The Abertay Historical Society

The Abertay Historical Society

Honorary Presidents: Lord Provost of the City of Dundee Principal of the

University of Dundee Principal of the University of

St Andrews

President: Professor C.A. Whatley

Acting Secretary: Mr R. Cullen, Archive and Record Centre, City Chambers, Dundee DDI 3BY

Treasurer: Mr I. McCraw, 27 Pitcairn Road, Downfield, Dundee DD3 9EE *

Editor: Mr C.J. Davey, Dept. of Modern History, University of Dundee DDI 4HN

Publications Secretary: Mr I.E.F. Flett, Archive and Record Centre, City Chambers, Dundee DDI 3BY

The Society was founded in May 1947 and exists to promote interest in history,

particularly the history of the Tayside region, Perthshire and Fife.

Details of recent Society publications will be found inside the back cover.

Cover design by Stevenson Graphics

Front cover illustration: Alexander Riddoch Keiller (courtesy of David Goodfellow)

Printed by Stevenson (Printers) Limited, Dundee Tel: (01382) 225768

KEILLER’S OF

DUNDEE

THE RISE OF THE

MARMALADE

DYNASTY

1800-1897

W M MATTHEW MA PhD FRHists

NUMBER 38

DUNDEE

1998

In memory of my mother

Jemima Nicol Currie

v

FOREWORD:

SOURCES, ISSUES, ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The origins of this book lie in a short entry that I was asked to write in 1995 for the New Dictionary of National Biography on John Mitchell Keiller, the third-generation head of James Keiller & Son, celebrated marmalade manufacturers of Dundee. While undertaking this work, it became evident that the Keillers were a good deal more interesting than the existing celebratory accounts allowed. Learning from Iain Flett, the City Archivist, that his office had acquired a substantial and unsorted collection of Keiller material, assembled in the first instance by Derek Shaw, a former works director with the firm, I approached the Nuffield Foundation for funds to support an extended research project on both the business and the family. The Foundation promptly and generously obliged, and fresh researches began in the summer of 1996.

The archive lacked ledgers, and proved very thin on Keiller's first half-century and, surprisingly, on the period of John Mitchell Keiller's senior partnership, running from his accession in 1877 up to incorporation in 1893. There was, however, an abundance of oddments which could be combined with other local sources and circumstantial material to enable a wide-ranging historical account of the Dundonian enterprise to be attempted with some confidence. And there was for the centrepiece, one splendid archival jewel: a volume of letters, 1871-74, written by the second-generation senior partner, Alexander Keiller, comprising 500 pages and well over 100,000 words. As most of this correspondence was between Alexander Keiller and his brother William, the manager of the firm's Guernsey branch, I was given a number of invaluable leads concerning their work in St Peter Port - which town, by the 1870s, had become the base for their export trade. Following these pointers, on visits to Guernsey itself, I could also hope to construct some picture of the wider Keiller enterprise. Most of my findings specific to the Guernsey business have already been published in The Secret History of Guernsey Marmalade: James Keiller & Son Offshore, 1857-79 (La Societe Guernesiaise, St Peter Port-1998).

From the very start, the Abertay Historical Society expressed an interest in the book, and throughout our dealings has, in the persons of its editor, Chris Davey, and its Council, shown great patience towards me as old plans have been shed and new ones formulated. In particular, they agreed to my suggestion that, to avoid

vi

over-abbreviation of a fascinating story, the publication might extend to two volumes: the first (this one), running up to 1879, the year when the firm left Guernsey and began production in London; and the second carrying the story through and beyond the marmalade business to the fourth-generation Alexander Keiller, excavator of the great neolithic henge at Avebury in Wiltshire, and his farmer cousins in New Zealand.

In this first book, I wish to demonstrate the extent to which Keiller history has to be written on blank paper. There are no reliable alternative accounts available. The founding of the firm, in particular, has been the subject of much fiction; the Guernsey adventure, if mentioned at all, is invariably misdated and misinterpreted; and the pivotal role of the second-generation Alexander Riddoch Keiller in the development of the business has remained totally unrecognized, the larger credits having been awarded to his father, James Keiller, and his son, John Mitchell Keiller.

Keiller's did not invent marmalade, but they set their imprint upon the commodity to the extent that marmalade as we know it today is very much their creation. The continuing equation of their name with that of the famous preserve is quite remarkable, considering that the family left the trade as long ago as 1899. Keiller's also appear to have maintained their dominant position in the marmalade business throughout the nineteenth century - while at the same time advancing a lively commerce in what had originally been their main offering, confectionery. Persisting market leadership was a notable achievement, considering that marmalade was a highly duplicable item, its production being little more than a matter of taking the raw fruit apart and reconstituting it with refined sugar. There were no secret ingredients, no particularly unique methods of processing, and no patent on the generic product. Keiller's way of manufacturing was described in detail in a Scotsman feature in 1867, with, one assumes, the co-operation of the Dundee management. The facts could, for many years before, have been publicized by word of mouth by any factory hand or sugar boiler. In 1873, as we shall see, Keiller's made little effort to stop two of their senior foremen going off to work for their competitors.

The reason for their long-term success lay partly with their name and their reputation for high quality, and, to a probably greater degree, with their constant attention to costs. This latter preoccupation took them to Guernsey, in 1857, as they sought out duty-free sugar; and to London, in 1879, as they

vii

attempted to reduce freights to the lowest possible levels. None of their Victorian rivals had quite that degree of mobility in both production and marketing, Keiller's therefore winning out by a decisively more daring brand of entrepreneurship - largely engineered by Alexander Keiller between the 1850s and the 1870s. At that time, Keiller's were ahead of the field in the sweet trade as well - being much larger, and much more profitable, than, for example, Cadbury's or Rowntree's. Concurrent with business expansion, however, was competition between the

Keillers themselves for power and position within the firm. Perhaps

commercial success stimulated this conflict, by raising the stakes and arousing

concerns of both greed and trusteeship. Internal conflict throughout our period

and beyond ran to a point whereby the family of the founder, James Keiller,

amounting to fifteen surviving children by the 1830s, had, by the 1890s,

withered to a single, frail, father-and-son line of succession. As this line

snapped, the Keillers quitting the trade with the death of John Mitchell Keiller

in 1899, the firm entered their second century in the directorial hands of the

Boyds of Dundee and Glasgow - who sold out to Crosse & Blackwell just after

the First World War.

A powerful historiographical case has been assembled on the conservative, stultifying influences at work in family-run British businesses in the pre-War decades, so it may be argued that the departure of the Keillers was no bad thing. Recent inquiry, however, has rendered such old correlations much less certain, families being seen to offer potentially valuable kinship networks, personal connections, mutual trust, and a positive psychology of long-term sentiment and loyalty that could be sorely missed under more 'professional' management.

1

A body of surviving Keillers, deliberating under the portrait of the founder, and taking measure of the fortune their firm had amassed during the War, might not have abandoned their heritage quite so promptly - especially to buyers whom their recent predecessors had looked down upon as mere imitators. These are events for a later volume, but the roots of the family demise lie firmly in the mid-Victorian years, and as such will be our concern in the pages that follow. The Keillers were pious people, and would no doubt have been familiar with the words of Mark iii, verse 25: 'If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand'.

I have already acknowledged my gratitude to the Nuffield Foundation for its funding, and to Chris Davey and the Abertay Historical Society for their unwavering interest. Writing this book far-distant from both Dundee and St Peter Port, I have also been heavily dependent on assistance from a number of better-placed individuals. Iain Flett and his colleagues at the Dundee Archive

viii

and Record Centre gave invaluable encouragement from the start. David Goodfellow of the well-known Dundee and Broughty Ferry bakery firm, and himself a business historian, volunteered a great deal of friendly information and advice, and supplied important photographic material. Bill Gallienne and Darryl Ogier of the States of Guernsey Island Archives Centre offered wonderful help with their own unfamiliar archival material. Richard Wilson of the University of East Anglia read the entire manuscript with a scrupulous eye, and helped me excise a lot of redundant material. Others, who guided, facilitated, and advised, include Catherine Brown, Roy Church, Rosamund Cleal, Richard Cullen, Bill Currie, Ken Currie, Patricia Keiller, Eileen Moran, Michael Moss, Lynda Murray, Dennis Northmore, Derek Shaw, Tony Slaven, Andrea Stark, David Stockdale, Lisbeth Thorns, Jerry Wright, Clara Young, and Rosamund Young. 1. For a useful survey on these points, see R A Church, 'The Family Firm in Industrial Capitalism:

International Perspectives on Hypotheses and History', Business History, 35, 4 (October 1993) pp 17-43.

ix

CONTENTS

FOREWORD: Sources, Issues, Acknowledgements v

ABBREVIATIONS

xii

GENEALOGY: James Keiller and his Descendants xiii

CHAPTER ONE: Origins of the Enterprise c 1800

I Fictional and Historical Beginnings 1

II Marmalade and Dundee 4

CHAPTER TWO: Growth of the Family and Firm 1800-1850

I Proliferating Keillers 11

II Expansion: Premises, Residences, & Bequests 13

CHAPTER THREE: Mid-Victorian Personnel and Partnerships

I Keillers and Charles Maxwell 23

II Sons and Brothers, 1870s 26

III The Death of William Boyd 34

CHAPTER FOUR: Mid-Victorian Production and Profits

I The Guernsey Extension, 1857 43

II Life and Work in a Channel Island 46

III Factories in Dundee and St Peter Port 50

IV Making Marmalade 52

V Peel, Jam, and Confectionery 58

VI Profitability and Stature 61

CHAPTER FIVE: Domestic and Overseas Trade

I Purchasing from Abroad 72

II Domestic Sales and Combinations 76

III Exports to Europe and the Empire 79

CHAPTER SIX: Family Conflict and the Mid-Victorian Legacy

I 'Distress & Pain' 91

II The Future

94

INDEX 99

x

xi

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

James Keiller, 1775-1839

Gravestone erected by James Keller in memory of his mother

Alexander Keiller’s House, 164 Nethergate, Dundee

Dundee New Exchange and Harbour c. 1836

Dundee Docks, mid-nineteenth century

William Keiller, 1829-1899

Haviland Hall, Guernsey; William Keiller residence 1873-79

Keillers Marmalade jar

xii

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN NOTES

AK-WK (et al)

Letters from Alex Keiller to William Keiller (and others),

Guernsey, Private Copy Letter Book 1871-74, James Keiller

& Son Ltd Archive, Dundee City Archives

ATMSK Account of the Trustees of the late Mrs Margaret Spence or

Keiller Confectioner Dundee, James Keiller & Son Ltd

Archive, Dundee City Archives

TMK Trustees of the Late Mrs Keiller, James Keiller & Son Ltd

Archive, Dundee City Archives

KArch James Keiller & Son Ltd Archive, Dundee City Archives (all

items additional to AK-WK, ATMSK, TMK above)

KGen Keiller Genealogy, from one or more of –

CW Meredith, "Keiller Family Genealogy", ms (1951),

Dundee Public Libraries Local Collection 391 [3 8];

G R Bellow, "Pedigree of Keiller", ms (1952), copy in

possession of Lynda J Murray;

"Stones in the Howff with the name Keiller", ts, Dundee

Public Libraries Local Collection 391 [39];

(extracts from) "Lockit Book of the Burgh of Dundee", ts,

Dundee Public Libraries Local Collection 391 [39]

DPLLC Dundee Public Libraries Local Collection

xiii

GENEALOGY:

JAMES KEILLER AND HIS DESCENDANTS

[KGen. Spouses in italics; women's married names in brackets; names of more prominent people emphasised; spelling of surname standardized]

1 John Keiller, born 10 October 1737.

Married 20 August 1762,

Janet Mathewson, born c!737, died 23 July 1813.

Died 23 March 1804.

Issue:

2 Thomas Keiller, born 20 October 1763

3 William Keiller, born 29 May 1765

4 Janet Keiller, born 25 March 1767

5 John Keiller, born 17 October 1768

6 Agnes Keiller (Wedderspoon), born 19 August 1770, died 18 May 1840

7 JAMES KEILLER, born 30 October 1775, died 28 January 1839

8 David Keiller, born 28 June 1778.

7 James Keiller, born 30 October 1775. Married 25 March 1805,

(a) Barbara Robertson, born c!789, died 22 November 1817.

Issue:

9 Agnes Keiller, born 23 January 1808, died 19 January 1827

10 James Keiller, born 31 May 1810, died December 1849 (?), at sea

11 John Keiller, born 12 September 1811, died 2 November 1857

12 Rosemary Keiller (Martin), born 26 November 1813, died 3 February 1843

13 Thomas Mathewson Keiller, born 8 February 1815, died 28 July 1841

14 David Mathewson Keiller, born 19 August 1817, died 27 June 1847

15 Janet Keiller (Bryson), born 10 June 1816, died 17 September 1846

Married 7 January 1818,

(b) Margaret Spence, daughter of William and Elizabeth Spence, born

1800, died-26 October 1850.

Died 28 January 1839.

Issue:

16 Barbara Keiller (Bruce/Govan), born 26 September 1818, died 1896

17 Anne Riddoch Keiller, born 8 June 1820, died 2 August 1846

xiv

18 Alexander Riddoch Keiller, born 24 November 1821,

died 9 February 1877 19 Margaret Keiller (Halley), born 23 December 1823,

died 20 September 1853 20 Catherine Keiller (Whimster), born 24 May 1825,

died 23 September 1852 21 William Keiller, born 14 September 1829, died 25 January 1899 22 James Wedderspoon Keiller, born 25 April 1832, died May 1833 (?) 23 James Wedderspoon Keiller, born 18 November 1835,

died 29 February1866 24 Elizabeth Keiller (Clark), born 16 November 1838, died 1905. 18 Alexander Riddoch Keiller, born 24 November 1821.

Married 14 November 1848,

Elizabeth Mitchell, daughter of John Mitchell (architect) and

Elizabeth Mitchell, born c1813, died 7 February 1871.

Died 9 February 1877. Issue: 25 James Keiller, born 14 November 1849 26 John Mitchell Keiller, born 1 January 1851, died 2 January 1899. 21 William Keiller, born 14 September 1829. Married 2 June 1859,

(a) Mary Steele of Glasgow. Issue: 27 Arnold William Keiller, born 24 August 1860, died 4 January 1865 28 Edith Mary Keiller (Meredith), born 8 December 1861, died 7 April

1943 29 William Albert Keiller, born 20 September 1863, died 9 July 1926 30 Edwin Keiller, born 18 February 1865, died 14 September 1909 31 Ernest James Keiller, born 29 November 1866, died 3 May 1944 32 Maud Elizabeth Catherine Keiller, born 11 January 1869, died 22 June

1943 33 Ethel Margaret Keiller, born 16 February 1873, died 1904

Married 15 April 1885.

(b)Catherine Bell of Glasgow, died 22 March 1922.

Died 25 January 1899. Issue: 34 Gordon William Keiller, born 12 March 1886 35 Clifton Macnee Keiller, born 15 January 1888 36 Eric Bell Keiller, born 16 December 1889

xv

37 Leila Catherine Keiller, born 18 august 1891 26 John Mitchell Keiller, born 1 January 1851

Married 5 February 1884

Mary Sime Greig, daughter of Dr David Greig and Anne Sime, born

1862, died 1907

Died 2 January 1899 Issue 38 Alexander Keiller, born 1 December 1889, died 29 October 1955

xvi

1

CHAPTER ONE

Origins of the Enterprise

I Fictional and Historical Beginnings

The Keillers appear to have been an entirely Scottish family. The look of their

name and their location in a North Sea trading city, combined with their later

European dealings and a branch factory near Berlin, have led to some casual

surmise that their origins might have been Germanic or Scandinavian. Keillers,

under a variety of phonetic spellings, however, had been resident in Dundee since

at least the early seventeenth century, their name deriving from the lands of Easter

and Wester Keilor in Strathmore, a dozen miles or so north-west of the city.1

No documents concerning the firm's foundation have survived. This fact, however,

has not stopped the writing of numerous short accounts of the early days,2 a fair

precis of which might run as follows. At some date in the eighteenth century

-probably towards its end - James Keiller, a Dundee grocer, heard that a Spanish

ship carrying a cargo of Seville oranges had entered the Tay to escape a storm at

sea. He decided to purchase these, to see what his wife, Janet, could make of them;

and she, experimenting with the sour pippy fruit, invented marmalade. The product

met with such instant success that the couple decided to specialise in its production,

open a factory in Albert Square, and, in 1797, formalise their operations under the

name of James Keiller & Son (sometimes given as James Keiller & Company). The

market was quickly widened at home and abroad, and in consequence of rising

sugar duties in the 1840s (some suggest the 1870s), James Keiller (or possibly his

grandson, John Mitchell Keiller) opened a tax-evading export branch 600-odd

miles south in the island of Guernsey. This account is not an exact paraphrasing of

the diverse authors in question: rather an abbreviated reconstruction based on their

aggregated narratives.

The story is in fact a sequence of errors. There was no late-century Dundee couple

named James and Janet Keiller - and earlier such pairs could not possibly have

included the James Keiller who gave his name to the firm, and who is cited in

directories, represented in oils, and buried in the Howff. Our James was still a

bachelor at the end of the century. Janet Keiller was his mother, not his wife. The "cargo' of Seville oranges could not conceivably have been a shipload, as the word

might be taken to imply; tonnages in the trade were always very modest. Janet

would not have claimed to be the inventor of marmalade; and the Keillers never, at

2

any point in their history, decided to specialise exclusively on its manufacture.

They were, for at least their first half-century, confectioners in the main. There was

no factory production at the outset; no name of 'James Keiller & Son' until the late

1820s; and no company flotation until almost the end of the century. Even the

founding year of 1797 is suspect in the absence of written evidence.-The Guernsey

branch was set up in neither the 1840s nor the 1870s; it did not appear at a time

when sugar duties were rising; and its intended purpose was not initially that of an

export base. The Keillers, moreover, did not rely exclusively on their first and third

generation representatives, James Keiller and John Mitchell Keiller, for their

success. The second generation, in the person of the largely unknown Alexander

Keiller, was decisively the most creative and expansionist of the three.

In the remainder of this chapter we shall try to provide an alternative account,

matching logic, circumstance, and the documentation available - while

acknowledging in advance that this is still just another construction, and that there

are likely to be significant grains of truth, however undetectable, in the old stories.

We shall begin with the assumption - and it can be no more - that there was some

connection between the introduction of marmalade and the founding of the firm,

and, therefore, that the two were not too far apart historically. If the undatable

former event is not linked to the roughly-dateable latter event, it can drift back,

entirely speculatively, to 1700 or earlier.

Elementary genealogical enquiry shows in the first instance that, prior to the

establishment of the firm, the Keiller family in question comprised John Keiller,

his wife Janet Mathewson, a son and a daughter, James and Agnes Keiller, and a

number of older children born in the 1760s. Janet, inevitably the dominant figure in

a business based on the domestic production of cakes, biscuits, jams, jellies, and

sweets, was 53 in 1790, and was to last for another twenty years.3 Her shop was on

the south side of Seagate,4 at the High Street end,

5 and was one of a number of

similar female establishments in the town. She might well have been in the trade

since her marriage in 1762, building up a wide range of skills in both production

and selling, able to put aside some portion of her earnings, and alert to the

possibility of the sort of diversification that could mark her out from her

neighbours. John Keiller, her husband, was the same age, and designated a burgess

and tailor of the town. He was to survive until 1804.6

One can imagine an elderly man with time on his hands and some money in his

purse, inclined to walk the short distance through the wynds between Seagate and the harbour to catch the commercial gossip and see what vessels had just landed

perhaps with the job of looking around for the odd package of fruits or spices that

his wife could use in her shop. An unexpected, storm-stayed vessel would have

3

attracted a good deal of attention; and if it had come all the way from the south of Spain, a country with which Dundee had negligible trading links, it would have been uncommonly interesting. The Seville sours on board, being inedible as fruit, must have been either on consignment to some existing northern producer of marmalade or peel, or part of some speculation by the captain or his Spanish principals. The first possibility is not so far-fetched as it might sound, if we imagine domestic rather than workshop producers. A Scottish recipe of the 1760s for orange marmalade recommends the use of 'the largest best Seville oranges'.

7 In any event, the quantities would have been very small:

a few crates at most.

James Keiller was only 22 in 1797, the year when the firm was allegedly founded. He did not marry until 1805, the year after his father died - and then, not to a Janet but a Barbara. James was the last of four sons,

8 and a number of

his surviving brothers had by then probably set up their own households. James would have moved into the shop, not on any inheritance principle, but because he was still at home - probably interested in baking and sweet-making, submissive to his parents' plans, and anticipating the opportunity to develop the business in his own way after they had passed on. Some writers present him as a young man of experimental bent: one remarking on his arduously-evolved 'theory for the practical conversion of bitter oranges into a palatable preserve', and another commenting on his "remarkable success in experiments with oranges”.

9 When the Keillers decided to formalise their operations, it was

James's name that was used to establish the firm's identity. We can assume that he had earned the distinction, and that his mother was a ready, if cautious, supplier of funds.

We cannot be entirely certain, though, of the initial business nomenclature. Another young Keiller, Agnes, was involved - James's senior by five years, and married to one James Wedderspoon. A document of 1808 gives the name of the business as "Wedderspoon and Keiller's”.

10 Agnes's credentials are confirmed

by her branching out on her own as a confectioner in Murraygate in later years." By then the Seagate firm had presumably reverted to simple 'James Keiller'. The importance of the connection with Agnes and her husband is clearly indicated by the choice of the name Wedderspoon for James Keiller's seventh and eighth sons, (the former dying in infancy.)

