The Irish-feminine touch

Nowadays, whisky distilling is seen as a man's world, but that hasn't always been the case. Before it turned from a domestic activity into a commercial enterprise, distilling was very much a woman's job. We have many stories from Scotland featuring women involved in illicit distilling and smuggling. The surviving Campbeltown account books of Robert Armour, a copper smith, and John Colville, a maltster, clearly show that women were still very much involved in whisky distilling in the early 19^th century, but as distilling became more and more a business, the involvement of women gradually decreased.

Talk about female distillers and you say 'Bessie'. The story of how Bessie Williamson arrived at the helm of Laphroaig distillery has been told in several whisky books and articles. Although Bessie was the last and most famous female distiller, she was not the only one: quite fittingly, Islay has had several more women distillers (the MacDougall sisters at Ardbeg and Lucy Ramsay at Port Ellen), while Elizabeth Cumming basically put Cardhu on the whisky map. A trawl through the distillery lists in Hume & Moss' The Making of Scotch Whisky results in well over 20 women connected to distilleries, from Jane MacGregor at Littlemill and Helen Mitchell at Rieclachan to Elizabeth Conacher at Blair Athol, Margaret Sutherland at Dalmore, and Margaret Cruickshank at Man O' Hoy in the Orkneys. In a recent article in Whisky Magazine, Helen Arthur honours a number of these Scottish whisky women.

But what about female distillers across the Irish sea? Were there any whiskey women? Ireland of course has its stories about women involved in poitin-making. A late 18^th century report from the parish of Kilronan also talks about distilling: As every cottager, to a man, distils his oats into spirits, every cabbin becomes alternately a whisky house, until the spirit is drunk. The parish minister goes on to describe a rotation of idleness and drinking, before offering a rather unusual 'explanation' for female involvement: The women also, being rather idler than the men, seem very great promotors of this traffic. E.B. McGuire, in his Irish Whiskey, the most thorough account of the Irish whiskey industry ever published, mentions that several of the eleven small distilleries around Galway in the late 18^th century were owned by women. One of them, Catherine Haurty, operated into the early 19^th century. In the 1802 excise records, Jane Hill is listed as operating a still in Tipperary.

Bushmills has also had a period of female rule: Ellen Jane Corrigan ran the distillery together with her husband's partner James McColgan when her husband Patrick died in 1865. The distillery was sold to a group of business men in 1880, Ellen Jane and James becoming two of the five directors of the new enterprise. Another distillery run by a mixed-sex partnership is Tullamore. When Bernard Daly died in 1887, he left the distillery to his wife Mary Anne to do what she thought proper with. In order to carry on the business, Mary Anne Daly entered into a partnership with her son Bernard and a cousin, B. Mara. Mary Anne's involvement with the daily running of the distillery was almost surely quite limited as only one source notes her being part of this partnership.

Without a doubt, the most 'feminine' Irish distillery is Locke's Brusna distillery at Kilbeggan. Mary Anne Locke ran the distillery from 1868, when her husband John died, until about 1880. She was a shrewd business woman and output increased while money was spent on improvements and expansion. Her two sons, John Edward and James Harvey became increasingly involved in the distillery and took over the running in the 1880s. The second period of female rule for Locke's began after James Harvey's death in 1927. Mary, the wife of John Edward (who died in 1920) became director, although her involvement with the distillery was minimal. When she died in 1943, her two daughters, Mary Evelyn ('Sweet', shown on the photo with two of her dogs) and Florence Emily ('Flo'), took on a more active role in the board of directors, with Sweet taking the chair and Flo playing a more minor role. Neither of them was much involved in the daily running of the distillery. In 1947 the sisters decided to sell the distillery. The syndicate they sold the distillery turned out to be criminals under false passports who had no intentions of running the distillery but were interested in the large amounts of Locke's maturing stocks. The whole thing snowballed into 'The Locke's Scandal' which eventually even played a role in the fall of the government. The scandal, bad management, under-investment and economic circumstances all contributed to distilling to cease at Locke's in 1953.

Monasterevan might be another distillery with two periods of female rule. Its early history is obscure, but Jane Goslin possibly ran the distillery in the late 18^th century after her husband John died. What is certain is that in 1918 Gwendella Cassidy took over running the distillery after the death of her husband Robert, their son James still being far too young. Gwendella was the daughter of a French nobleman (her maiden name was de Beler) and met her future husband Robert when he was on a trip in France. Almost surely, she is the only French-born woman at the helm of a Celtic distillery. Unfortunately, she wasn't too successful, as the business went into liquidation in 1921.

More than half a century has passed since Sweet and Flo were at the helm of an Irish whiskey distillery. The time is ripe for an enterprising woman to take the baton from the Locke sisters and add another link to the chain of history. My personal favourite is only too eager to make her dream, Cloonaughill distillery, come true. Here's a dram to Riannon Walsh becoming the next Irish whiskey woman!!

Thanks to Iain Henderson of Laphroaig distillery for permission to use the photo of Bessie from Graham Nown's "Laphroaig - no half measures". The photos of the Locke women are from Andrew Bielenberg's "Locke's Distillery - a history" and reproduced with kind permission of The Lilliput Press Ltd, Dublin, Ireland.

© 2001 Alex Kraaijeveld