urbanglasgow.co.uk

calamity · Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2010 3:42 pm Post subject: Red Hackle Whiskey

I remember the adverts all over the place years ago for this brand of whiskey.. and wondered what had happened to it..

Red Hackle Whisky

In 1920 Charles Hepburn established ‘Hepburn and Ross’. Owned jointly with Herbert Ross, a fellow soldier who had fought with the Scottish Horse Regiment in Palestine, Hepburn and Ross had a policy of employing ex-servicemen and produced ‘Red Hackle’ whisky which was aimed primarily at the export market. From uncertain beginnings, the business proved highly successful after the brand was requested in a Vienna night club by the then Prince of Wales, (later briefly Edward VIII), and the company supplied many RAF bases during World War Two.

The name ‘Red Hackle’ is taken from the distinctive red feather worn on the left of the headdress by the Black Watch Regiment with whom Hepburn had served in the Great War. The Black Watch were raised in the wake of the 1715 Jacobite uprisings from clans who had remained loyal to King George 1st and are so named because of their dark kilt and first command of watching over the Highlands.

Although now longer in production, Red Hackle is well remembered, with bottles fetching large sums at auction, and miniatures (such as the examples above) discussed and traded by specialist whisky collectors. Reminiscing about Glasgow’s West End, one local man remembers, ‘my childhood was spent playing around Otago Street and down the back of the mansions [...] there used to be an old railway line which ran under there and a station which closed in the late '40s I think. On the opposite corner is the Trustee Savings Bank Building where I opened my first savings account in 1949. Just next door in Otago Street there used to be a School of Piping and the Red Hackle whisky bond was across the street. It was owned by Charles Hepburn and he had a Rolls Royce converted into a delivery van, black with red coachwork stripes’.

Hepburn was also a supporter of traditional Scottish pipe bands and, in the 1940s, donated premises opposite the Red Hacke building to the fledgling College of Piping. The Red Hackle Pipe Band which he financed was for many years one of the finest in the world (a recording can be seen on the following page), and several Red Hackle pipe bands continue today.

Hepburn’s partner Herbert Ross died in 1957. Two years later, shortly after the death of his wife, Hepburn sold the business for a reputed £2m, commenting, ‘When my wife died … I realised that you never do anything for yourself, only for someone else. You come home in the evening and she asks - “Well, what have you done today?” When that’s gone, a lot of the meaning has gone out of the game.’ an old ad in Otago st...