As for the very start of the operation, Victorian writers, comparatively close to the events in question, were notably circumspect on the matter of dating. Charles Maxwell, the first non-Keiller to hold a partnership in the firm, and a historian of Dundee, told the British Association for the Advancement of

4

Science in 1867: 'It is between sixty and seventy years (that is, about the beginning

of the present century) since Dundee marmalade was first manufactured as an

article of commerce, by the late Mr James Keiller.'12

David Bremner, who

undertook a close examination of the Keiller business that same year, declared that

James Keiller had introduced marmalade as a means of 'increasing the variety of

his production' at 'about the beginning of the present century'.13

Ten years later, the

Dundee Courier & Argus, in its obituary of Alexander Keiller, repeated Bremner's

estimate: 'Messrs Keiller's trade commenced with the present century'.14

II Marmalade and Dundee

Notions of early Keiller specialisation in marmalade, with manufacturing

conducted in a large, custom-built factory, are, as suggested, imaginary. Keillers

were general confectioners from the outset, and remained in the small premises at 1

Seagate, just up from the harbour, until after James's death in 1839. Bremner

observed that for at least the first thirty years marmalade remained 'a subordinate

part of Mr Keiller's business'.15

In a stock-taking exercise of March 1833, thirty

years or so on from their foundation, the firm valued their commodity holdings at

£536, of which marmalade accounted for a mere £27. The principal items in their

premises were sweets and an assortment of ingredients for their manufacture.16

No

further figures are available for Dundee, but forty years later, in the eight months

following October 1872, the value of goods sold by Keiller's Guernsey branch

came to £54,395. Marmalade's contribution was only £7,353. 'Confections &

Boilings' accounted for £31,130.17

Such diversity is not at all surprising. The idea of a small turn-of-century family

business putting all its effort into a single, comparatively new product, awkwardly

dependent on long-distance importations of oranges and sugar, makes little sense.

No early-nineteenth century books on Dundee have any mention of James Keiller

or of marmalade, and no vessels are documented arriving with oranges and leaving

with the finished product. Elementary economics suggested that Keiller's

accompanied their marmalade-making with the continued production of sweets,

cakes, jams, and other preserves based on the celebrated and abundant fruits of the

neighbourhood. Tasty little lozenges cut into appealing shapes, and jars of colourful

jams from the fruits of Gowrie, however, failed to give them any particular fame.

Past writers, accordingly, have chosen to be retrospectively selective, focusing on

the one item that gave Keiller's a special identity and extrapolating backwards on

false premises.

As for Keiller's alleged introduction of marmalade, even the French are prepared to

hand this particular comestible to the Scots, Larousse Gastronomique declaring

5

that it was 'invented by a manufacturer from Dundee in Scotland about 1790'.18

But

Keiller's did not discover the general principles of marmalade-making; neither did

they meet the lesser claim of having introduced marmalade manufactured

specifically from oranges. We have already cited a Scottish recipe of the 1760s for

marmalade made from Seville sours. What Keiller's did do, was to promote orange

marmalade of a certain, relatively novel, sort. As their modification of the product

was so well executed, and as they were, in David Bremner's words, 'the first in the

country to produce it as an article of commerce', 19

the achievement was a major

one, giving them a long-lasting position as market leaders and enabling them

permanently to redefine the product.

The derivation of the word - through ancient and modern terms for quince (notably

marmelo in Portuguese), from which the product was traditionally made

-establishes preserve-making by the boiling of fruit with white sugars as a

centuries-old practice. According to the OED, the word's first appearance in

English was in 1480.20

Other marmalade fruits 'boiled soft and then reboiled with

sugar' since Tudor and Stuart times, according to C A Wilson, included peaches,

apples, pears, damsons, prunes, wardens, medlars, and services - softer fruits being

more suitable for jams. The technique subsequently spread to oranges - first to the

bitter sort available in southern Europe since the Arab and Berber conquests, and

then to the sweeter varieties introduced from the Far East in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries.21

In 1605, Sir Hugh Plat advised on 'how to preserve oranges after the Portugall

fashion'; and in 1661 Gervase Markham offered a recipe for an 'Excellent

marmalade of oranges'.22

M Kettilby's orange marmalade of 1714 had a quantity of

'fair large Sevil-oranges' as its base.23

One must not, though, visualise any

extensive consumption of orange marmalade as presently known. Chambers's

Cyclopaedia of 1728 excludes the critically distinctive Seville area from its list of

European and Asiatic sources of oranges; and little of the fruit could have found its

way into marmalade boilings by the early-eighteenth century, given the same

volume's definition of the preserve as 'a Confection made of the Juice or Pulp of

Several fruits, as Plumbs, Apricocks, Quince, etc. boiled with Sugar into a

Consistence'.24

But orange marmalade of a sort was made, to a limited, but

increasing, degree; a heavy, sticky preparation, sold in boxes, and containing peel

that had been grated and beaten. At the table it was sliced rather than spread

-cutting, in Plat's words, 'like an hard egg'.25

Therein lay the opportunity for any would-be marmalade manufacturer - pioneering a

more attractive preserve, and taking advantage of some earlier advances in the

production of lighter marmalades. The desire for thinner, more liquid conserves with a

6

citric flavour is shown, Wilson suggests, by the common addition of orange and

lemon peels to apple-pippin jellies. This predilection, she observes, came into

Britain from France, through the court of Charles II, and it soon developed,

logically, from an apple conserve with orange peel into an orange conserve with

orange peel.26

It was the sliced peel, and the jellied thinness of the preparation, that

distinguished it from the solid old marmalades of Plat, Markham.and Kertilby.

All versions were thought to possess curative functions, the lighter ones having the

edge by their visible preservation of the cordial and cold-relieving tonic peel, which

was also thought to have stimulative properties for the digestion and the appetite.27

The Arabs who introduced sours into Southern Spain used their skins for digestive

purposes.28

A central consideration in the history of the Seville orange is that, as a

fruit pulled from the tree, it cannot be eaten, and was first grown for such medicinal

rather than culinary processing - a fact that would have been known, and probably

promoted, by early marmalade-makers. Consumers, accordingly, were not just

purchasing because they liked the taste of the preserve. Marmalade's 'tonic qualities

whet our appetites', declared Confectionery in 1896.29

'The effect of marmalade on

the salivary glands is readily noticeable', write Keiller's in a modern promotional

item, 'and this contributes largely to its popularity at the breakfast table'.30

The Scots, lacking any natural abundance of quinces, developed a strong liking for

both the old beaten and the new peel preserves, giving the latter the peculiarly

Scottish name of 'chip' marmalade. Domestic and grocery production was helped

by the increasing availability of refined white sugar from the processing houses in

the main cities.31

Another specially Northern contribution was the partial shifting

of marmalade from the dessert board to the breakfast table, as a genteel, warming

alternative to the traditional early-morning whisky and ale.

Keiller's, precisely, were the first firm to engage in the sustained commercial

exploitation of the Scottish chip variety. It was not, generally, a very difficult line

of business to pursue. Recipes were available domestically, and from books that

could be borrowed from lending libraries.32

Technology was largely confined to

boiling pans and skin-slicing devices; semi-skilled labour could be got from the

family and the locality; capital was cash for rents and the purchase of sugar, fruits,

coal, and pots; management was recruitable from both sexes; and perishability was

not an immediate problem. The preserve was just waiting for the sort of

refinements in production, and energy in selling, that could lead to a breakthrough

in its popularity. Keiller's advanced a specific, marketable product from within the evolving range of marmalades; and theirs came to be seen, in consequence of their

great success, world-wide, as the essential marmalade. When the word is used

today, people visualise not some item made from damsons or quinces, or some

7

sticky beaten mass of boiled sugar and orange, but the peely, golden conserve, easy

to spread and sweetly astringent to the taste, that the Keiller family laboured hard to

promote.

When the Keillers, mother, father, and son, sat down to contemplate the prospects

for the firm they were proposing to establish, they must have checked their way

through quite a substantial list of considerations. They would, for one thing, have

recognised that there was no particular geographical factor giving Dundee any

decisive advantage over Glasgow, Edinburgh, or London; rather the opposite.

Selling, however, would be fairly straightforward in that their horizons would have

been initially local, and competition was going to be addressed by the very

introduction of marmalade to their shelves. The Dundee market, though,

comprised only about 25,000 souls,33

and pre-railway land transport to

neighbouring communities, albeit lately improved by turnpike roads,34

was still

very expensive. Water offered by far the cheapest carriage, meaning that Keiller's

could, if they dared, pack the odd parcel into a coastal smack and send it up or

down the Tay, round to Angus, or across to the shores of Fife.

Their main reflections at the start, however, were probably focused on buying: how

to bring in sugar, Seville oranges, and soft fruits for their preserves; sugar,

cornflour, gum, and spices for their sweets; coal for fuel; and paper, pots, casks,

and crates for packaging. Of these items, soft fruits and coal could all be had from

nearby Scottish sources, with fuel also just starting to come up from Newcastle.35

The abundance of fruits from the carses and straths to the north of the city, and the

skills that had developed around their processing, were perhaps the principal

advantage of producing in the town - but even in this respect Dundee did not enjoy

any unique privilege. Glasgow, for example, had its own fruit suppliers in the

orchards of Lanarkshire.

As for the rest, there was a possibly alarming dependence on overseas sources of

supply - sugar and Seville sours no doubt causing most of the worries in the early

years of the nineteenth century; the former coming from distant West Indies

markets under threat of disruption from revolutionary and anti-slavery forces, the

alter purchased from a very restricted part of southern Spain and subject to a tight

seasonally. Much larger supplies of oranges were to be had from the east coast of

Spain around Valencia, and huge quantities were later to come in from the Azores,

but sours - the best for peel-astringency, aroma and pecten - were largely confined

ID the Guadalquivir valley around Seville. The Hon R Dundas Murray, who sailed acre in the 1840s, wrote how the city's presence was 'announced by a cloud of

fragrance exhaled by her girdle of orange-groves', so powerful 'that the senses feel

oppressed'.36

Sugars came in from a much wider range of sources, but all

8

carried heavy duties - a cost that was to trouble the firm through much of the nineteenth century, and from which, as we shall see later, Guernsey was for a time to provide an escape.

Such imports also raised issues of long-distance transport. How were these to be carried to Dundee when the city had virtually no overseas contacts beyond the Baltic and the North Sea? Gordon Jackson's figures for 1789 show that of 67 vessels entering the port, 60 arrived from these high-latitude sources, the remainder being whalers and craft from southern Europe. None came from the West Indies, Seville, or the gum and spice lands of Africa and the Orient.

37 The

answers to the difficulty lay in the entrepot facilities of Glasgow and London. The Glasgow area, embracing Greenock, was a major importer and refiner of sugar; and London was an exchange for just about every important item in international trade. The key shipping company was the Dundee & Perth, founded in 1798 and running a service to Glasgow and other west coast ports by way of the recently completed Forth & Clyde Canal.

38 'In this way', writes

Jackson of the 1820s, 'imports could be had from Jamaica, Demerara, Trinidad, Grenada, Antigua and St Lucia'

39 - these comprising both refined and raw

sugar, some of the latter for the modest Dundee Sugar Refining Company, a few yards round the corner from the Keiller shop in Seagate.

London trade could be conducted by the same shipping concern. Jackson notes among its consignments, 'Indian spices, West Indian sugar, African gum' - all of great interest to the Keillers. And London was almost certainly the immediate source of oranges from Seville - the only vessel directly entering Dundee in 1789 from the broad vicinity of Andalusia being one that had loaded at Malaga, 'with assorted fresh and dried fruit' .

40 A principal advantage of

Dundee, in the view of the Rev. Robert Small shortly before the firm was established, was 'the noble river on which it is situated, opening to the inhabitants, a ready communication with the London market'.

41

NOTES

1. George F Black, The Surnames of Scotland: Their Origin, Meaning, and History (New York, 1946) p

389; also Andrew Jervise, Memories of Angus and the Mearns (Edinburgh 1861) pp 320-22; Alex J Warden, Angus or Forfarshire, The Land and People (Dundee 1880-85) V, p 43.

2. James Keiller & Son Ltd, 'The Romance of Keillers', The Court Journal (17 July 1914); ibid, 'Marmalade in the Making', Food (March 1948); ibid, 'The History of Keiller Marmalade', ts, DPLLC; ibid, labels on 1997 bicentenary marmalade pots; Anon, '"From Little Acorns.." Keiller of Dundee', The Grocer MonthlySupplement (April 1951); Barker & Dobson Group pic, 'Keiller - Unique in British Food History', ts, DPLLC; Anon, 'The History of Keiller' ts (1952), DPLLC; John Keay & Julia Keay, Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland (London 1994) p 566; J M Jackson, 'Leading Industries', in J M Jackson (ed),

9

The Third Statistical Account of Scotland. The City of Dundee (Arbroath 1979) p 179; Dorothea Joblin, Behold the Plains (Auckland 1970) pp 76-77; C Anne Wilson, The Book of Marmalade (London 1985) pp 65-67; David Gunston, 'Digging into marmalade', The Dominion (New Zealand) 3 October 1987;

Patricia Collins, 'John Mitchell Keiller', in Antony Slaven & Sydney Checkland (eds), Dictionary of Scottish Business Biography, II, (Aberdeen 1990) p 37.

3. KGen

4. It is possible that the shop was initially located in Murraygate. A 1797 document places James Keiller

there, but it might be that the house was separate from the shop - as it certainly was, at 78 Murraygate, in 1818. Forfarshire Lieutenancy Record 1797-1801, Dundee City Archives; The Dundee Directory for 1818 (Dundee 1818).

5. Dundee Directories, 1818, 1824-25. (Such annual lists of trades and addresses come under a variety of titles and publishers, and will usually be cited generically, as here).

6. KGen

7. Cited in Wilson, Book of Marmalade, p 153.

8. KGen. By way of incidental fact, it can be noted that James Keiller became liable for military service in 1797, early in the Napoleonic Wars, and was selected with 22 others in the first ballot. Presumably unwilling to be distracted from his work, he offered James Kinnear, a weaver from Brechin, as a substitute, and this offer was accepted, but as Kinnear 'walked off before being swore in', Keiller was obliged to pay a hefty £10 fine. Forfarshire Lieutenancy Record 1797-1801, Dundee City Archives. I am grateful to Jerry Wright for alerting me to this information, and to Richard Cullen for supplying archival details.

9. William Kidd & Sons, Dundee Past and Present (Dundee 1910) p 104; A H Millar, Glimpses of Old and New Dundee (Dundee 1925) p 94.

10. People's Journal, 8 July 1950

11. Dundee Directories of 1820s and 1830s

12. Charles Maxwell, 'The Confectionery and Marmalade Trade of Dundee', Meeting of the British

Association for the Advancement of Science in Dundee September 1867 (Dundee 1868) p 47.

13. David Bremner, The Industries of Scotland (Newton Abbott 1969 reprint of 1868 volume) p 467.

14. Dundee Courier & Argus, 12 February 1877

15. Bremner, Industries of Scotland, p 467. It should be noted that the term 'confectionary', by nineteenth-century usage, embraced preserves as well as sweets.

16. Stock Taken March 27* 1833, Miscellaneous Documents, KArch

17. AK-WK, I Nov 1873; see also 29 Oct 1873

18. (English ed, London 1900) p 755.

19. Bremner, Industries of Scotland, p 467.

20. The story that the term derives from Mary Queen of Scots' use of oranges to cure headaches - 'Marie est

malade' - is no more than pretty word play. A Brisbane correspondent, of Keiller descent, relates another,

10

family, explanation:' the name came about from Janet Keiller telling her son to fetch more oranges from

the shore - "Ma me lad" - more my lad! (Leigh Chester-Master 27 Nov 1998)

21. Wilson, Book of Marmalade, pp 45-48.

22. Cited in ibid, p 48.

23. Cited in ibid, pp 55, 152.

24. Chambers's Cyclopaedia, p 500.

25. Wilson, Book of Marmalade, p 150

26. ibid, pp 48-55.

27. ibid, pp 54-57.

28. Chambers'* Encyclopaedia (London & Edinburgh 1926) VII, p 619.

29. 12 Dec 1896, p 812.

30. Quoted in Frances Fox Sandmel, 'Pots for keeping things in', cutting of unknown provenance;

31. John M Hutcheson, Notes on the Sugar Industry of the United Kingdom (Greenock 1901) Chapter Four.

32. Robert Nicoll, for example, 'the Second Burns' and subsequent Chartist editor of The Leeds Times (and great-great-great-uncle of the present author) had a lending library in Castle Street, just round the corner

from Keiller's in Seagate, in the 1830s. Andrew Murray Scott, Discovering Dundee: The Story of a City (Worcester 1992) p 64; entry in Dictionary of National Biography.

33. Charles Maxwell, A Historical and Descriptive Guide to Dundee (Dundee 1858) p 4.

34. Dundee in 1793 and 1833: the First and Second Statistical Accounts (St Andrews 1991) p 52.

35. G Jackson with Kate Kinnear, The Trade and Shipping of Dundee, 1780-1850 (Dundee 1991) pp 26-27.

36. Hon R Dundas Murray, The Cities and Wilds ofAndalucia, vol 1 (London 1850) p 132.

37. Jackson, Trade of Dundee, p 81.

38. Jean Lindsay, The Canals of Scotland (Newton Abbott 1968) pp 31-33.


40. ibid, p 81.

41. Dundee in 1793 and 1833, p 51.

11

CHAPTER TWO

Growth of the Family and Firm: 1800-1850

I Proliferating Keillers

James Keiller & Son was, in considerable measure, run by women in its first decades. James himself was a young man at the outset; and his father, John, died in 1804. There were three females of working age at the start of the new century: Janet Mathewson, aged about 62, and her daughters Janet Keiller, 32, and Agnes Keiller, 29, the first and last, as we have seen, being prominent in the business. By the time of old Janet's death in 1813, Barbara Robertson, James's first wife, had given birth to three children, with a fourth on the way. It is doubtful if she could have contributed much to the firm, given that she had seven babies in nine years, surviving the last delivery by only a couple of months. With her demise in 1817 -following Janet's and Agnes's earlier departures - James, with a family of small children to tend, lost all his female support. He proceeded with haste to rectify the situation and married Margaret Spence in January 1818, only a few weeks after Barbara's death. James's paternal urges were as strong as ever, Margaret bearing him nine more children between 1818 and 1838.

1 Unlike her predecessor, she had the strength to

survive the experience and take an important part in the business. When James Keiller himself died of a stroke on 28 January 1839, at the age of 63, Margaret met the crisis by taking charge on her own. One of the firm's designations in the early 1840s was 'Mrs James and Son'.

2 James Keiller junior,

however - who had been introduced as a partner in 1828, when the firm acquired is '& Son' designation

3 - was by then absent from the scene, probably

replaced by Margaret's oldest son, Alex, who reached the age of 18 only months after his father's death.

4 When Margaret herself died, on 26 October

1850, Alex was an experienced 28-year-old, married with a child - another James - and well able to assume the role of family and business head.

The Keillers seemed to have taken good genetic care of the future. James had sixteen children in all, of whom fifteen reached maturity. Eight were boys, and six carried.

5 Such devotion to child-rearing was in part a defensive reaction to

Dundee's unhealthy urban environment and high infant mortality rates. The New Statistical Account of 1833 itemised problems of population density, 'swampiness', 'impurity of the atmosphere', and 'negligent habits of the people as to cleanliness' in the town. 1832 and 1833 alone had witnessed three severe outbreaks of cholera, the last of which had been 'very fatal' along Seagate.

6

12

The Keillers' high survival rate, in the middle of Dundee, must have had something

to do with careful domestic practices and the decent living standards of successful

confectioners. On the other hand, by surmounting the dreaded problems of

mortality, they might have generated new pressures. With nearly twenty mouths to

feed, the Keiller elders would have been forced into a rather constricting attention

to duty, reducing their latitude, in time and resources, for wealth-generating

innovation.

Because of this frustration, and probably also because she wished to reserve the

gains of enterprise for her own children, Margaret Keiller had an interest in

dislodging the children of her predecessor, Barbara. This process, when effected,

represented the first serious narrowing of the broad descendant base that James had

set up in his two marriages. On entering the family in 1818, Margaret became

stepmother to seven small children. All the first family survived into maturity. Of

these members, however, Agnes died some years before her father; and most of the

others failed to reach middle age, dying between 1841 and 1847, aged 26 to 30.

Poor health alone, however, did not bring about the family's demise. Two of the

children had already felt the need to leave Dundee - Janet marrying in Montreal, and

David dying in Toronto.

As for Barbara's remaining boys, John found independence by opening his own

confectionery shop at 8 Nethergate.7 For James junior, the evidence is uncertain.

The Poor Law Assessment for the town has him working as a confectioner on his

own account between 1834 and 1839 also in Nethergate.8 Since local directories of

these years mention John, but not James, it is possible that the Assessment confused

the initials, and that James was in fact still at Seagate - as we would expect from his

status in the firm. Whatever the truth of the matter, by the 1840s he appears to have

left Dundee, perhaps to follow his brother and sister to North America. Many years

later, Alex Keiller received a begging letter from a Mrs James Keiller's niece in the

United States. He was disinclined to help, observing how the last payment he had

sent to Mrs Keiller's youngest son 'no sooner reached him than he ... went at once

and got married & sent the beautiful gold printed intimation cards of the fact'. There

were, he complained, 'considerable claims upon me by relations on this side of the

water'. He was no longer willing 'to send money to America to people who are all

come to mature age 9 - hinting, perhaps, at past help, when the children were

younger. Mrs Keiller was probably James's widow, and the son, Alex's

half-nephew.

Margaret's boys, one assumes, were educated at the Dundee Public Seminaries -an

amalgam of the former Grammar School, English School, and Academy, brought

together in 1834 in the Doric splendours of George Angus's new building just north

13

of the town-centre. Alexander Keiller was certainly there before and after the

rehousing.10

The three components remained academically separate; the English

School, teaching language, grammar, and book-keeping," was probably the one that

the Keillers attended, to pick up the linguistic and accounting skills necessary for

good business.

