22 | Queen Victoria’s love of whisky
‘In the afternoon we drove with the three children and Miss Hildyard, getting out at Crathie and walking a little way up the hill to [the] Whiskey Distillery, which we looked at and then down to the carriage again, driving some miles on the road to Invercould. The whole way, the scenery was magnificent and the lights upon the hills, and woods with the setting sun, beautiful.’ The Queen bestowed a royal warrant on the distillery that year – an honour which meant that the whiskies produced there could, from that point onwards, incorporate the word ‘Royal’ into their names. And Victoria’s favourite tipple in the years to come, it is said, was one of the distillery’s own – ‘Begg’s Best.’ The Queen was frequently presented with whisky by her tenants as she made short excursions around her Balmoral estate. On 5 October 1865, for example, she recorded that she had ridden out with ‘Baby [her youngest child Princess Beatrice] and Janie E. to the new little Shiel,’ near Lochnagar. This was a hunting lodge, newly-built for the Queen and yet to be furnished. Victoria was delighted when, ‘Planks were got together to make a seat and table for us, and the fire was lit and tea made. ‘She went on to explain that as this was the first ‘fire kindling’ in the new house the occasion was marked by drinking a little whisky which was then also ‘sent round’ to the gillies who had presumably accompanied the royal party on their trek to the Shiel. On another occasion (9 October 1865), whisky was found necessary to countermand the awful Scottish weather. The royal party arrived at Loch Ordie after a two-and-a-half-hour trek in the pouring rain. The Queen recorded in her journal that it was dark and they were ‘dripping wet’. They ‘went into a Lodge and had tea and whiskey, and Lenchen [Princess Helena] had to have herself dried, she was so wet’. Another favourite stopping-off point for the royals was the so-called ‘Mr Fergusson’s Inn’ on the high road at the Brig o’Turk, which, Victoria wrote, ‘is the very poorest sort of Highland cottage’ Here lived Mrs Ferguson, a person who
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The Queen drank whisky more publicly while carrying out royal duties seemed to hold a particular fascination for the Queen. She was ‘an enormously fat woman, a character who is quite rich and well-dressed, but will not leave the place in which she has lived all her life, selling whisky’. On a visit on 6 September 1869, this lady ‘was brought out and seemed delighted to see’ the Queen, shaking her ‘twice by the hand’. Victoria recorded that Mrs Ferguson was ‘very unwieldy and lame and walks with a crutch’, and though the royal party ‘only stopped a moment and then hurried home’, there is a real sense that this rather well-to-do whisky-selling lady impressed the Queen quite deeply. At other times, the Queen drank whisky more publicly whilst carrying out royal duties. When laying a stone as part of a Cairn on the Balmoral estate on 11 October 1852, for example, she recorded: ‘I placed a stone first, then Albert, the children each according to their ages, the Ladies and Gentlemen, and then everybody present came with a stone in their hand, which they placed. Mc Kay played and whiskey was served round to all. The cairn took I am sure an hour to build up and while it was going on, some cheery reels were danced. It was a gay pretty sight. May God bless this place.’ And again on 8 September 1857, when Victoria and Albert opened a new bridge at the Linn of Dee, whisky was brought into play. ‘We started in Highland state (Albert in Royal Stewart Kilt, andc. — and I and the girls in do [ditto] skirts) with the girls, ladies, and gentlemen, for the Lynn of Dee, to open the new bridge there, in front of which a Triumphal Arch was erected. Ld
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