🥃 The Whisky Ring - Kidd, Eunson & Co
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
In attempting to tie all the loose whisky threads together, each of my emails from now on will hopefully lead on from the previous one, in one way or another. No guarantees, though; sometimes this research into Scotch whisky’s past takes me along all sorts of twists and turns. But I’ll continue to share anything weird and wonderful that comes to light.
Right then... in last week’s email about William Helm, I mentioned another key firm in the Leith whisky trade, namely that of Kidd, Eunson & Company.
Its collapse in 1887 caused difficulties for many other whisky firms – not only in Leith but elsewhere in Scotland.
Now, although I haven’t been able to find a date when the firm was established, John Kidd (born 1836) and Thomas Eunson (born 1829) were the founders of the company. The earliest mention of the firm I could find in the newspaper archives is November 1875, where their address is noted as 8 Quality (now Maritime) Street.
By the summer of 1887, rumours were circulating that Kidd, Eunson & Co were in serious financial difficulties. The firm itself held large quantities of whisky in bond and the worry was that if the company collapsed, it would trigger a crisis in the trade.
This is all starting to sound very familiar, isn’t it?
To give you an idea of the whisky stocks they held, this advert from June 1887 shows some of the different distilleries they had obtained casks from:
A couple of months later, the rumours proved to be correct.
Subsequently, a meeting of the creditors took place. It was revealed that the firm’s estimated total liabilities were £125,868 and its total assets stood at an estimated £92,762. This left a deficit of £33,000 – the equivalent of approximately £3.75 million today.
By this point, however, both Kidd and Eunson themselves were long gone. The former – John Kidd – had popped his clogs in 1880.
Then the latter – Thomas Eunson – took on Kidd’s widow, Annie, as a partner of the company. Now, Annie didn’t actually have anything to do with the running of the business; she was a partner in name only. This was the 1880s and she was a woman, after all.
The following year – 1881 – Thomas Eunson died and Samuel Boe, who had joined the business a month earlier, was assumed as a partner.
What, then, went wrong?
To understand that we need to look at the trade in Leith at the time.
Demand for Scotch whisky was on the up - especially in England and what were then known as ‘the British colonies’.
By the end of March 1885, the quantity of whisky in the bonded warehouses of Leith (which at this point totalled fifty-four) was 1,317,643 gallons (just shy of six million litres).
But the Leith whisky merchants held even more whisky than that. Special arrangements had been made by the distilleries for them to store their casks at the distilleries’ bonded warehouses themselves.
Whisky was also being sent to England under bond – but still owned by the Leith merchants. And, on top of all that, the Leith merchants held whisky under bond in the port for their customers until they were ready for it. Or until the whisky was ready for them.
All in all, Leith was known as the ‘Scottish whisky market of the world’ and would have undoubtedly smelled far better than it does today.
Rising demand was initially difficult to meet. Eager to secure supplies, merchants competed against one another, pushing prices steadily higher. Anticipating further increases, many people rushed into the market – not to keep hold of the whisky, but to resell it quickly at a profit.
Flippers gonna flip and all that…
In the early stages, these speculators did make money. Their success attracted others, and what began as active trading soon turned into outright gambling. The actual value of the whisky was largely ignored, replaced by a focus on short-term price movements.
Meanwhile, production, driven by this speculative demand, started to far exceed actual consumption. Large quantities of stock began to pile up in the bonded warehouses. These growing reserves could only be maintained through heavy financial support from the banks and private lenders.
By the end of July 1887, the quantity of whisky held in bond in Leith had risen to 1,548,094 gallons (just over seven million litres).
With such a huge quantity of whisky being held by just a handful of Leith merchants, known as The Whisky Ring, a certain uneasiness started to creep into the trade.
And then, eventually, the situation became unsustainable and –pop – the bubble burst.
If you’d like to find out more about The Whisky Ring and how it all went wrong for Kidd, Eunson & Co, consider upgrading to read the rest in tomorrow’s follow-up email.
Slà inte! Justine