II Business Expansion: Premises, Residences, and Bequests

With the personnel in place - or out of it, as the case may be - we can turn to the

business itself and take stock of its growth over the first half-century. First, and in

greatest detail, we can examine issues of overall scale and income; second, the

range of production; third, the securing of what the Keillers would have termed

'needful' raw materials; and fourth, the markets in which they disposed of their

produce. For all of these issues, the evidence is for the most part circumstantial; and

the bulk of it suggests that nothing very radical or high-speed took place in the years

up to James's death in 1839. The 1840s, however, did show distinct signs of

acceleration.

On the question of scale, we must, for the most part, proceed tangentially, by

looking at the size and location of Keillers' business premises and private

residences, and at the bequests of James Keiller in 1839 and Margaret Keiller in

1850. The firm began life at the top end of Seagate - an eastward extension of the

High Street and close to the harbour, though separated from it by a maze of narrow

wynds and pends.12

Seagate was still not an entirely commercial thoroughfare,

having once been, in the words of a 1834 directory, 'the abode of the principal

families of the county' with 'still several genteel residences in it'.13

The incidence of

cholera there in 1833,14

however, might suggest that the street had lately witnessed

some social decline. The Keillers are usually placed at number one, or "Top",

Seagate, and remained there until around 1845 - without any known extensions or

supplementary accommodation. It was not, remotely, the 'factory' that some have

mentioned. The business, it seems, was able to function in a single corner location

for forty-odd years after its foundation. This fact cannot be consistent with rapid

growth.

It was Margaret Keiller, a few years after James's death, who decided on the moves

to 1 Castle Street and New Inn Entry,15

the former close by the imposing

pedimented facade of Samuel Bell's Theatre Royal (and possibly also fronting the

High Street between William Adam's Town House and Bell's Trades House).16

Castle Street, a short, elegant road of the 1790s, ran down to the harbour a few score

yards west of Seagate.17

New Inn Entry was nearby, off the north side of the High

Street. The first location was to become the shop; the second, the works.

14

These premises might have been acquired by purchase rather than rental,

partnership documents of the 1860s - discussed below - showing that by that decade

at least the firm was exercising a clear preference for owner occupation.

The Keillers' earliest houses were also unexceptional - though, again, with evidence

of improvement in the 1840s. James Keiller himself liked to live close to his work.

In 1818 he occupied 78 Murraygate, a street running roughly parallel with Seagate

and connected to it by the short passage of Horse Wynd. Some time in the 1820s, he

moved with his two families to Rankine's Court off the High Street. A few years

later, and up to the time of James's death, the Keillers were in nearby Campbell's

Close.18

None of these houses lay more than a five-minute walk from the shop.

The next domestic shift, around 1841, was Margaret's doing, and took them to 21

Castle Street, just down from the site of their later shop, and placing them in the

company of merchants, tradesmen, and other shopkeepers - two bakers, a butcher, a

draper, a milliner, a haberdasher, and a tobacconist. The household comprised

Margaret, her daughters Ann, Catherine, Margaret, and Elizabeth, her sons, Alex,

William, and Wedd - with two servants, Elizabeth Purie and Helen Johnston, giving

it a distinctly bourgeois complexion.19

Only one of her children - Barbara, the oldest

- had by then left home, but all the issue of the first family had departed. A year or

two later, Margaret moved again, this time to a fine new flat at 30 Reform Street,

which she rented from an Edinburgh landlord for £27 a year.20

In 1851 - by which

time Margaret was dead, and Alex a married man - the place was occupied by an

assortment of bachelors and spinsters: William and Wedd, their sister Margaret,

their cousin Margaret Robertson, and a servant, Jean Halket.21

These various

residences gave the Keillers not only easy access to their business, but

living-quarters in the centre of an increasingly handsome town that combined

centuries-old narrow, dark closes and high timber houses with the sober grey

classicism of more recent buildings and terraces, all lying on a south-facing slope

above the waters of the Tay.

Some time in the late 1840s, Margaret also bought a pair of semi-detached houses

in Prospect Place,22

at the foot of the Law, to the north of the town - part of what

McKean and Walker describe as 'Dundee's riposte to Blacket Place, Edinburgh'.23

There is mention too of a purchase on nearby Constitution Road, 24

but there is

much confusion of locational terminology in the newly developed 'Chapelshade'

area, and there is no certainty that this was a separate acquisition. Whatever its

extent, such house-buying indicates that there was now money to spend beyond the immediate demands of business survival and domestic subsistence. This suggestion

is consistent with evidence from the 1851 census, showing the firm now with a

labour force of 50 women and 10 men.25

In 1850, Margaret's Trustees settled a bill

15

with Thomas Innes, marble-cutter, for four chimney pieces at Prospect Place - two

in dove marble for the dining-rooms, and two in vein marble for unspecified rooms,

the total cost being £29.26

Ten years later, one of the properties was valued at

£1,240, and sold at auction, 'after Competition', for £1,352.27

One can only guess at

the purpose of this investment. It might have been to do with some wish of

Margaret's to live in a quiet and stylish neighbourhood in her later years, or to

secure residences for her growing family, or to gain rental income, or to speculate in

property - or some combination of the four. Her son William, subsequent to his

marriage in 1859, bought one of the dwellings and held it until the 1870s 28

. This

house appears to have been Wedd's in the first instance, the younger brother - then

in Guernsey - transferring ownership to William in May 1860 for a sum of £1,352.29

Alex also had a house in the neighbourhood, possibly the same one, between the

early and mid 'fifties, later commencing his own speedy climb up the property

market in Dundee: to 164 Nethergate, a few doors along from Provost Riddoch's old

residence, by way of 3 (now 5) Nelson Street, 4 Roseangle, and 4 Hawkhill Place 30

.

Trust papers contain no mention whatever of any of Barbara Keiller's surviving

children.

This impression, from premises and residences, of initially slow growth prior to

Margaret's accession is further confirmed by the stock-taking sheet of 27 March

1833, already cited. The total for all the contents was valued at £536. To this sum

was added £145 for Tamilly Books' and £334 for 'Country do' - giving a grand total

of £1,015. Debts estimated at £345, and bills outstanding at £438, brought the final

figure down to £232.31

Omissions from certain contemporary portrayals may also be significant. The New

Statistical Account, also of 1833, carried a nine-page section on the industries of

Dundee, mentioning neither marmalade nor Keiller's.32

This was, admittedly, a bad

time for trade - but the problems were common to the whole business community.

James Keiller himself had neither the rank nor the money at the age of 46 to qualify

for inclusion in Henry Harwood's famous. 1821 painting - 'The Executive' - of

sixteen mercantile and other Dundonians outside the old Town House.33

Poor Law Assessments, based on rents and property valuations, give further

confirmation of inconsequential size. James Keiller appears as still part of the

common mass of shopkeepers; 1823/24, 1825/28, 1828/29, 1830/31, and 1837/38

show even his sister Agnes Wedderspoon with a higher rating. In the late 1820s,

William Gall was Dundee's most heavily-charged confectioner - paying £1 8s as against Keiller's 3s in 1828/29, for example. David Baxter, struggling at the

Dundee Sugar Refining Company,34

was then charged £8 10s. By the last year in

winch he appears, 1837/38, James Keiller's payment had risen to 15s - but Agnes's

was 18s.35

16

Further evidence of the scale of early growth might have been provided by James

Keiller's will, but no such document has survived. The archive does, however,

contain a note of 11 November 1847 in which one of his daughters, Catherine

Whimster, acknowledges receipt, from her mother, of a sum of £49.19s,

representing 'my share of my late father's estate.'36

This might have been a marriage

portion and, as such, scarcely representative of family -riches.

By the time of Margaret's death in 1850, however, the situation had notably

improved for the incoming generation. Dundee trade overall greatly expanded after

the 1837-42 depression, helped by the arrival of the railways which reached the

town in 1832. Margaret's estate, as we have seen, was deemed large enough to

require a Trust to administer her assets. Payments were made to all her children on

an annual basis, though by principles and patterns that are impossible to determine.

Barbara, for example, summarised her income from what she termed the 'surplus

estate' as, sequentially, £87, £81, £71, £29, and £27, 1851 to 1855: a very decent

£305 in all.37

In 1858 she received £39 for the year; and in 1859, £42.38

Margaret

and Janet Whimster of Montrose, the 'pupilary' children of the now-deceased

Catherine, got £26 in 1855 and £30 in 1856.39

Catherine Halley of Liverpool,

another minor, and only child of the late Margaret Keiller junior, received a

handsome £150 in 1857.40

Alex Keiller took the sums necessary for paying his feu

duties and insurance in Chapelshade.41

The Prospect Place properties, as observed, were sold off in 1860 - with William

acquiring ownership of one of them, and renting it out for most of his sojourn in

Guernsey. There is no means of telling how the money raised was distributed, the

Trust being wound up - and with it, all records - at about the same time. As we have

suggested, however, Wedd might have been a major beneficiary. And one of the

first charges on the Trust arose from Margaret's funeral - surviving accounts, which

exclude costs of food and refreshments, suggesting an unostentatious outlay of

around £15.42

The second broad business issue - the range of production - can be examined

briefly by means of the 1833 stock sheet. As already shown, Keiller's, thirty years

or more after their foundation, were still not remotely a marmalade enterprise. The

£27-worth of marmalade stocks is all the more surprising when it is borne in mind

that the valuation was made at the time when the shop would have needed large

stocks to last the half-year and more through to the start of the next season. Other

fruit products, such as jams, peels, and juices, were set at £113. Sugar - loaf,

crushed, and brown - was worth £72. Tea and coffee came to £26. Well over half of

the remainder comprised a wide assortment of sweets (lozenges, mints, pontefracts,

acid drops, rock), cakes (bath, ginger), nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, groundnuts,

walnuts), and spices (ginger, caraway, coriander, mugadon seed, cloves, nutmegs,

17

capsicum) - some of the nuts and most of the spices being brought in from distant

markets to give varied flavours to their lozenges. Biscuits, castor oil, ginger beer,

vinegar, mustard, chocolate, capers, peppermint oil, balsam, starch, isinglass,

macaroni, rice, paper, soap, candles, and the colouring agents vermilion and

cochineal, rounded off the list.

By 1850, however, the relative position of marmalade had greatly progressed, and

this change might help account for the improved circumstances of the Keillers.

David Bremner suggested in his 1867 survey that some time in the fairly recent past

- probably the 1840s - marmalade advanced from its formerly 'subordinate part',

and 'took precedence' as the firm's specialty'. Peel-chopping machines and steam

power apart, there was no particularly advanced technology in view,43

with

competition a continuing, if still rather notional, hazard.

For their raw materials, Keiller's still enjoyed easy canal and marine access to the

entrepots of Glasgow and London - these being, overwhelmingly, the main

providers. As far as one can tell, virtually none of the fruit, sugar, gums, or spices

were shipped straight to Dundee. The town's direct commercial links with southern

Europe, the West Indies, Africa, and Asia were thoroughly insignificant.43

The

requirements of the rapidly expanding linen industry rendered it primarily a 'Baltic'

port. Trade overall, however, was much assisted by the growth of Dundee's harbour

facilities in the 1830s and 1840s, the number of vessels entering and clearing

increasing four-fold in the former decade alone.44

This advance, from the 'one small

pier, and two or three clumsy erections in a state of dilapidation', cited in the New

Statistical Account 4S

owed much to the labours of the controversial Provost

Alexander Riddoch.46

James Keiller, interestingly, named the first son of his

marriage to Margaret Spence, Alexander Riddoch Keiller, the child being born just

months before Riddoch died.47

The main problem affecting the Keillers in raw-material acquisition was not their

resort to the Clyde and the Thames - perfectly practicable, if relatively slow, and

rather costly in commissions, freights,48

and transhipment - but the high import

duties levied on sugar. With the dismantling of the old protectionist system, the

government met its resultant revenue problems by retaining charges on certain

popular items of mass consumption and regular demand. Sugar tariffs were high for

most of the first half of the nineteenth century, the average per cwt standing at 23.97

shillings in 1820, 23.50 shillings in 1830, and 24.75 shillings in 1840. Reductions,

commencing in 1845, brought the figure down to 12.51 shillings by 1850 - but it

was up again at 13.30 in 1860, and final repeal did not come until 1874.49

An increasing portion of the sugar Keiller's required was refined in Dundee itself, and

the principal location of 'sugar boiling' was, conveniently, in and around Seagate.

The Dundee Sugar Refining Company, for example, was set up about 1770 in what

18

came to be called Sugar-house Wynd, off Seagate, under the management of a

Dutchman called Wiedemann - the father of Sarah Reval Wiedemann, and the

grandfather of Robert Browning.50

He was succeeded in the early 1820s by David

Baxter, during whose management the business succumbed to Greenock

competition51

- Baxter then transferring his entrepreneurship and capital into linen,

to highly profitable effect.52

The sugar company, however, was quickly revived

under the new management of James Boyd, this regime lasting at least until the late

30s.53

The name of Boyd is worth registering at this point, for this was the family

that was running James Keiller & Son Ltd by the turn of the century.

Coastal shipping brought in increasing supplies of coal from Newcastle and,

presumably in tandem, Tyneside earthenware pots as well. Shiny white crocks, with

bold lettering, were arresting to the eye, probably aided marmalade preservation,

and avoided, for the eater, the unpleasant appearance of a smeared glass jar. They

were purchased from C J Maling, whose products later extended up-market to

colourful fancy wares. Maling's had been potters since the mid-eighteenth century,

taking the idea of white pots from the first producer, Warburton of Carr's Hill

Pottery near Gateshead.54

Keiller's became major customers, and by the 1860s their

pots had a special "Maling K' impressed on their bases.55

Such white crocks were to

become almost universal in the trade by the end of the century.

Fourthly, on these strictly business questions, there is the critical issue of the

market. If we lack the pleasure of imagining great sailing ships gliding up the Tay

with gleaming cargoes of golden oranges, we must forego in even greater measure

any notion of conspicuous outward shipments of marmalade and confectionery.

The manufacturing process added value to the sugars and fruits, as well as greatly

reducing their bulk, meaning that the hold-filling capacity of exports was even

smaller than that of imports. Keiller produce would go out, inconspicuously, in

mixed cargoes loaded into all but the smallest of inshore and river smacks. The six

commonest named cargoes leaving Dundee on coastal runs in 1830 were

non-industrial: grain, potatoes, fishing stores, flax, timber, and paving stones.56

By 1850, the Scottish preserves market had expanded from Dundee and

neighbourhood to include the whole of the east and the Central Lowlands, with

particular focus on the cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen. Rapid

population expansion resulting from industrialisation was the prime factor at work,

sweets and preserves being popular with the working classes as well as with the

more genteel sections of society. In the words of a later observer, 'confectionery is

the luxury of the poor, and especially of the children of the poor'.57

Marmalade was

cheap - a third of the price of butter, according to Bremner;58

versatile as between

breakfasts, mid-day sandwiches, and teas; and an item that could, with other

19

purchased jams, relieve the housewife of bothersome kitchen labour.' The scale of

the demographic revolution in central Scotland is well known. In Dundee itself, mainly

under the impetus of linen production, population increased from 30,000 in 1811, to

45,000 in 1831, and 79,000 in 1851.59

Something like 20,000 new mouths appeared

in Dundee in the eleven years between James's and Margaret's deaths.60

Also of great significance were the first tentative probings of the London market

-prompted, one guesses, by the fear of future local competition. Keiller's were

particularly exposed, given the duplicability of their products and the large numbers of

long-standing preserve and sweet makers in Dundee and beyond. London, in such

circumstances, must have seemed an extremely attractive place in which to sell - at

once distant, accessible, rich, and unexploited. David Bremner suggests that some

of the initiative might have come from the metropolis itself, a 'principal grocery firm'

there giving the Dundee marmalade a trial in the late 1820s or 1830s, and setting off 'a

steadily increasing demand'.61

It was this London trade that, in turn, provided the foundation for selling overseas, the

latter developing, not as direct commerce out of the Tay, but as metropolitan

re-exporting through the agency of various merchant houses on the Thames. If

Keiller's had been selling in the capital since at least the 1830s, and a number of

overseas merchants there had spotted the trade at the docks and had the idea of

sending a few speculative pots to customers abroad - especially expatriates in the

colonies - a small, irregular, export trade could have been set in motion by

mid-century at the latest.

In summary, the fragments of documentary evidence, combined with the larger mass

of circumstantial data, suggest that Keiller's got off to a slow start, and that the

decisive acceleration of the business might have been delayed until after the founder's

death. It may be no coincidence that it was around then that the firm decided to give

marmalade more attention and to promote its purchase outside Scotland. If this is a

correct appraisal, then Margaret Keiller must be given a lot of the credit for setting

the business on a secure and forward footing, with a widening range of markets.

Their position, however, was as exposed as ever to the possibility of competition; and

problems of dear sugar and of expensive, indirect importing persisted. Dundee,

portentously, was not the ideal centre of production for an ambitious sweets and

marmalade manufacturer like Keiller's.

20

NOTES

1. KArch,

2. Dundee Directories, 1840-41

3. ibid, 1829-30

4. This is only surmise, there being no surviving partnership documents for these years

5. All such family detail in this section from KGen, partly reproduced in 'Genealogy: James Keiller and his Descendants', above

6. p 67; see also David Barrie, The City of Dundee Illustrated (Dundee 1890) pp 12, 17-18.

7. Dundee Directories, 1834 etc to 1856

8. Assessment of the Inhabitants of the Parish of Dundee, for the Support of the Poor (Dundee, 1820

- 1839/40), passim

9. AK-WK, 22 Apr 1872

10. Obituary in Dundee Advertiser, 12 Feb 1877

11. John Maclennan, The High School of Dundee', in A W Paton & A H Millar (eds), Handbook and

Guide to Dundee and District (Dundee, 1912) pp 237-40; A D Alexander et al, The High School of Dundee (Dundee nd) passim

12. See David M Walker, Architects and Architecture in Dundee 1770-1914 (Dundee 1955), p 6.

13. Dundee Directories, 1834, p xiv.

14. See above, n 6

15. Dundee Directories, 1846-47

16. Walker, Architects and Architecture, pp 4-6; see also photograph of High Street (c 1878) in Miles

Horsey et al, Dundee in Record. Images of the Past (HMSO 1992) cover and p 16.

17. ibid, p 6; Charles McKean& David Walker, Dundee. An Illustrated Introduction (Edinburgh 1984)

pp 21-22

18. Dundee Directories, 1818, 1829-30, 1840-41

19. Census of Dundee, 1841

20. Receipts for 1855 & 1856, Trustees of the late Mrs Keiller (hereinafter TMK), item of 25 Nov 1848, KArch


22. Receipts for 1858 & 1859, TMK, item of 13 May 1859, KArch; Account of the Trustees of the late

Mrs Margaret Spence or Keiller Confectioner Dundee (hereinafter ATMSK) 1860, KArch

21

23. McKean & Walker, Dundee,p 117. See also Crescents Conservation Area (City of Dundee District Council nd). I am grateful to the management of Barton House Hotel for drawing my

attention to this leaflet, with its helpful plan of the 1830s-1850s development

24. Receipts for 1855 & 1856, 1856 & 1857, 1858 & 1859, TMK, items of 12 Nov 1855, 16 June

1856, 29 Jan 1857, 16 Nov 1858, 12 Mar 1859, KArch


26. Receipts for 1855 & 1856, TMK, item of 21 December 1850, KArch

27. ATMSK, 12 Jan, 10 Feb 1860, KArch

28. ibid, 10 Jan 1860; Dundee Directories, 1861-62; AK-WK, 13, 24 Feb 1873

29. Dundee Directories, 1850, 1853-54, 1858-59, 1861-62, 1864-65

30. ATMSK, 30 May 1860, KArch

31. Stock Taken March 27* 1833, KArch (figures rounded up)

32. pp 61-62

33. Reproduced in Frontespiece of Enid Gauldie, One Ambitious and Artful Individual. Alexander

Riddoch [1745-1822] (Dundee 1989) pp 2-3.

34. See below, under 'raw materials'

35. Assessment for the Support of the Poor, passim

36. Receipts for 1855 & 1856, TMK, item of 11 Nov 1847, KArch

37. ibid, item of 8 Jan 1856 (all figures to nearest £)

38. Receipts for 1858 & 1859, TMK, items of 8 Nov 1858, 21 Nov 1859, KArch

39. Receipts for 1855 & 1856, TMK, item of 19 Dec 1855; receipts for 1856 & 1857, TMK, item of 11

Nov 1856, KArch

40. Receipts for 1856 & 1857, TMK, item of 16 Jan, KArch

41. Receipts for 1856 & 1857, TMK, items of 29 Sep, 21 Nov 1856; Receipts for 1858 & 1859, TMK, 15, 18 Nov 1858, 16 May, 29 Sep, 1859 KArch

42. Receipts for 1855 & 1856, TMK, items of 28 Oct, 16 Dec 1850


44. Jackson, Trade of Dundee, pp 81-83.

45. ibid, pp 5-6.

46. Dundee in 1793 and 1833, p 30.

22

47. Gauldie, Artful and Ambitious Individual, pp 35-40.

48. It is unlikely that James Keiller introduced these two unfamiliar names into his family in gratitude

for dock improvements. In his capacities as a money-lender and town-centre property- owner, the wealthy Riddoch might have been the source of some past favours to the shopkeeper. Riddoch,

moreover, had been party to the Forfarshire Lieutenancy's decision in 1797 to excuse James

Keiller from military service. See above, Chapter One, note 8


50. Hutcheson, Notes on the Sugar Industry, p 107.

51. Miller, Old and New Dundee, pp 36-37.

52. ibid, p 36.

53. The Concise Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford 1995) I, p 174.

54. Obituary of James Boyd in Dundee Advertise/; 11 Sep 1926

55. Llewellynn Jewitt, The Ceramic Art of Great Britain (New Orchard ed 1985 of 1883 volume) pp

301-4.

