Johnnie Walker is the most recognisable Scotch whisky in the world. The square bottle, the slanted label and the striding man in the tailcoat are so familiar that most drinkers assume the story behind them is equally well known: a Kilmarnock grocer starts blending whisky in 1820, and two centuries later his name is on shelves in almost every country on earth.
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READ THE STORYThe reality is more interesting, and considerably less tidy. The brand’s own history, drawn from company records, court papers and board minutes, tells a story of accidents, borrowings and reinventions. Here are five parts of it that rarely make it into the marketing.
1. The Whisky Wasn’t Called Johnnie Walker Until 1908
For the first eight decades of its life, the blend that conquered the world had no name worth speaking of. Inside the company it was known simply as Old Highland Whisky, shortened in correspondence to “OH”. Outside it went by whatever customers chose to call it, which was usually Walker’s whisky, Kilmarnock whisky or, most tellingly, square-bottle whisky.
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The brand as it exists today was assembled in 1908, when the firm engaged the American advertising man Paul E. Derrick, who had already made his reputation in Britain promoting Quaker Oats. Derrick commissioned Tom Browne, then perhaps the best-known comic illustrator in the country, to give an abstract company name a human face. Browne produced a hat-raising Regency gentleman caught in mid-stride, and the figure was appearing on hoardings across British cities by the middle of that year.
John Walker himself had died in 1857, half a century before any of this took place. He never saw the square bottle in its familiar form, never encountered the striding man, and never once heard his business described as Johnnie Walker.
2. The 1820 on the Bottle Is Doing a Lot of Work
“Born 1820, still going strong” followed the striding man onto the posters within a couple of years, and it has been on the packaging ever since. The date rests on a thinner foundation than the confidence of the line suggests.
John Walker’s father Alexander died in 1819, when John was fourteen years old. The family farm at Todriggs was sold, and part of the proceeds went the following year into a grocery business in Kilmarnock, intended chiefly as an income for John and his mother. Because John was still a minor, the shop was run on his behalf by a grocer named Robert Caldwell while the boy learned the trade, and it is Caldwell’s name that appears on the earliest surviving inventory of stock, taken in 1825.
The year therefore marks the point at which family money entered a grocery, rather than the moment a young whisky man opened his own doors.
3.The Blending Skill Came From Tea, Not Whisky
The Kilmarnock shop sold whisky, and it also sold a considerable quantity of tea. By 1825 tea was the second most valuable category in the business after Scotch, running to chests of black tea alongside smaller canisters of green, hyson and twankay. The quantities are too modest to suggest that Walker and Caldwell were blending commercially at that stage, though both would have understood the practice closely, including the way tea preferences varied from one part of Scotland to another.
Blending was a grocer’s discipline long before it became a whisky one, and it arrived carrying a great deal of baggage. The tea trade had been dogged for decades by adulteration scandals, and a generation of aggressive newcomers built their businesses on the claim that blended tea was suspect and that only tea “pure as imported” could be trusted. That association between blending and adulteration followed Scotch whisky well into the twentieth century, and it sat behind the “What is whisky?” dispute that reached a Royal Commission in 1908.
4.Cardhu Was Bought From a Woman Who Had Already Backed Glenfiddich
By the early 1890s the firm had decided that it needed to own distilleries rather than simply buy from them. Alexander Walker’s son Alec was negotiating for Glen Albyn in Inverness when a better opportunity appeared on Speyside.
Cardow, as the distillery was then known, had been rebuilt between 1884 and 1886 under Elizabeth Cumming, the daughter-in-law of its founder. She modernised the site comprehensively and built a formidable reputation for the spirit, which Alfred Barnard described after a visit as unusually rich and admirably suited to blending, reckoning a single gallon capable of carrying ten gallons of plainer spirit.
The stills and equipment she replaced during that rebuild were sold to William Grant in Dufftown, who used them to begin distilling at the new venture he was then building. That venture was Glenfiddich, which started life on equipment discarded from a distillery Johnnie Walker would go on to own.
Cumming had turned down earlier approaches, but ill health prompted her to sell in 1893, and the distillery and farm went to Walker’s for £20,500. Her eldest son John joined the board on condition that he live near the distillery and devote his whole attention to running it. She died less than twelve months after the sale was concluded.
5.A Johnnie Walker Director Helped Run Britain’s War Effort
James Stevenson joined Walker’s as a young man and rose to become one of the most powerful figures in Scotch whisky. He led industry opposition to Lloyd George’s People’s Budget and attacked it publicly in terms that left little room for reconciliation, describing it as conceived in malice and born in spite.
Lloyd George brought him into government regardless, appointing him in 1915 to the new Ministry of Munitions as one of a handpicked group of “push and go” men, chosen because they were unlikely to be absorbed by Whitehall. Stevenson took charge of the organisation linking local munitions manufacturers to central government, and he was created a baronet in 1917.
When Winston Churchill took control of the ministry that summer the two men formed a partnership that outlasted the war. Churchill came to describe him as his right-hand man and took him on to the War Office and then the Colonial Office, resisting requests from Kilmarnock for his return to the whisky business. Throughout all of it Stevenson remained a director of John Walker & Sons.
6.The Square Bottle Came From Gin and Patent Medicine
The square bottle is often presented as an invention of the whisky trade, though it was nothing of the sort. Square bottles were already standard for patent medicines, table sauces and gin by the time Walker’s adopted them, and other blenders were using them by the 1870s. What the firm did was carry a familiar format from other trades into a market where almost everything else was round, with the useful side effect that square bottles packed more efficiently for shipping.
Combined with the label set at its distinctive angle, the effect on a shelf or a bar mirror was immediate, and it worked in markets where very little English was spoken. Alexander Walker registered the label under the Trademark Act in 1877, claiming first use from before 1867, and defended the get-up in the Court of Session in Edinburgh in 1881.
So there you have it: from a farm sale in 1819 to a Regency gentleman invented in an ad agency, that’s six things about Johnnie Walker you probably didn’t know.
