The Highland Lady

Speyside is the heartland of the Grants of Freuchie and their clan. Of all the Highland family names redolent of whisky, Grant surely takes pride of place. In the opening decades of the 19^th century, the forested estates of Rothiemurchus, near Aviemore, were inherited by Sir John Grant, a direct descendant of 'the Gentle' John Grant, 4^th of Freuchie, Chief of Grant. The estate house, the Doune, became home for Sir John and his family. Among them was his young daughter Elizabeth, who recorded her life and times on Speyside in diaries. Edited by her niece Lady Jane Strachey, Elizabeth's diaries were published posthumously in 1898 as the Memoirs of a Highland Lady.

Elizabeth Grant recorded what she felt and saw in eclectic detail, and in among the minutiae of everyday life are many references to whisky, and its role in the Highlanders' lives. For this was Speyside in the heyday of its whisky smuggling fame, when the water of life was natural, plentiful, and free of excise. Whisky was nourishment in a morning dram, and oblivion at the end of a weary day. It was drunk to honour the living and wake the dead. It gave sustenance and life; it brought ruin and death. In Elizabeth's words, "That dram was the Highland prayer, it began, accompanied, and ended all things."

The most famous quote from the Memoirs concerns the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822. This was the man whose gluttony and lust, in his Regency days, had earned him the sobriquet Georgie Porgie, and gave him lasting notoriety in a nursery rhyme as the man who kissed the girls and made them cry. The King wore Highland dress, but Elizabeth was not impressed. "I dare say he thought the country all Highland, expected no fertile plains, did not know the difference between the Saxon and the Celt." But her resentment really rose when she had to surrender good Glenlivet whisky to the King's pleasure.

"One incident connected with this time made me very cross. Lord Conyngham, the Chamberlain, was looking everywhere for pure Glenlivet whisky ; the King drank nothing else. It was not to be had out of the Highlands. My father sent word to me--I was the cellarer--to empty my pet bin, where was whisky long in wood, long in uncorked bottles, mild as milk, and the true contraband goût in it. Much as I grudged this treasure it made our fortunes afterwards, showing on what trifles great events depend. The whisky, and fifty brace of ptarmigan all shot by one man, went up to Holyrood House, and were graciously received and made much of, and a reminder of this attention at a proper moment by the gentlemanly Chamberlain ensured to my father the Indian judgeship."

What a lot these lines tell us! They tell us that the landed Highland gentry condoned the illicit distilling of whisky, and took pleasure in the product. They knew that maturation in wood damped down the fires of the raw spirit, and that when a bottle was opened, it was best drunk down with speed and spirit. And they knew that one good favour deserves another, and that when it comes to greasing the wheels of personal progress, toil is oil, but liquor is quicker (with apologies to Ogden Nash).

Elizabeth's attitude to the prevalence of whisky was ambivalent. She cared well enough for 'Glenlivet' to be the mistress of a 'pet bin', and had no wish to squander the precious liquor on those thought undeserving, no matter how high of birth and great of girth. Yet she regarded the constant daily dramming as bad for the common people.

"At every house it was offered, at every house it must be tasted or offence would be given, so we were taught to believe. I am sure now had we steadily refused compliance with so incorrect a custom it would have been far better for ourselves, and might all the sooner have put a stop to so pernicious a habit among the people. Whisky-drinking was and is the bane of that country ; from early morning to late at night it went on. Decent gentlewomen began the day with a dram. In our house the bottle of whisky, with its accompaniment of a silver salver full of small glasses, was placed on the side-table with cold meat every morning. In the pantry a bottle of whisky was the allowance per day, with bread and cheese in any desired quantity, for such messengers or visitors whose errands sent them in that direction. The very poorest cottages could offer whisky ; all the men engaged in the wood manufacture drank it in goblets three times a day, yet except at merry-making we never saw anyone tipsy."

Could it be that the Highland Lady was guilty of an aristocratic attitude of "drink as I say, but not as I do"? Possibly, but in the Highland way, all classes would gather together to celebrate the harvest-home; thanks given for the gathered crops that would see the people through the bleak days of winter. At the Rothiemurchus farmhouse at the Dell, the harvest-home food was plentiful if plain, and who could deny that many a dram would help settle the solid fare in the stomach before the dancing began.

There was always broth, mutton boiled and roasted, fowls, muir-fowl--three or four pairs on a dish--apple pie and rice pudding, such jugs upon jugs of cream, cheese, oatcakes and butter ; thick bannocks of flour instead of wheaten bread, a bottle of port, a bottle of sherry, and after dinner no end to the whisky punch. In the kitchen was all the remains of the sheep, more broth, haggis, head and feet singed, puddings black and white, a pile of oaten cakes, a kit of butter, two whole cheeses, one tub of sowans, another of curd, whey, and whisky in plenty.

It is to be noted though, that the 'kitchen party' dined last while the ladies and gentlemen took post-prandial punch and tea before the parlour was prepared for dancing. And then…

With what ecstasies we heard the first sweep of that masterly bow across the strings of my father's Cremona.

Strathspeys and reels melodiously played on a classic Italian violin, the lasses lightly footing it while the good wives did little more than tread the measure as etiquette demanded. Not till Christmas and the Floaters' Ball would the rafters ring and the Highlanders fling in wild, whisky-washed abandon.