56. ibid, p 302; evidence from lib and 21b pots, probably of 1860s and 1870s, in author's possession


58. Confectionery, 12 Nov 1903, p 882.


60. Maxwell, Guide to Dundee, p 4; Dundee census returns

61. Maxwell, Guide to Dundee, p 4.


23

CHAPTER THREE

Mid-Victorian Personnel and Partnerships

I Keillers and Charles Maxwell

It is one of the main contentions of this study that the third quarter of the nineteenth

century saw James Keiller & Son in its most energetic and creative phase -

developing much of the potential laid down by James and Margaret, and setting the

foundations for the growth and consolidation that followed in the decades up to the

First World War. The key figure in this critical period was Alex Keiller, the senior

partner between 1850 and 1877. His particular achievement was to maintain and

vigorously develop Keiller's position as market leaders in marmalade, at a time

when others might have been expected to crowd in on the old producers. He led a

firm, moreover, which, as confectioners, ranked far above great enterprises of the

future like Cadbury's and Rowntree's. His decision to cut costs by running a portion

of his production in Guernsey between 1857 and 1879 was the most daring of his

business manoeuvres. No other sugar-dependent British manufacturers were so

bold, and no others that early sold preserves and confections in such a range of

African, Asian, and Australasian markets.

Alex Keiller, as we have seen, has received no identification, far less appraisal,

from historians. The limelight, such as it is, has fallen, misleadingly, on his father,

James, and his second son, John Mitchell. In making good this imbalance, we shall

not, however, be lapsing into hagiography. What Alex Keiller gave with one hand,

he took away with the other. It was to be he, more than anyone, who caused the

progressive, and ultimately terminal, narrowing of the Keiller family's involvement

in the business.

The first surviving partnership, that of I860,1 was an arrangement between three

brothers Alexander, William, and Wedderspoon. Alex and William were

designated wholesale and retail confectioners of Dundee; Wedd was at the time

resident in St Peter Port, where he had lately taken over management of the branch.

The arrangement was to last a minimum of five years, and the firm's capital was set

at £10,000. Alex, then approaching 40, was married to Elizabeth Mitchell, an

architect's daughter eight years his senior, and the father of two young boys, James

and John.2 As the oldest son of James Keiller's second family, he now enjoyed a

Controlling interest of 5/8. William, aged 30, and recently married to Mary Steele

of Glasgow, received 2/8. Wedd - Alex's junior by fourteen years - took a mere 1/8.

24

Annual salaries were set at £300, £200, and £150 respectively. The usual provisions

were made for loss, insolvency, and death.

The women of the family had, by now, lost their formal position. Three had died in

their twenties; and of the other two, only the youngest, Bessie, had some temporary

and subsidiary involvement with the firm. The arrangement ran without known

upsets until 1866. On 29 January of that year, Wedd Keiller succumbed to

tuberculosis in Guernsey at the age of 30.3 We must assume that such a premature

death, in a far-off spot, would have been profoundly upsetting for the family back in

Dundee. Some might have entertained self-reproachful thoughts about leaving a

consumptive to work in the hot little factory set up in the island - a stifling

environment, presenting dangers that far outweighed the benefits of a balmy

climate. Bessie, presumably with one or two other members of the family, travelled

south to attend to the funeral arrangements,4 Wedd being laid to rest under an

obelisk of red granite on elevated ground in the quiet woodland cemetery of Foulon,

west of St Peter Port.5 The simple inscription from his devout family read 'Thy Will

Be Done'. He was unmarried, and left no issue. With the Barbara-Keillers already

well departed, the succession now depended on only two males, Alex and William,

with the second of these required to take over in Guernsey.

This could hardly have been a move that William welcomed. He was by now an

established Dundee businessman, resident in Prospect Place, with a wife and three

small children. Any move, especially that distant, would be certain to diminish his

power as a partner - and might have been interpreted as a deliberate ploy. Alex

himself remained at the heart of affairs, settled now a little way west of the city

centre at 164 Nethergate - his home for the remainder of his life. The house, dating

from 1785, and possibly by Samuel Bell, was one of a row of merchants' dwellings6

facing Nethergate with fairly small, unpretentious facades, but sporting high

elevations and commanding views over the Tay to the south.7 In April 1872, Alex

announced that he had also taken a four-month lease on a house in St Andrews -'&

have been going back & forth every day for the past fortnight'. It was not, however,

the relaxing retreat that he had intended it to be; 'I find it is rather too much fatigue

for me to go every day'.8

Alex's and Elizabeth's family still comprised just two boys. When their uncle Wedd

died, James, the elder, was 16, and his brother John, 15; Alex intended both for

early partnerships. James might by this time have been working in the firm in some

minor clerical capacity; John was at the Seminaries - possibly the Academy part, with its emphasis on modern languages and mathematics

9 - with an eye set on

further linguistic studies at Edinburgh University.10

Thus lacking, as yet, any

Keiller substitute for Wedd, and on the point of losing William to Guernsey, Alex

25

had to consider the prospect of diluting family ownership for the first time. He

decided to call on the services of Charles Chalmers Maxwell. Aged 37, and the son

of a mill manager, Maxwell had been with Keiller's as a book-keeper and general

assistant since 1853, and enjoyed a considerable local reputation as a poet,

historian, and public speaker."

The 1867 partnership12

differed little from the preceding one, Maxwell coming in

on the 1/8 that Wedd had previously held - and, with the others, now sharing an

undisclosed capital stock. It seems unlikely that he would have introduced any

funds of his own. Salaries were raised to £400, £300, and £200. Looking to the near

future, and the likely recruitment of his own sons, Alex had a clause inserted

granting him 'full power and liberty ... to introduce into the Company a new Partner

or New Partners'. This provision did not, however, anticipate any revision of

Maxwell's position: any new shares, it was clearly stated, were to come out of

Alex's own 5/8 portion.

An interesting feature of the 1867 deed was the citing of most Keiller premises in

Dundee as belonging not to the firm itself, but to Alexander Keiller as a separate,

private party. This was not an uncommon arrangement at the time, although it

seems not to have been set out before in any contractual form. The works were

described as: 'the Warehouse and Offices at Rankines Court, Dundee ... and

likewise ... the Ground upon which the said Workshops and Bakehouse are built,

and of another Warehouse situated in New Inn Entry Dundee also ... the whole

Cellar Floor or Ground Floor of the premises in Campbells Close Dundee, ... the

whole of the Cross land at the top of Grays Close, Dundee', all let at an annual rent

of £240. Assuming a five-per-cent return, this rent indicates a property valuation of

£4,800. Some of these parts had been held by Keiller's, in whatever form, for some

time - Rankine's Court, for example, being given as business premises in the 1856

Dundee Directory, and the New Inn Entry featuring as early as 1846. Campbell's

Close might have dated back to the family's 1830s domestic residence.

Alex, having left the issue of property power unstated and unresolved in the 1860

partnership, might have decided to turn it to good personal account in the second,

by which time both his brothers had, one way or another, departed. Only the shop in

Castle Street, a purchase of Margaret's in the 1840s, was owned collectively by the

firm.13

In 1870-71 - the first year for which calculations are possible - Alex earned

£9,495 from profits, £400 from salary, and £240 from rent; an impressive £10,135.

William's total income came to £4,098; Charles Maxwell received £2,09914

- happily accepted, we may assume, by a former clerk accustomed to two or three

hundred a year.

26

It was around this time that Alex's thoughts turned once more to the question of

bringing in his own sons, James and John. James had just reached 22, and John

would be 21 the following New Year's Day - notionally, a perfect pair in Dundee,

by age and intimacy, to make good the absence of their uncles. 'I want to alter our

copartnery', Alex wrote to William on 14 December 1872, 'so that I can have the

liberty at short notice to take either or both of my sons in as partners or make other

arrangements so that if I am to continue in business with other partners I may do so

with something like peace & comfort to myself. If this were not possible, he

threatened 'to drop the connection' with the firm. He insisted that these were, for the

moment, only general aspirations, and that he had no plan to introduce his sons at

once. If, however, 'either of them get married', they were to be elevated 'with little

delay'. His sons' strictly-business qualifications were not discussed.15

For the immediate future, Alex's main business partner remained his surviving

brother. They communicated with each other by mail and telegraph on a near-daily

basis, and met from time to time in London and Dundee. The relationship, by Alex's

own testimony, was an unhappy one. Just before Christmas 1871, declaring, as in

the above letter, his wish for 'peace & comfort' at work, he told William: 'you .& I

ought never to have been engaged in the same business. Had we been from the first

engaged in separate concerns, it would have been of great advantage to both you &

myself & saved a vast amount of distress & pain to both our households'. The bad

relationship, clearly, had come to poison dealings between their families as well.

'We might not have been so successful as we have been in our present firm, but that

success has I think been bought too dear at least so far as I am concerned & when I

think of the wretched little trifles that have caused so much annoyance in time past

I am often constrained to wonder how we did not both agree to betake ourselves to

separate businesses & each go his own way in peace'.16

The letter was just one of a

steady stream of critical and often insulting missives. William might have been

gratified to learn that Alex's son and one-time heir, James, was having an even

worse time.

II Sons and Brothers, 1870s

In the deed of 1872,17

Alex Keiller was still the firm's landlord, owning all the

premises cited in 1866, and the 'new warehouse & offices situated at Chapel St

Meadowside' - just off Albert Square, and the centre of manufacturing in Dundee

far into the future. The overall rent was now more than doubled, to £500; and 'in

case of failure in punctual payment' the firm would be liable for an additional

27

instalment of £100 - Alex the landowner, in effect, taking powers to fine Alex the

partner. Charles Maxwell was obliged to give up half of his small share to make

way for the next Keiller generation, Alex conceding only 1/32 of his own. This

action was contrary to the terms of the preceding partnership, which stated that one

or both of Alex's sons, if they came in, would be 'entitled to such proportion of the

share, rights and interests of the said Alexander Keiller in the Company and its

estate as may be determined on'. If Maxwell considered his treatment untoward, he

seems, by some mix of courtesy and realism, not to have complained. 'I put the

matter before Mr Maxwell last night', Alex told William on 24 September 1872, '&

he is quite satisfied...and can easily do with 1/16 instead [of] the 1/8 I at first gave

him, and with the increase in business year by year we may expect for a better

return than in former years'.18

Maxwell's functions in the firm had been diffuse - the

surviving correspondence showing him acting loosely as number-two in the

Dundee office, calculating the annual accounts, backing up Alex in his squabbles

with William, ordering machinery in Glasgow, and dealing with Scottish wholesale

grocers.19

As a continuing partner and managerial employee, he was awarded a rise

in salary, from £200 to £300. William's rose from £300 to £500; and Alex's own

from £400 to £600.

The most important feature of the 1872 partnership was the inclusion of Alex

Keiller's younger son, John Mitchell Keiller, and the exclusion of his elder son,

James. In one decisive move, the third-generation Keiller base in the firm (ignoring

William's already marginal young family) was halved. The two sons, as noted

above, had been intended for the business, but there was always a note of doubt in

Alex's 'either or both' formulations. And when he did act on John's behalf- much

earlier than forecast - he offered no explanation for the rush. It certainly had nothing

to do with any forthcoming betrothal, for John did not marry until 1884.

John Mitchell Keiller had turned 21 at the beginning of the year, and had spent two

years at Edinburgh University where, not uncommonly for an intending

businessman20

, he chose not to graduate. He had then lived for a year or two on the

continent, ostensibly to learn French and German (not, perhaps, the most obvious

languages for someone whose firm's main European dealings were with Holland,

Spain, and Italy). Back home, aged 20, he entered the head office - a slim, dapper

young man, with curly hair, sideburns, and moustaches. According to A H Millar,

'he became assistant to his father...and rapidly mastered all the details of the

manufacture'.21

Alex, in fact, saw him more as an accountant than as a factory

manager. 'The work he has to do in managing all our money matters', he wrote in September 1872, 'is considerable & is most satisfactorily done & any work that is

required of him he does most thoroughly'.22

28

The 1872 partnership, Alex confessed, had not taken quite the form that he had

originally wished. 'I should have much preferred to have taken both my sons in as

partners at one time, but if James will during the next twelve months give me

satisfactory evidence that he will in future act as his brother has done during the

time he (John) has been in the office, I will also admit James as a partner'.23

The

exclusion was effected during James's temporary posting in Guernsey; and as

though the loss of favour and the invidious comparisons, communicated from afar,

were not painful enough, he was to face the possibility of being passed over yet

again - by a young clerk of similar age, James Boyd, who had been with the head

office in Dundee, and a close colleague, since the mid-1860s. Boyd was not a

member of the family, but was related to Keiller's machinery and ironware

suppliers in Glasgow and earlier sugar providers in Dundee. Since he had 'proved

himself a most useful servant in the past', declared Alex, '& no doubt will be more

so in the future, I think we should look forward to giving James [Boyd] also a share

in our business on something like similar terms to CM [Maxwell]'. He would have

to be spoken to soon on the matter, to prevent his moving elsewhere.24

There was a clear long-term perspective in managerial recruitment. 'I am quite

satisfied that to take on such young men who will make themselves useful in our

business is the only way for us to keep abreast of others in the same trade & do our

business with comfort to ourselves'. Once again, with this odd word 'comfort', Alex

revealed that trade for him, now that he had passed 50, was not just a matter of

accumulating wealth; it was also his long-endured daily life, to be kept as free of

pain as possible - and that meant free of people likely to cause distress. William

Keiller was clearly one of these people, just tolerable because he was in the Channel

Islands; James Keiller, it seems, was another.

'I have written my oldest son on this subject', Alex told William on 24 September,

'so that there is no necessity for you referring to the matter to him or to anyone

whatever'.25

Young James, in other words, was to sort out for himself the distressing

matter of his exclusion, unassisted by the one person who, from his own experience

of Alex, could offer a little understanding. Adding to the pain of the whole affair

might have been the fact that Elizabeth Keiller, Alex's wife and James's mother, had

died the previous year, in her late fifties,26

leaving James without motherly counsel

or comfort, and Alex a widower of 49, lacking a wider perspective on his decisions.

Nothing is known about Elizabeth's relations with her family, but her death might

well have contributed to the disruptions. The 1871 census, taken after her passing,

shows James living not at home, but a couple of doors along the road at 160 Nethergate, in the company of his unmarried aunt Bessie and a couple of servants.

Such a separation had nothing to do with problems of space, Alex's residence at 164

being a large house, with room for many more than the two - Alex and his son John

29

- then occupying it.

The immediate background to this breakdown lay in a recent, traumatic indiscretion

of James's. On 17 September 1872, he had sat down in his uncle's large Georgian

house in Euston Terrace, St Peter Port, and written a recriminatory letter, based on

seemingly long-standing ill-feeling, to his father. This letter has not survived, but its

tone and broad content are eloquently revealed by the specifics of Alex's despairing

reply: 'I have your letter of 17 Inst & the contents of it have given me much pain &

I exceedingly regret that you have not come to a better state of mind. However I am

not going to upbraid you for the past... .1 never treated you in my house otherwise

than as a father I was bound in duty to do & had you conducted yourself as your

brother has all along done you never would have received from me anything but

approval' - Alex apparently believing that his son might be won over by reference to

a younger sibling's superior virtue. 'Instead of the letter I have received, I looked for

from you an expression of regret for your past conduct & an offer that you would

come home at once with an assurance on your part that you would make it the effort

of your life to redeem the past by a course of conduct at home & in the business that

would not only approve itself to me but to all who love you & desire to see you a

good & useful man'.

Alex rejected accusations of 'wicked treatment', and denied that he had been 'in the

slightest degree unreasonable in the demands I made upon you as to the work you

ought to have performed in the office, as to the hours at which you should return

home at night or as to the books you should read at home, or the companions you

keep'. James, clearly, had baulked at the range of his father's domineering

assumptions. Alex insisted that he had only been performing his paternal duty. 'As I

have often already told you the only thing I regret in my conduct towards you in

time past is the over indulgence you received at one time & which put you in a

position to do a lot you should not have done'. Reminded of this spoiling, Alex

fantasised, James would perhaps be duly contrite and 'only too thankful to do me

justice'. In the meantime: 'I must leave you in God's hands trusting that he will keep

you and guide you aright'. He proposed to see James's aunt Barbara the following

day , when he would 'give her your present letter to read' to demonstrate how

unsuccessful he had been in 'getting you to look at what is your duty' - another

wretched prospect, given that Barbara was one of his last-remaining sources of

family comfort.

The tone softened somewhat at the end, with Alex expressing regret that he could not 'have the pleasure of having you beside me', but four days later he informed his

son that he had made a final decision about the partnerships, and that James would

indeed be denied elevation. There was hope, of a sort: 'Just act a proper part for the

30

future and I will be only too pleased to place you in the position I have always

intended you to occupy'.27

James had to endure demoralising comparisons with his younger brother. He also

witnessed his father's favours towards James Boyd and the latter's brother William.

And in February 1873, he had to cope with the news that his cqusin William Keiller

Bruce - a son of Barbara Keiller's from her first marriage - had been lifted from the

miseries of unpaid labour in the St Andrews pharmacy of his step-father, Alexander

Govan, and sent off to Guernsey as his uncle William's principal assistant on an

initial salary of £100 per annum, with subsequent £50 increments, or 'allowances',

to follow. James himself, while in St Peter Port the summer before, might originally

have hoped for such a permanent position. The idea for Bruce's appointment was

Alex Keiller's, but James was spared the full truth. 'You will be surprised to learn

that Willie Bruce is going to Guernsey to help your uncle'. It had all been at William

Keiller's initiative, he insisted; and Willie had 'at once stated that he would like to

try the place'.28

James must indeed have been taken aback, for he, his father, and

Willie Bruce had all been lately travelling in Italy together,29

and obviously nothing

had been said then about new Guernsey appointments. Uncle and nephew had

returned to Scotland together in late January.

Lacking James Keiller's remarks, and the details of his behaviour in Dundee, one

must take care not to judge Alex too harshly. His actions were those of the Victorian

paterfamilias, with, as he presumably saw it, solemn business and family

responsibilities. On the other hand, no spirited young man, with concerns wider

than mere money-making, was going to be brought back to the fold by appeals of

the sort that Alex used. James never did became a partner, despite his continuing

participation in the firm after 1872. He left Guernsey for Sicily later that year,

staying there for some months to deal with local merchants and arrange shipments

of peel; then moving on to the Italian mainland, where he helped nurse Willie Boyd

- a Keiller employee and brother of James Boyd - through a fatal illness; then going

on to Vienna by way of Trieste, to assist in the presentation of the firm's cabinet at

the 1872 Exhibition. He subsequently travelled to Paris, to collect some persistent

debts; attended to oddments of business in London; and finally returned home to

Dundee. Shortly after, he was sent to Bristol to sort out some trading difficulties 30

-

at which point the documentation ends. All the European work -which he was

obliged, latterly, to share with James Boyd - was competently handled. Alex was

particularly admiring of his son's solo efforts in Sicily.31

The fact that such wide-ranging labours, combined with his earlier employment in

Guernsey, forced no revision of his father's judgement suggests that the basic issues

were personal rather than professional.32

This was not some simple matter of

31

business trusteeship; rather, perhaps, a question of Alex's 'comfort'. He did,

nonetheless, retain much fatherly sentiment towards his son, worrying about his

exposure to illness in Florence,33

telling him to be sure to buy 'a rug to cross the

Alps' and to be careful with his diet.34

James, while abroad, was kept informed over

the full range of business and personal news concerning Dundee and Guernsey, and

assured that his services as a managerial employee were still in demand back in

Scotland. 'I shall be pleased that you return home with as little delay as possible.'35

The partnership door was still left a little way open as late as January 1874, Alex

advising William in one of the last surviving letters of his hope of 'taking my son

James & also Jas Boyd in a partnery', with 1/32 each.36

The aspiration was fulfilled for James Boyd, but not for James Keiller. His

continuing exclusion was confirmed in the contract of 1876,37

in which Alex

received 19/32; William, his usual 8/32; Charles Maxwell and John Mitchell

Keiller 2/32 alike; and James Boyd 1/32. Later in the year, Charles Maxwell was

removed altogether, his energies diverted into seeking election to the town council

and joining the magistracy. His 2/32, which in happier circumstances would have

been used to introduce James, went instead to Alex.38

If Alex Keiller did have any

serious long-run intention of resolving the conflict, this hope was abruptly undone

by his death in February 1877. His business bequest - a 21/32 share - left plenty of

room for accommodating his elder son, if John chose to act in a generous and

fraternal spirit. Aged only 26, with his uncle William far distant in Guernsey, and

plans underway for the building of a large new factory on the Thames, John might

have appreciated the assistance. But it was not to be.

James, though, had not been comprehensively disinherited. When his father died,

the elder son shared the estate - 'real and personal of every description and

denomination' - equally with the younger by the terms of a will drawn up in August

1871.39

This inheritance must have included half of 164 Nethergate, which was sold

quite soon after.40

It also covered Alex's savings and his considerable investment

portfolio of London & Westminster Bank, Atlantic & Great Western First

Mortgage, and Turkish Government stock, as well as the paper of various British

and American railway companies.41

James had claim, moreover, to half the rent

from the lands and buildings formerly let to James Keiller & Son by the deceased.

Alex Keiller, a convinced advocate of cruises for members of his family and staff

who were in poor health, had taken himself south to Spain in early 1877,

accompanied by Willie Bruce. He had, apparently, been 'rather out of sorts for some time past', resolving 'to take a short sea voyage as a restorative'. He made for

Seville, where he did some business, and then moved on to Gibraltar. That place,

most unexpectedly, was to be the end of the road. He was afflicted there by 'effusion

32

on the brain' - possibly the consequence of a tumour or, more probably, a stroke42

of

the sort that had killed his father. When the news was telegraphed to Dundee, John

Mitchell at once rushed south, but failed to complete the long journey in time. Alex

had died after three days in a coma.43

Alex Keiller's obituarists gave him credit for raising the Keiller firm from its

'comparatively small beginning to its present extent'. The Keiller marmalade trade

in particular had achieved 'enormous dimensions, and something like a world-wide

celebrity' under his guidance.44

The Rev Dr Wilson declared at his funeral service

that it had been he - not any predecessor - who had 'created and sustained a business

whose ramifications extend over the world'. He was 'a man singularly silent,

reserved, undemonstrative, although warm-hearted and most kindly, and

manifested what was in him much more by deeds than by words'45

- a description

which, combined with his photograph of the early 1870s and the evidence of his

correspondence, suggests a shy, lugubrious, troubled presence, animated by flashes

of good feeling, but capable of ill-temper and intimidation towards those around

him. For whatever personal reason, he seems to have been little attracted by the use

of his wealth for local political purposes, his only public role, outside the Church,

being a brief membership of the Dundee Harbour Board.46

Such social diffidence

might have contributed to his historical obscurity.

