbank and Glen Scotia). In this passage, he makes his way towards the Glenside Distillery (1830-1926) – but with Barnard, the journey is invariably more entertaining than the destination.

“Just as we were starting to visit the establishment which heads this chapter, our worthy landlord offered to drive us to see Saddell Castle, a place intimately connected with Campbeltown in former times, and standing in a district which used to be a favourite haunt of the smugglers.

We accepted his offer and in ten minutes were bowling through the town at a great pace. The road is somewhat uninteresting, and was sadly wanting in trees to shelter us from the sun’s rays, nevertheless, we were delighted with the old castle …

McDonald or ‘Righ Fingal,’ who resided here, was a great despot, tradition says that he knew the use of gunpowder, and for sport, to keep himself in practice, would shoot people with his long gun. He was also a terrible Don Juan, and if he fancied a married woman, would take her away from her husband, whom he would either imprison or kill.

McDonald was also a very strong man. One day three Irish gentlemen came to visit him, and after entertaining them he put them to sleep in one of his barns. Next morning he got up early to salute them, but found them asleep with their necks bare, the temptation was too strong for him, and wishing to test his strength of arm he drew his sword and cut off their heads. Such playful conduct would hardly be tolerated in these days.”

 

---

---