We delighted in the Floaters' ball, so large a party, so many strangers, some splendid dancers from Strathspey, the hay-loft, the straw-loft, and the upper floor of the threshing-mill all thrown open en suite ; two sets of fiddlers playing, punch made in the washing tubs, an illumination of tallow dips! It is surprising that the floors stood the pounding they got; the thumping noise of the many energetic feet could have been heard half a mile off.

Silver salvers be damned, give us a well-filled wash tub! Indeed, some of Elizabeth Grant's most vivid descriptions of life on Speyside belong to the common people. Her teenage years were a time when the great Highland pine forests that had clothed the straths and braes since the retreat of the ice sheets some 10,000 years before, were being clear-felled for lumber and profit. The burns paying tribute to the Spey became controlled raceways for washing the felled logs down to the saw mills in the lower valley. The men who ran the sluices, guided the tumbling logs, and rafted them across lochs were known as the 'floaters'. They were hard men working in conditions often cruelly cold and fearsomely dangerous; they lived and drank rough.

When the men met in the morning they were supposed to have breakfasted at home, and perhaps had had their private dram, it being cold work in a dark wintry dawn, to start over the moor for a walk of some miles to end in standing up to the knees in water ; yet on collecting, whisky was always handed round ; a lad with a small cask--a quarter anker--on his back, and a horn cup in his hand that held a gill, appeared three times a day among them. They all took their "morning" raw, undiluted and without accompaniment, so they did the gill at parting when the work was done ; but the noontide dram was part of a meal. There was a twenty minutes' rest from labour, and a bannock and a bit of cheese taken out of every pocket to be eaten leisurely with the whisky……… Sometimes a floater's wife or bairn would come with a message ; such messenger was always offered whisky. Aunt Mary had a story that one day a woman with a child in her arms, and another bit thing at her knee, came up among them ; the horn cup was duly handed to her, she took a "gey guid drap" herself, and then gave a little to each of the babies. "My goodness, child," said my mother to the wee thing that was trotting by the mother's side, "doesn't it bite you?" "Ay, but I like the bite," replied the creature.

And come night time, they slept rough too.

"A large bothy was built for them at the mouth of the Druie in a fashion that suited themselves ; a fire on a stone hearth in the middle of the floor, a hole in the very centre of the roof just over it where some of the smoke got out, heather spread on the ground, no window, and there, after their hard day's work, they lay down for the night, in their wet clothes--for they had been perhaps hours in the river--each man's feet to the fire, each man's plaid round his chest, a circle of weary bodies half stupefied with whisky, enveloped in a cloud of steam and smoke, and sleeping soundly till the morning."

Whisky got men, women and bairns alike through bitter days, but one poignant tale was a stark warning that when the going gets lethally tough, alcohol and hypothermia are bad mixers.

"Poor old Christy! She gave him a hot supper, put up a bannock and a little whisky for him, and wrapped his plaid well round him.  She looked after him as he left the house in the driving sleet ; such risks were common, no one thought about them.  Early in the morning down came the water, the weather had taken up, and the floating went merrily on, but Allan did not return. He had reached the loch, that was plain ; where then had he wandered? Not far. When evening came on and no word of him, a party set out in search, and they found him at his post, asleep seemingly, a bit of a bannock and the empty flask beside him. He had done his duty, opened the water-gate, and then sat down to rest. The whisky and the storm told the remainder. He was quite dead."

By comparison with the life of the floaters, the circumstances of the Grants of Rothiemurchus was one of opportunity and ease, yet the feckless nature of Sir John Grant brought the family to the door of poverty and ruin. He was an aspiring barrister, an owner of timbered estates, and a member of parliament to boot, yet by 1826 his debts were insurmountable and the Doune was manned by a sole retainer.

"Our establishment consisted of poor Robert Allan, who was butler and footman and gamekeeper, and never could be persuaded to leave a falling house. He had a fault, a serious one, he tippled ; but the man was so good, so worthy, it had to be borne with to the end, whisky and all ; he never left the family."

Robert Allen obviously enjoyed good Glenlivet whisky! In the end, the favour paid to King George was called in and the Grants left Britain for India, Elizabeth never to return to live in Scotland, for she met and married an Irish colonel by the name of Smith, and spent the rest of her life as lady of the manor at Baltiboys in county Wicklow. Let us leave her in 1827 as she sets sail on the long voyage to India, whisky, as ever, in mind.

"He was in great hurry to return and clear his ship, and that puts me in mind that among our Edinburgh baggage was a case of whisky bitters made for the long sea voyage, and a few bottles of fine old Glenlivet ; it was seized at the Custom-house, and though General Need took a great deal of trouble to represent the peculiar circumstances, we never saw more of our precious contrabands."

Thanks to Pete Cairns (www.uklandscape.net/Ads/Wildshots.htm) for permission to use his photo of Loch an Eilein on the Rothiemurchus Estate, to The Trustees of the National Library of Scotland for permission to use the photo of Elizabeth Grant and to Dirk "Sir Ardbeg" Guenther (www.geocities.com/NapaValley/Vineyard/2423/) for the photo of the rare 'Highland Lady' bottling of Glenlivet. Memoirs of a Highland Lady was recently re-published by Canongate.

© 2001 Peter Wood

Elizabeth Grant photo © National Library of Scotland