His letters reveal a pious and fatalistic man, and we know him to have been an

office-bearer at the Free Church of St Pauls.47

There was much preoccupation with

illness and death; unsurprising, perhaps, for a man who had lost his brother in

Guernsey in 1866, his wife in 1871, and a promising young manager in Italy in

1873,48

and who might have felt himself partly to blame for the first and last of

these sad events. In the middle of commercial letters he would report or describe the

passing of various contemporaries - among them his cousin William, who died in

Edinburgh on 3 December 1871 just after dreaming of his own demise;49

his old

friend Alick Nicoll, a fellow-confectioner, who died in Dundee on 12 March 1873,

having stayed 'happy & rejoicing' throughout his last illness, to the point of singing

'Rock of Ages' to Alex shortly before he passed away;50

and the purchaser of

William Keiller's Prospect Place House, David Shepherd, who died the day after

Nicoll, 'not quite so cheerful'.51

Alex appears as a dutiful brother to his two sisters,

Barbara and Bessie, whose financial affairs were his regular concern;52

a concerned

father to his son James in the months following his failure to secure a partnership;

and a sometimes benevolent employer to those who accepted his writ. On the other

hand, he was, as we shall see, the relentless scourge of his younger brother, William; and in business affairs generally, he had a tendency to confront difficult

relationships with moralistic and often self-defeating pomposity.

33

Art was a strong private interest. He was a regular visitor to Royal Academy

exhibitions and an enthusiastic purchaser of landscape paintings,53

possibly laying

the foundations for his son's more famous collection.54

He was also a very fussy

man, giving John Mitchell Keiller a paragraph of precise instructions as to how best

to travel by train from Kings Cross to Edinburgh and back,55

and warning his son

James on his return from what, as we shall observe below, had been a protracted

and tragic trip to Italy of the danger of his leaving his hat box at the Castle & Falcon

Hotel in London.56

Alex himself had recently lost a new green umbrella from a

stand in the place. He considered the possible explanations - among them, that

'society fellows the worse of drink' had 'come out of the smoking room late that

night before or early morning & being too drunk took the good umbrella' - and

asked James to 'take charge & bring it home' .if anyone had returned it.57

John

Mitchell was also told to check: it 'had a handle similar to the one you have with

you, but a more solid handle filled the hand better than yours'.58

The new 1877 partnership59

following Alex's death saw John Mitchell, aged 26,

award himself a massive 23/32 - the largest concentration yet. William received

8/32, and, at the distance of Guernsey, probably had no more influence on affairs

than he had had under Alex. James Boyd, despite his continuing small fraction of

1/32, was the new, coming man - John's companion and assistant in Dundee, still

only in his twenties,60

and possibly able to see ahead through the Keiller miseries to

his own future opportunity. John's cousin, Willie Bruce, was left out of the new

arrangements, despite his export experience in Guernsey and Alex's suggestion in

1874 that, after a few years of good service, they could 'safely offer him an...interest

in the firm'.61

The business property, now owned jointly by John and his brother, included the

Castle Street shop that their grandmother had bought in the 1840s - whether by

purchase from James Keiller & Son or, more probably, by simple declaration, one

cannot tell. The other places - 'Chapel Street, New Inn Entry, Rankine's Court,

Gray's Close, and elsewhere adjoining' were the same as before, and to these were

added various specified items of equipment. The total rent was left unstated,

leaving the door open for John to negotiate with himself on an ad hoc basis. James

Keiller & Son also undertook to meet all maintenance, repair, and insurance costs.

Business circumstances apart, James and John Keiller seem from their father's

comments to have been of widely differing temperaments, and might have been

unhappy companions in childhood. In manhood, the discrepancies were probably beyond endurance, especially if John had had a hand - even just by being the 'good'

son - in James's commercial disinheritance. James disappears from the Dundee

Directories in the early 1880s. With his monetized share of 164 Nethergate, his half

34

of the proceeds of his father's savings and investments, and his portion of the rents

from James Keiller & Son, he must have been comfortably-off - advised by his

friends, no doubt, to sink his funds in some sensible venture rather than to squander

it all in a life of self-pity, alcoholism, or other destructive indulgence. Others may

be more successful than the author in tracking him down. If he had a wife and

family, that was attended to elsewhere.62

A genealogical account of the 1950s has

him marrying, first, an Elizabeth Wallace, and secondly, a Mrs Thompson, but no

place-names are given, and there are no supporting source-notes.63

Whenever he

died, he was not in his home town. Not a single published account of the Keillers as

much as mentions his existence.

III The Death of William Boyd

The Boyd family, as already pointed out, assumed control of the Keiller business in

1899, and held an ever-strengthening position within it through to the sell-out to

Crosse & Blackwell after World War I. Their position in the firm dates back to the

1860s, when James Boyd was first appointed; and their affiliation with the Keillers

goes back, as we have noted, a further few decades in association with the Boyds'

provision of refined sugar and machinery to the confectioners.64

The elevation of

the Boyds at the expense of two young and apparently competent family

employees, James Keiller and Willie Bruce, represents a marked departure from the

normal practices of mid-Victorian business dynasties. Various considerations here

have already been adduced. A further speculation is that Alex Keiller's commitment

to the Boyds might have been intensified by the premature death abroad of the

younger Boyd, William, and the possibility that he, Alex, bore some personal

responsibility for the tragic loss. The events and trauma surrounding Boyd's demise

are worth some consideration, partly to see if the conjecture - with its far-reaching

implications - has any foundations, and partly because of what the story tell us

about the Keillers' personal and business conduct at the time.

Willie Boyd was a contemporary of James Keiller, and had been in the firm's

employ since the late 1860s. As he had, in the autumn of 1872, lately been in poor

health, Alex Keiller decided that he should come away for an extended spell with a

party due to leave for Spain and Italy65

on what, one assumes, was an accustomed

mix of business, instruction, and therapy. James was going as well, en route to his

mission in Sicily; so too was Willie Bruce.66

They left Dundee at the end of

October, only a month or so before the marmalade season got underway.67

After a lengthy stay in Rome, Alex returned home with Willie Bruce, arriving on 30

January 1873. He had granted young Boyd 'liberty of absence until end of March',

and given him £10 for his pocket. Back in Dundee, he regretted that he had not

35

remained longer in Italy himself - 'until the cold weather was past, for I now find

that everything has gone on so well despite our absence & no doubt would have

done so for other three months'.68

The plan for Willie Boyd was that he should

consolidate his improved health and meet with James again on the latter's return

from Sicily. The journey home was to be educational for both men, and neither was

to be short of funds.69

Shortly after Alex Keiller's departure from Rome, Boyd travelled down to Naples.

In that unhealthy city, the invalid, instead of recuperating, contracted malaria.

Recovering somewhat from the first bout of fever, and now in James Keiller's

company,70

he made the journey north to Florence, where he immediately lapsed

into three weeks of much more intense sickness.71

Alex, back in Dundee, was most

concerned, reflecting perhaps on his role in taking Willie away from his wife and

infant children in the first place, and then leaving him to his own devices in Italy. 'I

do hope & pray that God will spare his useful life'.72

It was 'distressing to think of

the poor fellow having been so much reduced again after having enjoyed good

health for some four months in the South & before the present attack of fever was

quite strong. We must put our trust to what our Heavenly Father orders for us'.73

He could not, however, have been quite as confident about Willie's 'good health' as

he made out. When he and James were expected to be leaving for home, and before

he knew of Willie's latest illness, Alex advised his son: 'you should not allow Boyd

to walk about too much & knock himself out. Drive if you have to go any long

distance'. The weather had turned 'cold & disagreeable' back in Dundee, and it was

hoped that on his return Willie would be 'strong enough to indure it'.74

At the end of March, when he and James should have been safely back in Dundee,

Willie was confined to a hotel room in Florence, and in a desperate condition. His

mother and wife had now joined him, having rushed south by train.75

Alex arranged

for William Taylor, a business associate in London, to facilitate their passage

through the capital76

- at the same time, however, refusing to let James Boyd go

with them; the Dundee office, he considered, was currently short-staffed.77

Willie

seemed a little better on 24 March, and managed to take some nourishment, but two

days later he was again 'a very bad case'.78

All waited for 'the change'79

-when the

fever, having reached its greatest intensity, would either recede, or kill the patient.

Alex, observing anxiously from afar with the help of James's letters and telegrams,

still thought it best to 'leave the matter in Gods hands'. He worried additionally

about James, and urged him to hire a proper nurse80

and keep out of the sick room as much as possible.

81 The Boyd women relieved James when they arrived on the

morning of 30 March,82

and Alex thought his son should now take the opportunity

to come straight home.83

36

It was, however, too late for any changes of plan. Willie's condition worsened and,

at 3.30 on the morning of 2 April 1873, he passed away.84

Alex Keiller mourned the

loss of 'a good man & a true friend' - 'most kindly & exemplary in all things'.85

Arrangements were made for his funeral on 7 April - holding the body that long to

enable John Boyd, a brother, to arrive in Florence.86

James Boyd was also released

from the Keiller's office in Dundee on the day of Willie's funeral; not as

compassionate leave, but for a business trip to the continent.87

His young brother now

beyond any support, Boyd would probably have preferred to stay in Scotland and

attend to his grief-stricken mother on her return. His wife, moreover, had lately given

birth to a son88

- another William.

Mrs Boyd Sr left Florence on the evening of the funeral, and arrived back on the

following Saturday, 12 April89

- 'a wonderful woman', declared Alex with coarse

flippancy. 'She would do for an express courier'.90

James Boyd had departed south

earlier in the week, and was by then in France. He was to proceed via Manchester,

Liverpool, London, and Paris, attending to business matters as he went along, meet

James Keiller in Italy,91

and return with Keiller by Vienna, where the firm had items

on display at the Exhibition, and where they were also hoping to set up an agency

.

Might this disturbing Italian episode, as surmised, have had some bearing on the

rapid rise of the Boyds within the Keiller business? Alex's motives in sending the

ailing Willie Boyd south for four months might have been entirely kindly. On the other

hand, the trip could have been conceived principally as a form of business training,

in this instance ill-timed; and, perhaps too, a way of diluting the company in the

aftermath of Alex's rift with James. There is no way of telling, but the Boyds could

well have thought Alex partly to blame for Willie's death. It was one thing to breath

in the Mediterranean air, even if it could be rather raw in the winter; but quite

another to be exposed, in an already weakened state, to new sources of infection and

new categories of ailment in a country of known hazards. Alex wrote to Charles

Maxwell that Willie's hotel in Naples 'was in a bad situation with imperfect drainage &

that many cases of Typhus & Typhoid fever had been in that same district'.92

Others

might not have shared Alex's enthusiasm for health travelling abroad, and might have

recalled the tubercular Wedd Keiller's premature death in Guernsey seven years

earlier.

If Alex did not feel personal remorse over Willie's death in malarial Italy, he might still

have felt uneasy about the turn of events. One solution - if the problem existed - was

to indulge James Boyd, Willie's elder brother. His partnership had already been mooted before Willie's death, and events in Florence might have made it a certainty -

further confirming James Keiller's exclusion. Another long-term, less direct,

beneficiary might have been James Boyd's son William, who kept his late uncle's

37

name alive and rose to take charge of Keiller's entire Dundee works at the

remarkably early age of 22. If there were no guilt, or even embarrassment, there

might at least have been some shared trauma. Willie's was the sort of death - that of

a promising young man, married with small children, already suffering from some

persistent ailment, far from Scotland, and buried in foreign soil - that would have

acquired some quasi-mythic qualities with his family at home. The Keiller's -Alex

as employer and travelling companion, and James as colleague and, latterly, nurse -

would have been pulled into this atmosphere of tragedy.

Financial help provided another means by which Alex Keiller could compensate his

friends - though only within strict limits. Willie's wife had been given £25 to assist

her passage from Glasgow to Florence. In her rush and confusion, she had arrived at

Dundee station with no more than £2 in her purse. Alex, however, was reluctant to

get involved in any of the Boyd's strictly Italian expenses.93

The issue was not just

one of outlays for travel and subsistence; additional claims arose from Willie's

residence and nursing in Florence, and James Boyd was told to alert his family to

the need for a prompt settlement.94

Alex had no wish for the money he had given

Willie and his wife to be repaid - 'but all other claims I leave the Boyd family to

meet themselves'. There was also the cost of the funeral; and a large payment had to

be made to the proprietor of the hotel where Willie had spent his last weeks 'for

damage to bedding'.95

Willie's wife would be left in comparative penury if her

in-laws failed to offer the support she required. 'William's life is assured for

something like £1500', wrote Alex Keiller, 'so that his widow will have only about

£130 @ £140 per annum including what she receives from the widows fund & for

her ... children. So poor thing she has little enough to depend on'.96

He did, however,

feel obligated to a Mr McDougall in Florence, whose mission in the city had given

some assistance to James and Willie, and which seemed deserving of a small

donation.97

There the story ends, and we can only guess at its final significance. Of the younger

generation of Keiller managers, only John Mitchell Keiller and James Boyd rose to

the highest levels. James Keiller was abandoned; Willie Boyd died; and Willie

Bruce was, for the time being, sidelined. Of the two possible lines of succession, the

Boyd one was to prove by far the more resilient.

38

NOTES

1. Contract of Co-partnery between and among Alexander Keiller, William Keiller and Wedderspoon James Keiller under the firm of James Keiller & Son, 1860, KArch

2. All such family detail, here and below, is based on KGen; see also 'Genealogy: James Keiller and his Descendants', above

3. Barbel's Almanack for 1864; Register of Deaths, 1840-1874. Guernsey, St Peter Port, 31 Jan 1866

4. 'References to Name Keiller in the Registers of the Church of Scotland, Guernsey', memo prepared by

Gill Lenfestey, 9 Jan 1997

5. Kay Leslie, 'Marmalade on it', Guernsey Evening Press and Star. Weekender, 28 June 1997, p 2.

6. McKean and Walker, Dundee, p 62.

7. Alex Keiller also referred in 1873 to 'my property ... between Mid Street and Dudhope', which he agreed to sell, through William Scott, solicitor, for £1,450. AK-WK 18 Dec 1873

8. ibid 17 Apr 1872

9. See Chapter Two, note 11, above

10. Millar, Old and New Dundee, p 94.

11. Cutting of obituary from unnamed Dundee newspaper of Jan 1900, DPLLC

12. Contract of CoPartnery between and among Alexander Keiller, William Keiller and Charles

Chalmers Maxwell under the firm of James Keiller & Son, 1867, 1868, KArch

13. ATMSK, entries of 9, 12 Jan, 23 Feb, 24 June, 8 Nov 1860

14. AK-WK 14 Nov 1871

15. ibid 14 Dec 1872

16. ibid 20 Dec 1871

17. Contract of CoPartnery between and among Messrs Alexander Keiller, William Keiller, Charles

Chalmers Maxwell and John Mitchell Keiller under the firm of James Keiller & Son, 1872, KArch

18. AK-WK 24 Sep 1872

19. ibid, 8 Dec 1871, 13 Mar, 11 Oct, 10 Nov 1873; AK - Charles Maxwell, 27 Mar, 10 Apr 1872; 25,

27, 28 Mar, 21 Oct 1873

20. See, for example, W M Mathew, The Origins and Occupations of Glasgow Students, 1740-1839', Past and Present, 33 (April 1966) p 91.

21. Millar, Old and New Dundee, pp 94-95.

22. AK-WK24 Sep 1872

39

23. Ibid

24. Ibid

25. Ibid

26. KGen

27. AK - James Keiller 17 Sep 1872

28. ibid 31 Jan, 11 Feb, 13 Mar 1872; AK - William Black 6 Feb 1873; AK-WK 6 Feb 1873; Directory

of St Andrews 1894 (St Andrews 1894) the cover of which gives illustration of the Smith & Govan

pharmacy at 109 South Street, a reconstructed shop dating from the 1840s - presently the site of Boots

29. see section III below

30. AK - James Keiller 11,13 Feb, 4, 13, 15, 18, 27 Mar, 4, 5, 7, 14, 30 Apr, 6, 7, 12 May, 17, 20 Oct

1873

31. eg AK-WK 1 Feb 1873

32. There is also discussion of an unresolved problem in 1872-73 - possibly to do with some sort of

military service - concerning a Lt Col Anderson, which Alex asked James to attend to at once. AK -

James Keiller 9 Apr 1873

33. ibid 27, 28 Mar 1872

34. ibid 8 Apr 1872

35. ibid 14 Apr 1872

36. AK-WK 19 Jan 1874

37. Contract of CoPartnery between and among Messrs Alexander Keiller, William Keiller, John Mitchell

Keiller, Charles Chalmers Maxwell and James Boyd under the firm of James Keiller & Son, 1876, KArch

38. Agreement and Mutual Discharges by and Between Alexander Keiller and others and Charles C Maxwell, 7 & 10 Jan 1876, KArch (setting Maxwell's departure for 1 Nov 1876); Maxwell obituary

cited n 1 1 , above

39. Will of Alexander Riddoch Keiller, 3 Aug 1871, KArch. It might be that this document pre-dated the

worst of Alex's conflict with his elder son, but that the breach was not such as to force Alex into any

further acts of disinheritance.

40. Dundee Directory 1878-79, published 1878 and showing 164 Nethergate then in hands of Dr Thomas

S Gray

41. eg AK-WK 11, 19 Feb 1874; AK - Moore, Carr & Moore, 19, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28 Feb, 2 Mar 1874

42. As interpreted by Dr P R Greenfield, Robertsbridge, Sussex

40

43. Obituaries in Dundee Advertiser and Dundee Courier & Argus, both of 12 Feb 1877

44. Dundee Courier & Argus, 12 Feb 1877

45. Dundee Advertiser, 12 Feb 1877

46. Dundee Courier & Argus, 12 Feb 1877

47. Ibid

48. See below, section III

49. AK-WK 9 Dec 1871

50. ibid 13 Mar 1873; AK - James Keiller 15 Mar 1873; Dundee Directory 1871-72

51. ibid; AK-WK 1, 24 Feb, 4, 10 Mar, 6, 15, 16, 21 May

52. He also gave such advice and assistance to Alexander Govan, Barbara's second husband. AK

Bessie Clark, 22 May 1872, 23, 25 May 1873; AK - 'Sister', 26 Oct 1872, 8 Nov 1873; AK - Alexander Govan, 28 Oct 1872, 17 Nov 1873; AK - W Kidstone, 18, 21 Oct 1872; AK - Mr

Thurrock, 21 May 1873; AK-WK 15 May 1873; AK - unnamed correspondent 22 May 1872, 21

Apr 1873

53. AK-WK 16 Oct 1871; AK - James Keiller, 18 Mar, 12 May 1873. For comment on a painter

of Scottish, Channel Island, and other landscapes, of interest to Alex Keiller, see Stephen Furniss, Paul Jacob Naftel 1817-1891 (Guernsey 1991)

54. Dundee Advertiser, 16 Jan 1899; David Scruton, The Victoria Galleries (Dundee 1989) p 8.

55. AK - John Mitchell Keiller 22 Apr 1873

56. AK - James Keiller 15 Mar 1873

57. Ibid


59. Contract of CoPartnery between and among Messrs William Keiller, John Mitchell Keiller and

James Boyd under the firm of James Keiller & Son, 1877, KArch

60. Dundee Advertiser, 11 Sep 1926

61. AK-WK 19 Jan 1873

62. Inconclusive results of Registries of Births, Deaths and Marriages enquiries, Perth and Logiealmond

63. KGen

64. Relations, generally, could be close between engineers and confectioners: see Confectionery, 18

Oct 1896, p 594.

65. AK-WK 30 Sep 1872; also AK - James Keiller 18 Mar 1873 showing that, on the Spanish leg,

41

Alex had got as far as Gibraltar.

66. AK-WK31 Jan 1873

67. ibid 23 Oct 1872

68. AK - James Keiller 11 Feb 1873

69. ibid and 15, 18 Mar 1873

70. ibid 15 Mar 1873

71. ibid 2 Apr 1873; AK-WK 31 Mar 1873


73. AK-WK 31 Mar 1873


75. ibid 27, 28, 29, 31 Mar 1873

76. ibid 28 Mar 1873

77. ibid

78. AK - William Taylor 28 Mar 1873


80. ibid 28 Mar 1873

81. ibid 27 Mar 1873

82. ibid 31 Mar 1873

83. ibid 27 Mar 1873

84. AK-WK 2 Apr 1873

85. AK - James Keiller 2 Apr 1873; AK - William Black 2 Apr 1873

86. AK - James Keiller 2 Apr 1873; AK - William Black 5 Apr 1873

87. AK - James Keiller 4, 8 Apr 1873

88. AK - James Boyd 22 Apr 1873

89. AK - James Keiller 14 Apr 1873


91. AK - James Keiller 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 14, 30 Apr 1873

42

92. AK - Charles Maxwell 25 Mar 1873

93. AK – James Keiller 28 Mar 1873

94. Ibid; also 4, 7 Apr 1873

95. Ibid, 8 Apr 1873

96. Ibid 4 Apr 1873

97. Ibid 14 Apr 1873

43

CHAPTER FOUR

Production and Profits

I The Guernsey Extension, 1857

For all but seven years between 1850 and 1879, James Keiller & Son operated from

two separate branches: one in Dundee, and the other in St Peter Port, Guernsey. The

latter, it must be stressed, was a manufacturing establishment, not some mere

commercial outlet in the south. It was a rough duplication of the Dundee works,

with a bias towards sweet-making, employing at its peak about 200 people, and

accounting for over one-third of Keiller's total production.1 While Dundee

remained preoccupied with selling in the British market, Guernsey progressively

took on the job of catering for a steadily increasing number of overseas customers -

most of them imperial expatriates. Since Keiller's were still the paramount

marmalade producers, this gave the island the odd distinction of being the principal

exporter of the preserve, world-wide, for around twenty years. When the factories

there closed in 1879, this trading role was transferred to the firm's new works in

North Woolwich.

