WHISKY HISTORY

The original whisky bar

Teacher’s whisky is known the world over, with its famous Highland Cream blend having first been registered in 1884. What is less well known, however, is that a case may be made for company founder William Teacher being the originator of the specialist whisky bar, so loved by connoisseurs today

WORDS: GAVIN D SMITH

William Teacher was born in 1811, probably in Paisley, and began working in a spinning mill at Bridge of Weir, aged seven.

Subsequently, he was apprenticed to a tailor, Robert Barr, who is credited with helping shape the bright boy who had undertaken less than a year’s formal education into the man who would become the patriarch of one of Scotland’s great whisky dynasties.

Another spell as a millworker was followed by a job in the grocery store of Mrs McDonald in the increasingly industrialised village of Anderston, close to Glasgow and beside the River Clyde. He went on to marry the owner’s daughter Agnes in 1834. Teacher was soon running the business and took out a licence to sell spirits, opening another shop at Cheapside Street, in the heart of Glasgow’s docklands, two years later.

In 1856, Teacher was granted a ‘licence for consumption’ and introduced the concept of his eponymous ‘dram shop’, initially at 450 Argyle Street. Within 25 years, the company operated no fewer than 18 of them in and around Glasgow, making Teacher’s the largest single licence-holder in the city.

In The Spirit of Glasgow: The Story of Teacher’s Whisky, Edward Chisnall paints a splendid picture of the dram shops and their modus operandi.

“It was the Victorian age. William Teacher’s dram shops echoed the standards and dignity of the owner, who was playing a large part in the making of Victorian Glasgow life and character. Bleak by today’s standards, the shops allowed no smoking [a rule maintained until 1926], and no ‘standing of rounds’, but for the princely sum of one silver threepenny piece, would supply a glass of that liquid said to contain all the ingredients necessary to sustain life. The shops were scrupulously clean, and even a hint of over-indulgence would bring one of the hand-picked Highland barmen to the assistance of a luckless patron looking for the way out.”

Although Chisnall writes that the dram shops “echoed the standards and dignity of the owner”, cynics might point out that their strict codes of operation may well also have been a shrewd response to the increasingly vociferous and influential temperance movement and to the fact that the Glasgow authorities were keen to curb the excesses of the city’s many licensed premises. The dram shop model ensured the operators kept their licences!

One aspect of Teacher’s dram shops which is sometimes overlooked is that customers could be confident that what they were purchasing was the ‘real McCoy’. Even during the second half of the 19th century, adulteration of food and drink was rife, as evidenced by the Glasgow Whisky Scandal of 1872.

Ardmore distillery

In that year, the editor of the North British Daily Mail obtained 30 samples of whisky from public houses in Glasgow and had them subjected to analysis. Only two were found to be genuine ‘whisky’, with the others either greatly diluted with water, or more worryingly with methylated spirits, turpentine, furniture polish and even sulphuric acid.

Such was the quality of the malt whisky sold in the dram shops that William Teacher was soon supplying other retailers, and when the 1860 Spirits Act made it legal to blend grain and malt whiskies under bond, Teacher was one of the early blended Scotch evangelists, creating his own blends and soon selling those on a wholesale basis.

The great man himself died in 1876, but the company continued in the hands of his sons William Jr and Adam and their descendants, only losing its independence to Allied Breweries in 1976. A decade previously, the last of the dram shops had been sold off, as their austerity hardly chimed with the spirit of the ‘Swinging Sixties’.

ABOVE: Glasgow’s High Street, with a Teacher’s dram shop on the corner

Teacher’s was unique among Scotch whisky distillers and blenders in establishing its own chain of branded licensed premises in this way, and curiously, although the term ‘dram shop’ has long since disappeared from regular British usage, it remains current in the United States.

‘Dram Shop Laws’ vary from state to state, but according to Cornell Law School:

“A dram shop rule (dram shop law or dram shop act) is a civil liability statute that renders a dram shop liable for the harmful acts of its intoxicated customers when the establishment acts negligently in serving the intoxicated customer alcohol, and the customer then causes harm (usually to a third-party victim) as a result of his/her intoxication (examples include drunk driving accidents and bar fights).”

Such events would never have occurred as a result of patronising Teacher’s dram shops, of course, given the “hand-picked Highland barmen” in place to prevent over-indulgence.

So, is it fanciful to say that today’s specialist whisky bars owe something to the establishments of William Teacher? Perhaps so, but in both cases, the focus is on responsible consumption of high-quality whisky of proven integrity. They certainly have that much in common.