FOUNDER'S TALE
In at
SMWS founder Pip Hills describes how he and a ‘motley bunch’ ignited a revolution in the world of whisky appreciation
WORDS: RICHARD GOSLAN PHOTOS: MIKE WILKINSON
It’s been almost 40 years, but there’s no sign of the passion and enthusiasm that drove Phillip ‘Pip’ Hills to found The Scotch Malt Whisky Society diminishing. Sitting in his study, he expounds about the book he’s writing on the Stirling engine, invented by 24-year-old minister Robert Stirling in Kilmarnock in 1816, or a previous project to restore a Norwegian Kirkenes pilot boat from the 1920s. He’s equally absorbed in his research into the Ismaili form of Islam, or in relating stories about his youth scaling new routes in Glen Coe with Scottish climbing legend, Dougal Haston.
We should all be grateful, however, that in the late 1970s Pip’s focus turned to single cask, single malt whisky – and the question of why more people didn’t know about it. The story of Pip’s discovery of whisky taken from a quarter cask of Glenfarclas when he visited a friend in Aberdeenshire is well enough known.
What’s remarkable to reflect upon now is how few people had experienced whisky in this form at that time. “I was brought up in Grangemouth where my dad was a docker, and whisky was Haig, that's all it was – blended whisky,” he says.
“I grew up knowing it was our national drink but frankly not liking the stuff very much. In the 1970s, malt whisky was practically unknown outside Scotland, and very little known within it.
“What opened my eyes was drinking this farmer’s Glenfarclas that he’d drawn from his own cask and brought over to my friends’ house in a lemonade bottle. I thought it was just wonderful.”
Pip wasn’t the only one who thought it was wonderful, and soon he’d formed a syndicate in Edinburgh to share in the cost of their own quarter cask of Glenfarclas.
After dividing it up, he began to get phone calls from an ever-increasing circle of friends – and strangers – asking if they could also get their hands on some of this amazing whisky.
“That’s when I started thinking to myself, why is somebody not selling this stuff?” says Pip. “I had no background in whisky, but I got introductions to various people in the industry and they all said: ‘Oh there's no market for that, if there had been we'd have done it before’. But the people I spoke to who said it couldn't be done were so dull, there was no imagination.
They were all pulling in big salaries from their companies and they were all selling blended whisky, and they were surprised that anybody would want malt whisky, which showed how little they knew! But my main motivation was fun. It was a fun thing to do.” The fun grew into a formal company named The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, formed in 1983 with the purchase of The Vaults in Leith. “I spent quite a bit of time in Leith, mostly to do with pubs and boats, and it was a very scruffy place,” says Pip.
“But I liked old buildings, and at the time the wine merchant J G Thomson occupied The Vaults. I thought that would do fine and I walked up the stairs one day and asked to buy it. It just so happened they were about to move out, and accepted the offer.”
“At the time the wine merchant J G Thomson occupied The Vaults. I thought that would do fine and I walked up the stairs one day and asked to buy it. It just so happened they were about to move out.”
PIP HILLS
Pip formed the Society’s first Tasting Panel, selecting what he calls a “motley bunch” to set about exploring a language they could use to describe single cask, single malt – something that had never been done before.
“I thought it best to get people who knew whisky but who were literate, but they were by and large useless, despite my care in selecting them,” says Pip. “Hamish Henderson was there, one of Scotland’s foremost poets and songwriters, who should have been brilliant.
I said: ‘How would you describe this whisky, Hamish?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘It's a lovely whisky, just a lovely whisky’. I could get nothing more out of him except that it was a lovely whisky. So although you may have great literary qualities, it doesn't follow that you can describe a whisky.”
Positive coverage followed in the national and international press, possibly thanks to Pip preparing a stew of roadkill hare and pheasant collected on a tour of distilleries with The Wall Street Journal’s wine correspondent, Paul Levy. In The Sunday Times, wine writer Jancis Robinson waxed lyrical about the SMWS discovering “storehouses piled high with casks of gently maturing liquid gold, each one subtly different from the next”.
For her, as with Pip, the mystery was in why the distillers were so reluctant to let drinkers get their hands on this whisky.
“There was a process going on at this time with the rediscovery of the ‘real’ Scotland, something of a cultural revolution, and we were part of that movement,” he says.
“The rediscovery was also lots of fun, and it was poking our fingers up the noses of all sorts of terribly respectable members of the establishment, who all adhered to the old ways and were drinking blended whisky in tumblers filled with soda.
“I was convinced that there had to be a market for something as good as this single cask, single malt that I had discovered, but it took the whisky industry 10 years to waken up to what we were doing at the SMWS.”
Pip describes the foundation of the Society as a “very small revolution” within the whisky industry and within Scotland’s wider cultural awakening and growing sense of self-confidence. His part in that process brought us whisky in its purest form, and set in place the world’s leading whisky club. For that, we raise a glass to SMWS member #1.
“I was convinced that there had to be a market for something as good as this single cask, single malt that I had discovered, but it took the whisky industry 10 years to waken up to what we were doing at the SMWS.”
PIP HILLS
One for the road
Pip’s classic car played an early and central part in the Society’s story
A quirky whisky club needs a quirky car to play a central role in its story. And they don’t get much quirkier than the 17-foot long Lagonda that Pip used to transport those first casks of whisky from Speyside to Edinburgh.
The LG45 Saloon model was built in 1937 and unusually for the time was fitted with a four-cylinder diesel engine from Gardner in Manchester – quite a revolutionary move for the time.
“I bought it in 1974, when it was already 37 years old and I used it every day for the following 25 years, barring a few spells when it was off the road for necessary repairs,” writes Pip in The Founder’s Tale. “I could never have been classed as an old-car enthusiast, for I didn’t much care about old motors other than the one I happened to be driving. That this was a Lagonda 4.5 litre pillarless saloon was a matter of mere chance. I bought it for £500, drove it for about half a million miles and sold it for about 20 times what I paid for it, so it has to be classed as one of my better transactions.”
The car went on to play a role in many more Society adventures, that you can read about in Pip’s book. We were delighted in 2019 to reunite Pip with his Lagonda during our Gathering celebrations, when the car’s current owner visited The Vaults. Pip was even able to demonstrate how he squeezed a quarter cask into the Lagonda’s boot, and take the beautifully restored car for a short spin around Leith. Whisky club creator, and classic car, reunited at our spiritual home.