Other published accounts name the branch's foundation year as either 18462 or the

1870s3 - absurdly disparate guesses. These errors may be a consequence of Keiller's

own attempts to keep their Guernsey adventure as secret as possible. Neither

Charles Maxwell nor David Bremner, in their contemporary accounts of the firm,

made any mention of it. When Alex Keiller died in 1877, his obituarists praised him

as an exclusively Dundonian business man. Two factories notwithstanding,

Keiller's kept a determinedly low profile on the island itself, steering clear of

business disputes, exporting their produce under Dundee labels until the Customs

authorities stopped them in 1873, and shipping most of their produce in small

parcels within mixed cargoes.4

The initial decision to establish factories in Guernsey was a result not of mere

expansionism but of Keiller's constant worries about competition. As already

discussed, theirs was an easy act to follow, being based on domestic and workshop

industry, simple recipes, limited capital, a mix of female and male labour, and

untaxing skills. This situation can be seen in other branches of the sweets and preserves trades right through to the end of the nineteenth century. Frederick

Needier bought a plant in Hull as late as 1886 - stoves, rollers, slabs, utensils - for a

mere £100, developing it rapidly into one of Yorkshire's largest sweet businesses.

44

Thereafter, according to a historian of the firm, they were beset by a great 'amount

of cheap competition', serving constantly to tighten the margins on profits.5 John

Mackintosh got his celebrated Halifax firm underway in 1890 with what his

biographer describes as 'a sack of sugar, a tub of butter and a few pastries'.6 In past

years, J H Macadam observed in 1901, 'anyone could start a business with a kitchen

fire, a pan, a pair of scissors and a slab'.7 A number of enterprises in Scotland had

already progressed rapidly from the kitchen hearth to the factory. Bremner's survey

of Scottish manufacturing cites six of these, additional to Keiller's, in the main

urban centres - most of them in operation when the Guernsey branch was set up.

The whole confections and preserves industry in Scotland was then employing over

2,000 people, with Keiller's accounting for just 300 of these.8

Keiller's lacked any strictly Dundonian options to reassure them of their ability to

cope with future competition. Technology remained simple, and there were no

breakthroughs in prospect. In any case, no particular cachet attached to production

in large, mechanised establishments, there still being a sentimental premium on

onetime domestic goods being home-made.9 There were, accordingly, limited

opportunities for any American-style substitution of capital for labour: a frustration,

given that wages for the whole business community in Dundee were being driven

up by pressure from the expanding jute and linen industries. Baxter Brothers, in

linen, had 4,000 workers in 1864; Cox Brothers employed 3,200.'° Keiller's, with

their few hundred a year or two later, ranked as minor and submissive players in the

Dundee labour market. As Alex Keiller saw it, the problem concerned numbers as

well as rates. If they were to try to expand their plant in Scotland, he observed, they

'would have difficulty in procuring workers so long as the Dundee jute trade

flourishes'." The final factor cost, that of raw materials, also lay beyond Keiller's

ability to control at home.

Orthodox choices, therefore, showed costs as being difficult to lower, with a

marmalade-promoting campaign as probably the best hope for future success.

Guernsey, at a stroke, offered an alternative strategy. In St Peter Port, factor costs

could be brought down decisively, and to a degree that could overcome inhibitions

about producing more than 600 miles from the home town. There was no other

major reason for going there. The island was neither a significant purchaser nor a

supplier of raw materials, and its southern position yielded no special access to the

Continent, virtually all exports going out by Southampton or London. Lacking any

sizeable shipping market, Guernsey was also useless for picking up the long-

distance sailing vessels needed for the fruit and sugar trades. The island's appeal lay

in its cheap imported sugar, while also offering the lesser advantage of a partial

escape from the tight labour and land markets in Dundee.

45

Sugar, as we shall see in Sections III and IV below, was Keiller's universal raw

material, and there was no possible substitute for it. Beet-sugar production

supplemented, and in time surpassed, the ancient cane-sugar trade, but the refined

product was roughly the same whatever the agricultural origins. Average British

sugar duties were still as high as 24.8 shillings per cwt in 1840. Contrary to the idea,

mooted by some authors, that sugar duties were either introduced or raised in the

mid-1840s, thus energising the Keillers, it was then that reductions set in -bringing

the average down sharply to 12.5 shillings by 1850. Oscillations close to that level

continued in the 1850s and 1860s, with final abolition coming in 1874.12

Guernsey

did not offer complete free trade, but calculations for the sample year 1866 do show

that charges were less than one eighty-seventh of those on the mainland 13

- a saving

of almost £10 per ton. When these British duties were abolished, Alex Keiller

warned his brother, London sweet and preserve makers would 'be in a position to

sell as cheap as we do....This being the case we may find Guernsey at a considerable

disadvantage...& we may find it to be to our advantage to give up manufacturing in

Guernsey altogether'.14

Bargain sugar, he was confirming, was the main reason for

being there. But however compelling the logic of the move, no other British

manufacturer had the nerve to follow Keiller's to their Channel redoubt. The

Dundonians calculated in the early 1870s that they alone consumed as much as

six-sevenths of all the sugar sold in the island.15

The lesser means of reducing production expenses was to take advantage of the

comparatively low labour costs in Guernsey. Young female workers, needing only

minimal training, were easy to acquire in large numbers. Alex Keiller contrasted his

'difficulty in procuring hands for our busy season' in Dundee with the position in

Guernsey, where there were 'plenty of workpeople & a reasonable rate of wage'.16

There were also the attractions of a less-inflated property market. In 1872, as a

result of a recent trebling of land values in central Dundee, Keiller's local fiscal

liability had increased from £540 to £800 per year. Additional assessments, for

some rented premises owned by Messrs McGrady & Christie, and for their own

property in Castle Street, brought the total up to £1,040.17

In addition, the firm was

paying £500 in rent to Alex Keiller and another unknown sum to McGrady &

Christie. At the very least, their combined outlays in 1872 stood at £1,600. Keiller's

were happy to take advantage in Guernsey of the useful complex of underused,

relatively low-rent warehouses, and there were the ancillary benefits of

newly-modernised harbours and good steamship connections with the mainland.18

As far as one can tell, there was no particular intention at the outset to make Guernsey into a specialised export house. The objective, almost certainly, was

cheaper sweets for southern England, with a long-term option of transferring an

increasing proportion of the firm's production to the low-cost centre if the business

46

went well. Overseas trade was minuscule in the 1850s, with initiatives probably

coming less from Keiller's themselves than from colonial exporters in London.

Geographical specialisation came later, when pressure of demand left them little

choice but to spread the load.19

Guernsey, in brief, evolved into an export branch.

II Life and Work in a Channel Island

The Keiller archive tells us nothing about the mechanics of setting up the branch or

of the initial recruitment of its personnel. It is a fair guess that Alex Keiller himself

travelled down for some preliminary surveillance. St Peter Port was the only

possible location, if labour were to be recruited and external trade arranged. It was a

pretty place, essentially Georgian and Regency in character,20

and it held the great

bulk of Guernsey's population. Topographically, it might have reminded Alex a

little of his home town, lying as it did on a seaward slope, with a narrow channel

and low hills beyond. On a clear day, the Cherbourg peninsula would indicate,

tantalisingly, the proximity of the continental mainland.

Unfortunately, St Peter Port would also have seemed familiar by its congestion.

Indeed it was the more packed of the two towns, Alexander Riddoch and others

having embarked on the sort of programme of road straightening, widening, and

rebuilding in early-century Dundee21

that would have been unthinkable on the

Guernsey capital's constricted site. And, unlike Dundee, the town had virtually no

rural hinterland, yielding large volumes of produce, raw materials, and labour. The

entire territory of Guernsey extended to only twenty-five square miles, lying for the

most part on hard, unyielding granite.

Wedderspoon Keiller is the first known manager of the branch, though there is no

record of his arriving in the island in the late 1850s. He was only 24 at the founding

in 1857. The local Church of Scotland communion roll, however, names him in

1860; likewise the partnership of that year, which cites him as a resident of the

island. Also appearing on the 1860 communion roll was Bessie Keiller, Wedd's

younger sister.22

Her name features again in 1861 and 1866 - but, like Wedd's, is

absent from the 1861 census. This apparent return by the Keillers to at least an

element of female management is confirmed by the census return for 40 the Pollet,

Keiller's initial workshop, listing Elizabeth Bruce, head of the household, aged 37

(and possibly an in-law of the family); her six-year-old daughter Agnes; and three 'working confectioners' - Isabella Gibson, Christian Ritchie, and Helen Rathay, in

their early 20s.23

All had made the long journey south from Scotland, by way of

London and Southampton or Weymouth. This trip took at least three days in the

47

1850s24

- and might, in its latter stages, have posed notoriously severe tests for

land-legged passengers.25

There was a small, disparate Scottish community in St

Peter Port at the time - about ninety strong. Five had been born in Dundee; John

Elphinstone Fyffe, a shipowner, three of his sons, and Helen Douglas Vlarmaret,

wife of Guernsey's Procureur-Solicitor.26

Some of these folk might have offered

friendly company in what was a highly segregated little town.27

All the Pollet women were gone by the time of the next census in 1871. Wedd

Keiller's presence remains misty, but the 1860 documents cited indicate that he had

taken up full-time duties by that year. Leave in Dundee or business in London

might explain his absence from the 1861 census. A local directory of 1864 finds

him a tenant of De Beauvoir Cottage in Les Rocquettes in the western fringes of St

Peter Port, and he lived there until his death from consumption in January 1866.28

His condition might, as surmised above, have been started, or at least aggravated,

by the sort of work he had to supervise in the firm's ill-ventilated little factory in the

Pollet.29

Bessie's evident return to Guernsey in the mid-1860s was probably the

consequence of Wedd's illness and demise.

William took the usual journey south by train and steamer, in the company of his

wife Mary and his three surviving children, Edith, William, and Edwin.30

What mix

of grief over the loss of a young brother, anticipation at ruling in his own little

island kingdom, and resentment at exile from his native town, William experienced

on his arrival, we can only surmise. The confinement of the place might, as time

went by, have taxed his spirits. 'Jersey', in the words of Paul de Saint-Victor, the

French literary critic, 'is still big enough to give the illusion of the Continent....In

little Guernsey, you must withdraw and live within yourself.31

Language problems

would have intensified any sense of exclusion. Paul Stapfer, who taught in the

island at the time, observed how French was the official language, and that: 'In

town, merchants and the petit bourgeoisie speak French from birth, and English to

reply to the colonial aristocracy'.32

Alex Keiller, noting the uncertain linguistic

abilities of his brother and his nephew, Willie Bruce, did not believe that 'so far as

speaking [French] is concerned you will be of much service to each other'.33

William did find compensations, however, in a series of increasingly grand

residences in Guernsey. The first, which he rented, was at 1 Brock Terrace on the

Grange - a stuccoed, six-bedroomed Regency edifice with a small walled garden

and coach house, in a smart quarter of town/4 a short distance from the works, and

with glimpses of the sea through the surrounding buildings and trees. In 1869, the

growing family moved a few yards round the corner into 1 Euston Terrace, at the

top of the steep, twisting street named Vauvert. This was a much larger,

four-storeyed, Georgian property, again rented, where Keiller's tax assessment was

48

more than doubled,35

placing him on exactly the same footing as another - and

much more famous - exile, Victor Hugo, in his house on Hauteville on an opposite

hill (valued at 24,000F in 1856).36

In 1871 the Keiller household numbered eleven;

William and Mary; their five children; Catherine Bell, Mary's 20-year-old niece and

later William's second wife; and three servants, all born in the Channel Islands.37

William, through either demoralisation or patrician habit, was not a hard worker,

confining his office visits to early afternoon, and letting junior management attend

to the necessary supervision at other times of the day.38

In 1872 - and for reasons that Alex Keiller in Dundee could not exactly fathom39

-William began looking for a house to buy. The following year he sold his Prospect

Place house in Dundee - a mishandled exercise that brought him an unduly low

£1,450.40

Alex warned him that if he were still serious about 'a new Prospect' in

Guernsey, he ought to reflect a little on 'the difficulty you may have in reselling ...

should you & your family leave the island'.41

With sugar duties close to abolition,

the firm's stay on the island was likely to be brief. Alex recruited some Dundonian

opinion to strengthen his case: 'a good many of your friends have spoken to me

about your project & without exception they give it as their opinion that you are

wrong'.42

William went ahead nonetheless, and in May 1873 bought the large property of Le

Preel, in Castel, well to the west of town - only to sell it again six months later and

return to the rental market, this time at a much more elevated level.43

He and his

family moved into possibly the grandest house in Guernsey - the spectacular

Havilland Hall,44

an eighteenth-century porticoed mansion45

set in extensive acres

of gardens, home farm, and rolling parkland just a short carriage-ride from the

centre of town. For the four years he was there, he must at times have imagined

himself the first of the Keillers to have accomplished the translation into the landed

classes - for once, leaving his older brother behind. In subsequent years, the Hall

was purchased by the descendants of Field-Marshal Blücher, of Waterloo fame.

As for the other, more junior, managers in Keiller's branch, the evidence suggests

that they were all recruited in Scotland. James Keiller's short stay in the island has

already been mentioned; likewise the longer sojourns of James Mustard, William's

assistant, with special duties in inspecting and packaging,46

and Willie Bruce, the

Keillers' nephew from St Andrews, who took over as Mustard's replacement in

1873. The only known names to be added are that of a certain Anthony Thorns, who

had assisted Mustard; and Charles Henderson, a clerk in the Dundee house, who came down to work alongside Willie

47 - and who was expected to marry one of

James Boyd's sisters-in-law.48

All these men, including Mustard, lived in modest

lodgings in St Peter Port.49

By Alex Keiller's instructions, Willie Bruce was not

49

even allowed a night or two with his uncle in Euston Terrace when he first arrived

in the island. He was expected to find space in some employee's house and then

look around town for suitable accommodation.50

A coincidental presence in Guernsey, as noted above, was the great French man of

letters, Victor Hugo.51

He had arrived in 1855 as a political exile from the France of

Louis Napoleon, remaining in the island until 1870, and visiting in subsequent

years up to 1878.52

Keiller's second factory, acquired in 1866, lay in the south of the

town close by the long, twisting, walled ascent of Park Lane Steps, rising to Pieds

des Vardes and Hauteville Street. Here Hugo resided in the extraordinary house of

his own interior decoration, crowned by the glass belvedere from which he

surveyed the waters and islands to the east. A daily walker, he must have ascended

and descended the Steps on innumerable occasions in the late 1860s with the smell

of boiling marmalade in his nostrils.

There is no record of any encounter between the displaced Frenchman and the

immigrant manufacturers, but there are strangely incongruous Scottish allusions in

his Guernsey novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer, published in 1866. The strains of

'Bonnie Dundee' feature at intervals throughout the book; when the heroine,

Deruchette Lethierry, sings it to her own piano accompaniment; again, when she

hears it played 'from time to time...particularly when the nights were very dark' by a

distant bagpiper, in the hidden form of the hero, Gilliatt; and finally, when it is sung

by the same Gilliatt, after his titanic struggles against the elements to salvage a ship

on the Douvres Rocks and thereby win Deruchette's hand. 'At the moment of his

departure from the rocks, anyone who had been there might have heard him singing,

in an undertone, the air of "Bonnie Dundee'".53

This air, now almost a leitmotif,

recalls Gilliatt's hopeless love, and signals the tragedy to come. It is the 'Dundee'

that is peculiar in a thoroughly unScottish book - even if the song does celebrate a

handsome warrior rather than a fine .town.54

Apart from their identical tax valuations, Victor Hugo and William Keiller had the

common experience of resorting to the one St Peter Port property-owner, William

Ozanne - Hugo to buy his house in 1856, Keiller to rent his Park Street

manufacturing premises a decade later.55

Hugo, moreover, was much affected by

the sinking of the steamer Normandy in early 1870, just after it had delivered some

packages of Keiller confectionery to the railhead in Southampton. Half its

passengers and all its return cargo were lost in a sea collision, and Hugo wrote to

The Star of Guernsey denouncing the 'rich companies' that failed to fit their vessels with adequate safety equipment.

56 Keiller's, as mere charterers, were not among the

guilty parties.

50

III Factories in Dundee and St Peter Port

Both Keiller's manufacturing premises, in Dundee and St Peter Port, comprised

complexes of factories, warehouses, offices, and shops; and both were decidedly

town-centre - advantageous for docks and for labour recruitment, but awkward

when it came to finding adjacent buildings into which they could expand. Virtually

all were rented; in Dundee, as discussed, mainly from the internal market devised

by Alex Keiller; and in St Peter Port, from a variety of resident and absentee

property owners. The only exceptions were the shop in Dundee prior to 1872, and

the Guernsey properties purchased in 1875 close by their original Pollet factory.57

Annual rents for the two Guernsey factories in 1867 stood at £163.58

By 1872, as

discussed, Alex was asking the firm at home for £500.

In Dundee, the main cluster lay to the immediate south of Albert Square. The

separate parts - for storing, boiling, bottling, rolling, cutting, packaging - were

gradually consolidated, with some likely acceleration after a serious fire in 1859.59

When David Bremner came to inspect the place in 1867 he found that successive

extensions had been made: 'and now the establishment, which occupies several

blocks of three-story buildings, is the largest and finest of its kind in the

country...'.60

The end-product was the remarkable compressed structure that lay,

like a loose jigsaw piece, between an outer, surrounding quadrilateral of business

and residential properties along Meadowside, Commercial Street, the High Street,

and Reform Street; the inner spaces of Rankine's Court and New Inn Entry, and a

northern access along Chapel Street. The whole configuration, if not the Victorian

detail, is brilliantly captured in the 1930s aerial photograph reproduced herein. A

newspaper report on the dreadful fire of 1900 described the nineteenth-century

works that were being destroyed. The tall, slate-roofed complex, built within an

'enclosure' and surrounded by the 'towering walls' of the city-centre streets, was of a

magnitude that was 'only apparent when viewed from a neighbouring housetop'.61

The limitations of the site counted as one of the principal reasons why, when they

opened a new factory at the end of the 1870s, Keiller's chose reclaimed riverside

land in London. Alex initially had hopes for extensions in Dundee. 'We must', he

wrote in 1873, 'look out for a piece of ground here, to put up a one story [sic] place

to boil jams & marmalade also peel to assist to make the quantity we require for the

home trade & be able to make up fruit in a shorter time.. ..As you know the oranges

at the early part of the season .. .produce a finer marmalade and give a much larger

turnout than later in the season'.62

Interest was shown in a number of central

locations,63

but no purchases appear to have been made; rather the reverse. In April

1873, Alex Keiller sold to one Richard Miller 'that house in New Inn Entry

51

presently occupied by Int EC Guild/Mrs E Quick, Jas Keiller & Son & others, at the

price you named £700',64

probably having little use for a multi-occupation property

in which certain non-business parties had persisting tenancy rights.

In St Peter Port, the first factory was established at 40 the Pollet, a narrow northern

extension of the High Street, separated from the harbour by a thin line of

warehouses. The street, according to M H Ouseley, was possibly a traditional centre of

confectionery production in the town.65

Keiller's premises, by the terms of their

1857 lease, comprised stores, houses, other buildings, stables, and a yard.66

As their

main location in the island, used for clerical work and packaging as well as

production, it was much altered by the firm, and expanded to embrace an adjoining

property.67

By the time of the 1861 census, it was still their only abode, renting of a

second factory some way south at 30 Park Street - formerly a timber store - being

delayed until 1866.68

This latter site was to be the centre of marmalade production.

By 1871 it had experienced 'late additions',69

the firm subsequently arranging also to

rent a separate 'house' on Park Street where tin cans could be made.70

These places

were supplemented by a warehouse nearby, used for storage and for washing and filling

marmalade pots. This building gave them, in effect, a third small factory. 'Pouring

boiling hot OM71

is to all intents & purposes manufacturing premises', wrote Alex to

William, '& the stoves which you propose putting in are the things which insurance

coy's most dislike'.72

Another rentable warehouse was found on the Pollet in 1872 -

perfect, Alex suggested to William, 'for preparing & packing up your goods not

forgetting a suitable well ventilated & comfortable office for yourself.73

This action

was followed in 1875 by a fresh acquisition - this time a purchase rather than a let

- to the south of the original Pollet factory, and embracing an office on the sea

front.74

The Keiller works in St Peter Port were, therefore, a compound affair of small units,

stretched out over a larger area than the premises in Dundee. The besetting problem of

space was, by the 1870s, diminishing Guernsey's appeal as a manufacturing centre.

When he sent down some new boilers in 1872, Alex Keiller was aware that, on the

Pollet, there was 'little enough room in your courtyard already but thought you

might get space toward the back of your premises from some of the gardens' to put

them down.75

The working environment, moreover, was unpleasantly warm, with poor

ventilation, goods being 'packed in the second floor of the Pollet above the great heat

of the boilers & pans'.76

Alex thought that 'pottering away' with little improvements

in such a tight corner was no solution. Attempting some marginal extensions was little

better, the firm already having too many leasing contracts: 'how do you propose', he asked William, 'to arrange with the different proprietors when you come to hand their

property back to them?'77

52

The Pollet establishment was described in the 1861 census as a 'Manufactory of

Succades' - sweetmeats of candied fruit - and this site developed as the centre of

Keiller's confectionery production. The Park Street place was known, by local

testimony, as the 'jam factory' - an imprecision, as Keiller's did not produce much

jam in Guernsey. The shells of both buildings, tall and solidly-built, still stand.78

IV Making Marmalade

David Bremner made it clear in 1867 that marmalade in Dundee had long since

ceased running a poor second to sweets, the preserve now constituting 'the most

important part of the goods manufactured' - though by no means obliterating the

traditional 'extensive business in jams, jellies, and general confectionery'.79

Charles

Maxwell, in his address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science

the following year, told how marmalade was being taken by 'the whole British Isles'

and beyond - annual sales amounting to the equivalent of about two-and-a-quarter

million one-pound pots.80

Guernsey, on the other hand, never reached the point where marmalade became the

main product - despite its becoming the principal base of the international

commerce in the commodity. The reasons probably lie with the initial limitations of

the overseas marmalade market, and Dundee's original intention of using Guernsey

for the more commonplace business of sweet-making. There had been periodic

doubts about the quality of Guernsey marmalade: 'colour so abominable', and 'such

rubbish', being Alex's appraisals in January 1872.81

He had instructed William in

November 1871: 'Make as little outlay as possible for the manufacture of

marmalade'.82

As for jams, Guernsey was deemed too expensive a place to produce,

given the cost of importing fruit from the mainland.83

These strictures seem to have held for jam, but could not carry for marmalade.

Expansion in the home market was proving too much for Dundee's restricted

manufacturing capacity. William, though, was told not to get any ideas about his

branch becoming a regular marmalade producer for the British market. 'Your

proposal', wrote Alex in March 1873, 'to make marmalade in Guernsey as bulk for

the home trade will I fear not suit. No doubt it is a pity that so much expense has

been incurred at Park Street but it cannot be helped'.84

Any expansion of home

production for domestic consumers, it was insisted, could take place only in

Dundee. One important consideration was that the Customs authorities were

insisting on the honest labelling of St Peter Port produce. Pots displaying 'made at Guernsey' would 'do well enough for export but will not do for home use'

85 - a neat

statement of market priorities, and a sharp put-down for the island.86

No risks were

to be run with a commodity 'giving great satisfaction', and known to be 'far superior

53

to any other'.87

In the accounting year 1872-73, the Guernsey branch's exports of

marmalade were estimated at an approximate £10,000. Boilings, jujubes, pastilles,

and other confections, by contrast, were valued at £75,000.88

Manufacturing operations are described in David Bremner's invaluable account of

the Dundee works, and it can be assumed that Guernsey procedures were similar.

Keiller's insisted on using Seville sours and, as we have seen, liked to start boiling

as soon as these arrived. The manufacturing season, accordingly, was coincident

with the early December - late March importing season. Speedy preparation helped

avoid over-ripening and staleness, and allowed the firm to boast of the freshness of

their materials. However, the quality of the fruit could not always be controlled;

supplies were arranged not by nosing around some London market-room floor but

by long-term arrangements with Spanish dealers and British shippers.89

In 1873, for

example, there was an excess of green fruit, hundreds of boxes having to be 'put

aside till they gain colour';90

and with restricted capacity, Keiller's were having to

resort to a longer manufacturing season, ending in May. This practice stopped much

of the fruit being 'wasted & thrown out',91

though also threatened to compromise

their reputation for high quality, and Alex wrote of 'very serious loss' as a possible

consequence.92

After the skins of the orange had been removed, they were taken away for

steam-softening and cutting into chips, leaving the flesh behind to be manually

squeezed for juice. A late-century report on the trade comments on the customary

boiling of the outsides - 'to remove the acrid bitter bodies of the peel'.93

In January

1872, Alex Keiller advised William in Guernsey that rather than just using the juice,

they were now 'taking all the inside of the orange to use amongst the OM', which

proved 'a considerable saving and makes the OM better liked by the customers'.94

Such an innovation, combined perhaps with some temporary involvement of the

seeds, would have increased the pectin level and facilitated setting. These jobs were

done by young women. The resultant chips, juice, and flesh were then mixed with

sugar, ready for boiling. Two other sugar ingredients, glucose and French crystals,

were also in use by the 1870s,95

possibly to improve the colour and shine of the

marmalade.

'The boiling-house contains a number of open copper pans about three feet in

diameter, and two feet deep', Bremner reported. 'The pans are made double, and the

boiling is effected by the admission of steam into the space between the outer and

inner vessels. A young woman attends to each pan the contents of which she has to stir constantly'.

96 The pans, set in iron frames,

97 were worked in rotation, and

whenever one was sufficiently boiled its contents were tipped with the aid of a long

handle98

into another receptacle waiting alongside on a small wheeled vehicle, on

54

which it was sent to the filling-room - 'a large apartment, with tables arranged

longitudinally, on which thousands of pots and jars are piled'. Adjoining, was a

scullery in which containers were washed by a steam-machine."

These pots, mostly lib, were either glass or earthenware. Tins, ranging from lib cans

to pitchers capable of holding up to 561b bulk marmalade, were also in use, along

with large containers that could each take 6 dozen pots.100

In Guernsey, they were

starting to produce some of their own cans by 1873 in a rented 'house' in Park Street

with 'a few boys'.101

Dundee already had its own tin-shops,102

and the containers

had to be immaculately fashioned and soldered to avoid spoiling of the contents.

'We have to contend with other firms in the export trade who take the greatest care

that perfect tins only are used', Alex Keiller warned in May 1873.l03

Little is known about jars.104

The pots, as already observed, came from C J Maling

of Newcastle. Charles Maxwell told the British Association in 1867 that 1,500,000

of these pots were required every year, at a cost to the firm of £6,500.105

Maling,

however, was not always in a position to provided as and when required, which

could be highly disruptive. 'I hope Maling will succeed in picking up a vessel soon',

Alex Keiller wrote to his brother in December 1871, 'or you may get into a mess for

want of pots after you commence to make marmalade'.106

Dundee itself was also

being inadequately supplied: 'we are pressing him very hard & may get him to do

better'.107

The problem of inadequate consignments was compounded by one of

price rises, Maling's charge for printed pots increasing by over 20 per cent between

1871 and 1872, with the prospect of a further 18 per cent rise for the year following.

In October 1872, Keiller's current contract was for '4500 crates or as many as

contain the whole of next season's pots'.108

Once the hot marmalade had cooled, the containers were raised by steam-elevator

to an upper room for covering - first by tissue paper on the surface of the

marmalade, and then by a layer of De La Rue parchment109

tied round an outer

groove. About fifty women and girls attended to these jobs in Dundee in the late

1860s. Bremner suggested that the parchment had comprehensively replaced the

less-hygienic animal tissue formerly used,110

but this suggestion was at odds with

Keiller's private testimony and cost-comparisons of the early 1870s. 'We pay the

women that cover the pots with bladder 4d per gross & they can do from 6 to 8 gross

in 12 hours. When we use parchment they can only do 5 gross & we pay them for 6d

a gross for that'.111

In October 1871 he proposed to send William 'a few thousand

dozen firm bladders.'112

In October 1871 a promise of improved ways was offered by William Robertson,

Keiller's chief marmalade-maker in St Peter Port. Robertson claimed to have

55

devised a method of covering that would keep the marmalade 'in good condition for

any reasonable length of time'. Alex acknowledged a problem here by saying he

would pay 'handsomely' for any real benefit,113

but Robertson's ideas were to prove

a disappointment. One of his proposals was to use india rubber for covers thereby

guaranteeing absolute air-tightness. However, in Alex's view, 'price puts it out of

the question altogether & the appearance of it on the pots would be exceedingly

objectionable'.114

Another suggestion - that the covers be secured with rubber bands

around the hot containers - was dismissed, rather unpresciently as 'simply

nonsense'.115

Samples from Edinburgh rubber manufacturers proved to be 'rubbish'

and 'of no use whatever'.116

What really mattered for preservation, Alex thought,

was high-quality fruit, a sufficiency of sugar, and a good boiling."7 And there the

issue was left.

Covering was followed by wrapping, the women in that section earning 'the highest

wages'.118

Keiller's in Dundee were using a sober grey paper in 1871, cut to the size

of each pot; the Guernsey branch bought a buff cartridge cover from Milne of

Glasgow."9 Once wrapped, the pots went to the packing shed - a male preserve. 'Our

packers', wrote Alex, 'can pack 3 to 4 gross casks OM per hour. If they only do 3

they head them up themselves. When they do 4 we keep a boy who does the

heading'. They were 'daily engaged at such work throughout the whole year'.120

Casks made from Newcastle bleaching-wood were imported along with coal and

pot shipments; others, locally made, were priced at 2s to 2s 6d each in 1871.

Alternatives to casks were large tin cans and wooden cases.121

Thus ended the production process - characterised, in Bremner's words, by 'an air of

cleanliness and order which the visitor cannot but be gratified to witness', and a

body of workpeople whose appearance 'is a sufficient proof that their occupation is

by no means unhealthy'.122

Surveying the full range of marmalade-making, as

Bremner and Alex Keiller describe it, two features stand out; first, the dependence

of so many of the operations on either steam heat or steam power; and second, the

prevalence of women in the larger, less skilled part of the workforce, with men in

charge in a minority of skilled and onerous jobs.

The wide resort to steam made constant supplies of coal and water essential for

success. Guernsey was, in this respect, probably less advanced than Dundee. It

produced fewer preserves; it had logistical difficulties in bringing in and adapting

machinery; it suffered less wage-led pressure to mechanise; it had to make special

arrangements with the town authorities to secure a water supply;123

and it had to import all the coal it required from mainland sources. The branch was sent a cargo

of Scotch coals from Tayport in early 1872.124

In the spring of that year they were

advised 'to look before you a good bit as to winter coals', and to attend to their own

56

chartering to get stocks in early.125

Welsh and Sunderland coals were also considered,126

and some supplies came down from Maling in Newcastle along with crates of pots.127

The importance of female labour carried forward the oldest traditions of the

industry. As pot covering and wrapping show, there could be substantial

differentials in piece-rates paid, depending on degrees of difficulty and speed. The

general preference was for spinsters, Alex declaring it 'better that women when they are

married should not get to work in factories'.128

In Guernsey, the youngest employee

recorded in the 1871 census was Selina Pasquier, aged 13; the oldest, Agnes Wilson,

was the 64-year-old wife of a retired mariner. Women, however, did not penetrate the

male preserves of sugar-boiling, tin-making, and packaging.

A further feature of the business was Keiller's concentration on a single,

standardised product - 'OM', by their abbreviation. Surviving pots simply offer

'Dundee marmalade', with no distinctions as to ingredient or thickness of peel. This

concentration was a sign of self-confidence; but it was also precarious, given the

implied invitation to competitors to devise any number of winning alternatives.

For the firm, there was no-one more important than their marmalade foreman -usually

a sugar-boiler by training. It was only because such men were so skilled and

highly-trusted that Alex Keiller and his young friends could leave the country for long

periods during the manufacturing season. William Robertson was the key individual in

this respect at the time of the 1870s correspondence, working in both St Peter Port and

Dundee. He moved back from Guernsey at his own request (and the firm's expense) in

1872, and was allowed to dislodge Dundee's resident marmalade-maker, the efficient

but ailing Laurence Price.129

In St Peter Port he was paid 60s per week, in Dundee

£150 per year - placing him roughly on a par with junior managers.130

It soon became

clear, however, that the transfer had been precipitate. Robertson was finding the

Dundee work a 'harder job than he has had at Park Street. In fact he is scarcely equal to

fill Laurie's place'.131

After only a year-and-a-half in Dundee, Robertson moved on

again. The intervening events are worth some comment, being instructive of the

labour-poaching features of the marmalade industry, of the confident self-esteem of

marmalade foremen, and of Alex Keiller's own business personality. Alex even

provides a script of one of his conversations with Robertson.

In September 1873, a peel-maker, George Stewart, who had been with the firm for

three years, applied for the job of marmalade supervisor with the prominent

Aberdeen preserving firm of John Moir & Son, without telling Alex. Stewart was summoned into the senior partner's office, and asked what he was up to - to which

he replied, 'more wages'. Invited to name a figure that would keep him in Dundee,

Stewart said 30s - a 10s rise on his current pay. The two men verbally agreed a

57

twelve-month deal - whereupon John Moir Clark, Moir & Son's senior partner,132

wrote to Stewart, raising his own offer to 40s. Keiller, unwilling to bargain further,

at once dismissed Stewart.133

Worried about this loss of a skilled assistant, Alex called in the recently-transferred

William Robertson - whose responsibilities included peel-making - to ask for his

advice. 'His reply to me was - "I don't care for giving any opinion about what you

ought to do under the circumstances until my own engagement expires which it will

do on the first of next month". I said "then am I to understand that you also intend to

leave next month". He said "I don't know. It depends on what you are willing to

make my salary". I said "If you are not satisfied with your salary tell me how much

more will satisfy you". He replied "I cannot tell how much I am worth but I mean at

once to advertise that I am open for an engagement & you can offer along with

others". This I said would not do. He then stated that he would advertise all the

same & after he had got in the offers he expects to get then he would make us an

offer of his services & state his price. You will easily conceive that I do not much

relish being talked to in this style but as I had to be careful how I received his

statements & answered them I did not say anything to cause him to think that I was

in the slightest degree offended at his mode of treatment towards us'. Although

Robertson had made some 'good stuff, he could have produced 'a great deal more

had he taken & acted on our suggestions but this he would not do & thwarted us in

various ways'. Now he was saying that, if re-engaged, he would not permit any

more marmalade to be made than he judged appropriate. Alex declared himself 'not

disposed to submit to the dictation of servants to this extent'.134

His plan now was to re-employ Laurie Price, who had fully recovered, and get

someone up from Guernsey as a matter of urgency to work with peels.135

Once

William gave word, very reluctantly, that a man could be made available, Alex

went ahead and sacked Robertson. 'I don't wish Robertson to have the advantage of

advertising whilst in our employment'. As for the man's future, Alex was

disingenuous: 'I have no idea what he is going to do & don't care'.136

There were

unpredictable consequences for the firm's competitive position when someone as

experienced as Robertson, from the very heart of the Keiller enterprises in Dundee

and St Peter Port, could join Stewart in making his special inside-knowledge

available to other businesses.137

58

V Peel, Jam, and Confectionery

'When the marmalade season closes in the end of March', wrote David Bremner,

'the manufacture of candied peel.. .is commenced, and lasts till the jam fruits begin

to appear, which usually happens about the beginning of June'. Peels were in

increasing demand138

in consequence of the Victorian love for

astringently-flavoured cakes, puddings, and fruit loaves. Bremner's discretely

phased marmalade-peel-jam sequence had disappeared a few years later, however,

with the extension of the marmalade season into May; and in 1873 Alex Keiller

declared that peel-making that year would not be finished until the end of

November.139

The kinds of skin candied were lemon, orange, and citron. Usually,

these were pickled in brine abroad to prevent discolouration and deterioration. In

the factory, they were subjected to desalinisation in cold water, boiled for thirty or

forty minutes, and then steeped in a weak and regularly replenished sugar solution

for a few weeks before being dried.140

The processes were simple, unmechanized,

and laborious, employing young women and girls. Most of the peel fruit was

imported from the extensive groves of north-east Sicily, behind Messina.141

There is scant mention of preserved fruits in the correspondence,142

but it is fair to

assume that they were made in roughly the same way as peels, without the prior

pickling. These products served the growing popular market for various fruity

desserts. Jams and jellies were, according to Bremner, 'made in the ordinary way',

using British and imported fruits.143

Considerable supplies still came down from

Blairgowrie; blackcurrants, raspberries, strawberries, and plums are cited in the

correspondence.144

Boiling and bottling were conducted in ways similar to those

prevailing for marmalade.145

The principal items of confectionery were lozenges - sweetmeats of diverse taste,

shape, and hardness. These products, according to a late-century report, catered for

a huge variety of tastes, and included such distinctive flavours as wintergreen,

musk, cayenne, coltsfoot, and anise.146

Production comprised the mixing of

finely-ground refined sugar with water, gum, flavouring essence, and colour, thus

forming a dough which could be mechanically kneaded and rolled through polished

cylinders into sheets for cutting.147

The devices, called pinning machines, were

supplied to Keiller's by either Low & Duff of Dundee or Boyd's Nassau works in

Anderston, Glasgow. The former charged £75 in 1872 'for one of the improved new

4 roller machines'.148

Each was worked by 'a boy and two girls, whose duties are

exceedingly light'.149

Detachable stamping and cutting bars could be purchased

separately and inserted into the machines. 'We are getting a Conversation Loz Bar

for the new square & other fancy shapes', Alex told William in 1873, suggesting

that his brother order one for himself.150

Another technique was the partial

59

replacement of gelatine for gum, thus speeding up the drying of the sweets and

improving their colour.151

'Before the invention of the cutting-machine', wrote Bremner, 'all the lozenges were

stamped out with hand cutters; and for particular kinds of goods cutting is still done by

hand'.152

This latter reference was to some of the larger lozenges, with mottoes or

questions and answers153

printed on them - like the hearts 'so dear to the boy and girl

sweethearts' described by a later writer.154

There might have been a problem with

Dundee suppliers of the necessary equipment, for Charles Maxwell was sent on an

unsuccessful mission to find improved stamps and cutters in Glasgow,155

and

William Black, Keiller's London agent, was asked to send items up from the capital:

'"Love" and "Purity" will suit me very well indeed ...', wrote Alex with no doubt

unintended wit. 'They could not be got so well in Dundee'.156

Comfits - otherwise pan goods or confects - were made by adding consecutive small

doses of syrup to fragments of caraway, cassia, cinnamon, or almonds agitated in

large, steam-heated, copper pans until the comfit had grown into the size of sweet

required. 'The principle', according to an 1890s writer, 'is the same as that which

causes a rolling snowball to increase in size': and the final shape was determined by

the shape of the kernel. Some pans were 'inclined at an angle of forty-five degrees,

and revolve slowly: while others maintain a horizontal position, but are violently

shaken about'.157

Keiller's had a dozen of these at work in Dundee in 1867.158

A new,

first-class pan cost about £50 in 1871,159

and there was mention by Alex of a near-new

pan, belonging to another firm in the city, that might be sent down to Guernsey to

expand the capacity there.160

Rocks and fruit drops were made almost entirely from sugar with colouring and

flavouring essences, the drops with assistance from moulded rollers. Alex Keiller

sent his brother a new machine for this latter process in June 1873 - one capable of

producing a variety of shapes and sizes: 'I will also send you samples of all the sorts

of boiled goods we put through said machine'.161

Rock-making was un-mechanized in

Bremner's account, and we learn of two young sugar-boilers being trained by a senior

employee, John Shaw - who, according to Alex, found 'the making of so many very

hard work & complains of same'.162

Rocks were deemed at the time 'a kind of

confection that very few confectioners make'163

and when serious competition did

materialise, in the elongated shapes of Alexander Ferguson's 'Edinburgh Rock',

Alex asked a correspondent in the capital to send samples up at once by passenger

train.l64

Gum goods - mainly jujubes or pastilles - were another important category of

confection. 'The gums used here', reported Bremner, 'are the finest Turkish sort.

60

After being boiled with a certain quantity of sugar, the gum liquor is placed into

trays, and deposited in the hot-room where it is allowed to consolidate for a

week'.165

For candied pastilles, the solution was poured into an indented corn-starch

mould set out on a wooden tray166

and then coated with sugar. Alex preached economy

in the use of starch, suggesting that Guernsey used ten times as much as they should

have done: 'an unnecessary waste'.167

The Dundee works had an oddly-named 'clean

room where the gum goods are sifted out of the starch & anything that goes upon the

floor of the room is swept up & used again'.168

There was no particular inefficiency

here; fine particles of starch filled the air and obliged the women workers to cover their

heads. 'Do not imagine', wrote the chemist John Goodfellow in a later context, 'that

the quaint head-gear of the ladies in this department indicates employment of foreign

labour'.169

The Dundee factory not only had its own deposits to recycle. In April 1872 it

received some of Guernsey's as well. 'I will examine the gum dust... and report as to

what can be done with it & if sold credit Guernsey act. with the amount received for

same'.170

The edible portion could be used in the works, perhaps for cough sweets; the

inedible sand was sold to jute makers.171

Alex Keiller was concerned in 1873 by a great 'press of orders on hand',172

being able

to make only half the quantity of jujubes and pastilles required. 'David Howson

has been off work for the past month drinking. I offered to take him back again on

condition that he would work in place by himself along with two young men but this

he declined therefore we must just do the best we can without him & after a little while

I believe we will be able to make as many gum goods as we require'.173

The production of sweets remained a labour-intensive industry. Steam-driven

machines of a rather simple order were important in lozenge-making but less so in

other branches. This fact raised important issues of training and supervision.

Referring to gum goods, Alex Keiller told his brother that 'it would be well that you

see that the girls do learn to be able to make them themselves just as girls learn to make

pan goods and lozenges by themselves & not trust entirely to Crabb or to the man

working under him. We are getting on pretty well without Thomson & will soon turn

out all the goods we require as well made as he made them, but it would have been

easier for us had Thomson trained those that were under him ... So soon as the girl

learned anything as to the making of pastilles & jujubes he made it a point to quarrel

with her & and get her out of the place'.174

61

VI Profitability and Stature

How remunerative were these diverse operations in Dundee and St Peter Port, and what

was Keillor's comparative rank in the national confectionery trade and in the

Dundee business community? The general impression from the correspondence is

that Keiller's suffered in the 1870s not- from any stagnation or diminution of

demand, but from a rate of market expansion that their manufacturing capacities

could not match. Profitability was discussed for the financial years 1868-69 through to

1872-73, a buoyant period overall in the British economy.

In January 1872, Alex Keiller set down, without specifics, profit figures of £10,091 and

£12,280 for 1868-69 and 1869-70 respectively. To these figures he added the

interest on capital that was also paid to the three partners: £2,918 and £3,403.175

The

two taken together - the first, actual commercial returns; the second, an abstractly

calculated 'dividend' on the estimated capital of the firm - comprised the total

disposable income, giving £13,009 and £15,683. Guernsey's contribution in these

two years is not supplied, but we do know that in the extended period from 1868-69

to 1870-71 the branch contributed £12,604 to an overall total of £47,877.176

Profits in 1870-71 amounted to £15,436 - of which £12,182 had been earned by

Dundee and £3,254 by Guernsey. Alex's takings were calculated at £8,085,

William's at £3,234, and Charles Maxwell's at £1,617. Accumulated balances for the

three were estimated as £65,057, £21,105, and £5,801.177

The statement, Alex wrote to

William in November 1871, 'is as near as possible correct. The above return of

course you understand is in addition to the interest paid the partners'.178

This interest

amounted to £3,993, of which £2,495 went to Alex, £998 to William, and £499 to

Charles Maxwell.179

With his salary of £400 and his Meadowside rent of £250 added, Alex's total

remuneration for the year would have come to a bulky £11,230 - supplemented by

earnings from other sources, such as government and railway investments, and

interest on his swelling bank balances. Taking into account his Nethergate house and

his private ownership of the Keiller factory, he was a wealthy man - even by the

impressive standards of mid-Victorian Dundee. The situation in the business,

however, was not entirely healthy. Alex's income from the firm represented - by one

angle of calculation - the transfer into just one pair of hands of 92% of all the

Dundee work's profits. William's total, £4,532, left a differential that only the most

humble-spirited of younger brothers could find tolerable. His income, nevertheless, was considerably in excess of his own Guernsey profits for the year. When

Maxwell's total of £2,316 is added, we find that partners' earnings overall

amounted to £18,078 - compared with total profits of £15,436.

62

'The result of the year's business will be very satisfactory', Alex announced of the

1871-72 returns.180

Profits, excluding interest, amounted to £24,629 - very

decisively up on 1870-71. Dundee made £19,311 and Guernsey, holding its 1870-71

share, £5,318. Partners' earnings this time are rather confusingly presented, with

payments-from profits and payments-for-interest combined in a single calculation.

Alex got £12,520 (and a total income of £13,170); William got £5,008; and Charles

Maxwell £2,504. Accumulated balances were estimated at £77,577, £26,108, and

£7,950.181

Progress continued in 1872-73, bringing Dundee's profits to £25,251, Guernsey's to

£9,898, and the total to £35,149. Adding interest of £5,682, the final sum stood at

£40,831. The somewhat ambiguous figures suggest that the partners, now including

John Mitchell Keiller, took £30,267 from the straight profits and £5,682 in interest,

giving £35,949 in all - again more than swallowing up all the gains from trade. Alex's

income - on his new, 19/32 share - combined with his increased salary and rental, must

have come to an enormous £23,545. The accumulated sums for the four partners were

now estimated at £80,410 for Alex, £33,358 for William, £9,476 for Charles, and

£1,670 for John.182

In the space of the three years covered by the correspondence,

Alex's income had grown by as much as 110%. The rapid growth in earnings must

owe a lot to the favourable condition of the economy in the early 1870s.

Confectionery and preserves, catering for an income-elastic demand, could expect

to do well in good times.183

The Guernsey branch did particularly well in 1872-73, expanding rapidly from the

previous year, and bringing in more than a quarter of the profits. Despite this sum,

its performance incurred Alex Keiller's displeasure. Considering their turnover, the

income should have been even greater. 'I cannot understand the small return from the

Guernsey Branch of our business last year', he wrote on 24 September 1873. This

return had represented only 9% of net income, instead of the 20% or so expected.184

It was all rather worrying; 'we can only say that something is wrong or that Guernsey

is a very dear place for manufacturing in comparison with Dundee'185

- a depressing

possibility, considering that reduced costs had been the main reason for coming to

Guernsey in the first place. Dundee, Alex estimated, had a regular return of 25% on its

turnover.186

After many exchanges, and some discussion between Alex and William

as to methods of calculation, the Guernsey figure was revised upwards, to 11%187

- an

improvement, without doubt, but still leaving the economics of the branch much weaker

than that of the parent concern.188

Despite its sugar-cost advantage, Guernsey now

seemed to be losing out overall.

During this correspondence, rough figures were calculated for average profits per

item of production in Guernsey in the year up to October 1873. Gum goods

(£10,000 turnover) showed the best returns, followed by bulk confectionery

63

(£52,000) at 18%. Marmalade (£10,000) and small tins of confectionery (£1,500)

both scored a respectable 15%. Peel (£5,000) registered 10%. Bottled confectionery

and boilings (£10,000) were the worst performers, with only a 5% return.189

Dundee

figures, if available, would have shown generally better margins.

There are not many statistics available for contemporaries in the confectionary and

preserves business, permitting a comparative view of Keiller's performance. Fred

Needier of Hull only began his business in the 1880s; by 1914 his returns (£4,767)

were just a fraction of Keiller's levels of forty years earlier.190

Rowntree's of York

got off to an earlier start in 1862, but by 1870-73 their annual net profits stood no

higher than £147. For the 1870s as a whole they amounted to a mere £372, and

indeed the Keiller level of profits in 1872-73 was not surpassed until 1896.191

Cadbury's had had longer to emulate Keiller's, having commenced operations in

1824. These had registered little success, and in 1861 the enterprise was passed over

to John Cadbury's two sons, Richard and George. Expansion in the 1860s remained

sluggish, with a tiny labour force and minuscule, sometimes negative, profits. In the

late 1870s, although returns had hugely improved, they were still not level even

with those registered by Keiller's Guernsey branch.192

Among marmalade

producers, the distinctive firm of Frank Cooper of Oxford did not begin preserve

production until 1874, and then only as a sideline to their local grocery business.193

The Keiller business, with its diversity of markets and products, looked secure

when compared with these great confectioners of the future. Their competitors

were, at this stage, numerous but small-scale. Seen in a Dundonian context,

however, Keiller's strictly industrial stature diminishes. The linen trade, for

example, offered judicious entrepreneurs not only a very dynamic market, but also

great opportunities for technological advance. William Baxter & Son -

subsequently Baxter Brothers -was founded in the 1820s, and quickly moved into a

different league from Keiller's, employing nearly 1,300 people by 1846, and paying

out to David Baxter alone, on his 9/24 shareholding, a massive annual income of

£59,250 in the 1860s.194

By David Bremner's testimony in 1867, there were 72

linen, hemp, and jute firms in the city, employing an average of 614 workers each -

at a time when Keiller's had no more than 300195

, with an additional 100 or so in

Guernsey.

Keiller's, then, were large-scale producers - indeed market leaders - in their own

national business sector, but decidedly middling performers in their home city. As

Charles Maxwell modestly observed in 1867, they were 'small and unimportant when compared with the flax and jute spinning.'

196

64

NOTES

1. Ferdinand Brock Tucker, The History of Guernsey and its Bailiwick (London1876)p513; AK-WK 12Jan

1872, 15 Oct 1872.

2. Barker & Dobson, 'Keiller'; James Keiller & Son, 'House of KeillerMarmalade'; Anon, 'History of Keiller'; Anon, 'Keiller of Dundee'

3. Millar, Old and New Dundee, p 95; Collins, 'John Mitchell Keiller', p 38.

4. See Chapter Five, section III below

5. Raymond Needier, Needler's of Hull (Beverley 1993) pp 3-12.

6. George W Crutchley, John Mackintosh. A Biography (London 1921) p 31.

7. J H Macadam, article on Confectionery in Morning Post, Great Britain: her Finance and Commerce

(London 1901). See also Confectionery, 12 Nov 1896, p 709; 12 Dec 1896, p 778.

8. Bremner, Scottish Industries, pp 467, 472.

9. See, for example, comparative prices in Victorian Shopping. Harrod's Catalogue 1895 (Newton Abbott

reprint 1972) p 70.

10. A J Cooke (ed), Baxter's of Dundee (Dundee 1980) p 19.

11. AK-WK 18 Apr 1873

12. Hutcheson, Sugar Industry p 108.

13. ibid; Barbel's Almanack for 1866 (St Peter Port 1866) p 76.

14. AK-WK 27 Oct 1873

15. ibid 16 Oct 1871

16. ibid 6 Nov 1871, 18 Apr 1873

17. ibid 26 Aug 1872

18. AH Jamieson, "The Coming of Steam: Cross-Channel Services and Island Steamers' in Jamieson (ed), A

People of the Sea. The Maritime History of the Channel Islands (London & New York 1986) pp 444-57; John Jacob, Annals of Some of the British Norman Isles Constituting the Bailiwick of Guernsey (Paris 1831)

pp 423, 436-39; Gregory Stevens Cox, 'The Transformation of St Peter Port Guernsey, 1660-1831'

(University of Leicester doctoral thesis 1994) pp 163-64.

19. See, for example, AK-WK 5 Feb 1872

20. C E B Brett, Buildings in the Town and Parish of St Peter Port (Belfast 1975) pp 10-17.

21. Gauldie, Ambitious and Artful Individual, passim

22. Lenfestey, 'References to the name Keiller'

65

23. Census of St Peter Port, 1861

24. See later journey time of Willie Bruce, AK-WK 17 Feb 1873

25. See, for example, Historical Directory of the Channel Islands (Guernsey 1874) p 303. 26. Census of St Peter Port, 1861

27. Stevens Cox, 'Transformation of St Peter Port' p 259; Paul Stapfer, Victor Hugo a Guernsey (Paris 1905) pp 12-14; Joanna Richardson, Victor Hugo (London 1976) p 145.

28. Barbet's Almanack for 1864 (St Peter Port, 1864); Register of Deaths, 1840-74, Guernsey, St Peter Port, 31 Jan 1866

29. See Confectionery, 13 April 1896, p 116; M W Flynn (ed), Edwin Chadwick. Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (Edinburgh 1965) p 11.

30. KGen

31. Quoted in Richardson, Victor Hugo, p 140.

32. Stapfer, Victor Hugo, p 6.

33. AK-WK 13 Jan 1872

34. Brett, Buildings in St Peter Port, pp 44, 48. The description is based on an inspection of the house in

1998, by permission of the present owner, Mrs J D Pay.

35. Constable's Office, St Peter Port Taxes, 1845-77

36. Ibid

37. Census of St Peter Port, 1871

38. AK-WK 6 Feb 1872

39. ibid 26 Aug 1872

40. ibid; AK-WK 31 Jan, 1, 13, 24 Feb; 4, 10 Mar 1873

41. ibid 11 Apr 1873; also 12, 17 May 1873

42. ibid 22 Oct 1873

43. ibid 19 May, 31 Oct, 4 Nov 1873; Cadastre des Maisons et Terres, situees dans la Paroisse de St

Pierre-Port (information from this source supplied by W T Gallienne, Island Archives Service) 22

May 1873; John McCormack, The Guernsey House (London & Chichester 1980) pp 321, 361.

44. Not Government House, as stated in some publications.

45. McCormack, Guernsey House, pp 368-69; illustration in Leslie, 'Marmalade on it", p 4.

46. AK-WK 18, 20 Dec 1871, 4 Jan 1872, 31 Jan, 28 Apr 1873

47. ibid 31 Jan, 6, 7 Feb, 15 Mar 1873

66

48. ibid 6 Feb 1873

49. Mustard for example - a bachelor - lodged with one Eliza Hitchins in comparatively humble quarters at 27

Mount Durand, St Peter Port. Census of St Peter Port, 1871

50. AK-WK 17 Feb 1872

51. See below, section III

52. There are numerous books dealing with Hugo's stay in Guernsey. A recent volume, brief and well-illustrated, with French as well as English text, is Gregory Stevens Cox, Victor Hugo in the Channel

Islands (Guernsey 1996)

53. Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea (Nelson ed, London etc nd) pp 80, 105, 401.

54. There is also evidence that Hugo might have had another song in mind, given his description of it as

'melancolique'. This point, though, does not weaken the suggested incongruity. When the possible error was

pointed out to him, Hugo replied: 'Et moi, je Pappelle "Bonny Dundee"'. George Saintsbury, A History of

the French Novel, II (London 1919) p 116, n 1. For whatever reason, the same 'Dundee' had important resonance for him. His reference, moreover, to the second instrument in question as a 'bug-pipe' (ibid, p

116) indicates the possibility of careless phonetic spelling, based, perhaps, on some Dundonian pronunciation

heard locally.

55. Stevens Cox, Victor Hugo, p 17; Cadastre des Maisons et Terres, 29 Apr 1867

56. Stevens Cox, Victor Hugo, p 53.

57. Cadastre de Maisons et Terres, 23 April 1875

58. ibid, 8 Mar 1862, 29 Apr 1867

59. Newspaper cutting of 1900 (otherwise undated) DPLLC, 200A (69)


61. Cutting cited note 59, above

62. AK-WK 13 Mar 1873

63. AK - unnamed correspondent 30 Oct, 4 Dec 1871

64. AK - Richard Miller 3 Apr 1873

65. M H Ouseley, 'Guernsey and Sugar in the mid-nineteenth century. A Trade War', Transactions of La Societe

Guernesiaise (1971) n 1.

66. Cadastre des Maisons et Terres, 1 Mar 1857

67. AK-WK 5 Dec 1873

68. Cadastre des Maisons et Terres, 29 Apr 1867; information concerning prior use supplied by Judy Porter, Guernsey

67

69. AK-WK 11 Nov 1871

70. AK-WK 14 Apr, 7, 10, 23 July, 24, 29 Sep 1873, 9 May, 12, 23 June 1874

71. Keiller's standard abbreviation for 'Orange Marmalade'

72. AK-WK 29 Sep, 2, 16, 21 Oct 1871; also 16 Oct 1871, 18 Jan 1872

73. ibid 12 Mar 1872; also 24, 27 May 1872; Cadastre des Maisons et Terres 27 Apr 1872

74. Cadastre des Maisons et Terres, 3 Apr 1875, 16 Jan 1879

75. AK-WK 29 Jan 1872

76. ibid 21 Oct 1871, 16 June 1873

77. ibid 12 Dec 1873

78. As (probably) Pollet House and Borough House respectively, both converted into office complexes, the latter

described in a modern architectural survey as a 'very large and tall brick warehouse; four-storey and dormers, the dressings of granite almost outweighing the brickwork...overlooking a nice triangular open

space with nine plane trees...'. Brett, Buildings in Peter Port, p 61.


80. Maxwell, 'Confectionery and Marmalade Trade', p 47.

81. AK-WK 13 Jan 1872

82. ibid 6 Nov 1871

83. ibid 9, 21 May 1873

84. ibid 24 Mar 1873

85. ibid

86. Problems to do with Dundee's restricted capacity did, however, mean that such exclusivity could be quickly, if

temporarily suspended when home demand ran ahead of normal supply. See, for example, ibid 11 Nov, 4

Dec 1871; also 3 Nov 1871 for similar flexibilities with peel.

87. ibid 19 Jan 1872, 9 May 1873

88. ibid 1 Nov 1873

89. Some procedures, regarding orange purchases, graphically outlined in a long letter of instruction to a Seville-bound employee: AK - William Murray 16 October 1871

90. ibid 5 Dec 1873; also 23 Nov, 21 Dec, 27 Dec 1871

91. ibid 13 Mar 1873

92. ibid

68

93. Confectionery, 12 Nov 1896, p 709. There being no contemporary trade journal of significance,

frequent use is made here of this valuable publication, which first appeared in March 1896

94. AK-WK 19 Jan 1872

95. ibid and 17 Oct 1872


97. AK-WK 4 Dec 1871

98. See illustrated advertisements in Confectionery, 12 Mar 1896, p 3; 13 Apr 1896, p 122.

99. Bremner, Industries of Scotland, p 469; similar arrangements in Guernsey are discussed in AK-WK 29 Sep 1871

100. AK-WK 18 Apr 1873

101. ibid 14 Mar, 18 Apr, 9 May, 12, 23 June, 7, 10, 22, 28 July, 24 Sep, 3 Dec 1873

102. ibid 18 Apr 1873

103. ibid 9 May 1873

104. These jars have a lower survival rate than pots. One in the author's possession is a handsome 1lb

container dating from some time after 1886, 13¼ cms high, with a deeply-grooved and narrowed top, and the usual inscription of name, awards, and oak-leaf wreath heavily embossed in the glass

105. Maxwell, 'Confectionery and Marmalade Trade', p 47.

106. AK-WK 14 Dec 1871; also 21, 27 Dec 1871,4, 12, 18 Jan 1872

107. ibid 5 Feb 1872

108. ibid 30 Sep 1872

109. ibid 8 Nov 1871


111. AK-WK 29 Jan 1871

112. ibid 16 Oct 1871; also 12 Jan 1872

113. ibid 2 Nov 1871; AK - William Robertson 2 November 1871

114. AK-WK 8 Nov 1871

115. ibid 8 Nov 1871

116. AK - unnamed correspondent 10 Jan 1872; also AK - unnamed correspondents 9 Nov, 2 Dec 1871

117. AK-WK 8 Nov 1871

69

118. ibid 29 Sep 1871

119. ibid 16 Oct 1871, 27 Mar 1872

120. ibid 29 Sep 1871

121. ibid 2, 7 Oct 1871


123. Guernsey States Office Documents, BA/59-5, Supervisor's Letter Book, 10 Aug 1864

124. AK-WK29 Jan 1872

125. ibid 19 July 1872

126. ibid 3 Dec 1873

127. ibid 27 Dec 1871, 4 Jan 1872

128. ibid 11 March 1872

129. ibid 5, 19, 27 Mar, 23 Apr 1872

130. ibid 19 Mar 1872

131. ibid 19 July 1872

132. Richard Perren, 'John Moir Clark', Dictionary of Scottish Business Biography, II, pp 29-30.

133. AK-WK 6 Oct 1873

134. ibid

135. ibid and 8 Oct 1873

136. AK-WK 6, 24 Oct 1873

137. No connection, however, has been established between William Robertson and the successful Paisley,

and later Manchester, marmalade firm of the same surname


139. AK-WK 25 Oct 1873

140. ibid 5 Feb 1872; Bremner, Industries of Scotland, p 469; Confectionery, 12 Oct, 12 Nov, 12 Dec 1896, pp 581-82,750-51,811-12.

141. Bremner, Industries of Scotland, p 469; John Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Sicily (London 1864) pp 469-71.

142. Only in AK-WK 12, 13 June 1873

143. Bremner, Industries of Scotland, pp 469-70.

70

144. AK-WK 24 May 1872, 12 Mar, 31 July 1873; AK - unnamed correspondent 21 June 1873

145. See late-century evidence in Confectionery, 12 June, 13 July, 12 Aug 1896, pp 269-70, 345-46, 422.

146. ibid 12 June 1896 p 260.


148. AK-WK 22 Jan, 12 Mar 1872


150. AK-WK 7 Feb 1873

151. ibid 13 June 1873

152. Bremner, Industries of Scotland, p 470; also AK - Charles Maxwell 22 Mar 1872

153. AK - Charles Maxwell 23 July 1872

154. Confectionery, 12 Oct 1896, p 588.

155. AK-Charles Maxwell 22 Mar 1872

156. AK - William Black 25 Mar 1873



159. AK-WK 24 Nov 1871

160. ibid 3 May 1873

161. ibid 12 June 1873

162. ibid 15 Apr 1872

163. ibid 10 Apr 1872

164. AK - Turnbull & Kay 27 Nov 1871


166. See later account of the simple procedures in Confectionery, 12 Nov 1896, pp 743-4. 167. AK-WK 19 Mar 1872

168. Ibid


170. AK-WK 15 Apr 1872

71

171. ibid 11 Mar, 10 Apr 1872

172. ibid 12 June 1873

173. ibid 7 July 1873

174. ibid 21 Nov 1873. David Thomson had been foreman in the gums department

175. ibid 12 Jan 1872

176. ibid

177. ibid 11 Nov 1871

178. ibid 14 Nov 1871

179. ibid 1, 14 Nov 1871, 12 Jan 1872

180. ibid 19 Oct 1872

181. ibid 15 Oct 1872

182. ibid 1, 10 Nov 1873

183. See Confectionery, 12 Jan 1906, p 54.

184. AK-WK24Sep 1873

185. ibid 13 Oct 1873

186. ibid 18 Oct 1873

187. ibid 4 Nov 1873

188. ibid 24, 27, 29 Oct, 1, 4 Nov 1873

189. ibid 1 Nov 1873

190. Needler, Needer'* of Hull, p 10.

191. Robert Fitzgerald, Rowntree and the Marketing Revolution; 1862-1969 (Cambridge 1995) pp

610-12.

192. T B Rogers, A Century of Progress 1831-1931 Cadbury Bournville (Bournille 1931) pp 5-40.

193. Cutting 'Frank Cooper's "Oxford Marmalade'" supplied by Dennis Northmore, Hull. For detail on another late starter, see Glenn Horridge, The Growth and Development of a Family Firm. Chivers of

Histon 1873-1939 (Godalming, nd)

194. Cook, Baxter's of Dundee, pp 18-20.

195. Bremner, Industries of Scotland, pp 232, 267, 472.

72

CHAPTER FIVE

Domestic and Overseas Trade

I Purchasing from Home and Abroad

Keiller's bought their main raw materials - sugar, oranges, lemons - from Europe.

Only some jam fruits were purchased at home. Refined sugar came from Holland,

and to a lesser degree France, oranges overwhelmingly from Andalusia, and lemons

principally from Sicily. This pattern gave a powerful continental dimension to

Keiller's work, with much managerial effort directed towards securing and

synchronising consignments and shipping-space through a variety of far-flung

agency houses. And by requiring visits to the various sources of supply, it forced on

Keiller's an early and direct familiarity with foreign lands. There was, however, no

replication in the export business. Inward and outward trades were unrelated, the

bulk of Keiller produce bypassing Europe on its way east to Asia and Australasia.1

Sugar, the universal raw material, was shipped to Dundee and Guernsey from

Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Le Havre, either directly or by way of London. It was

all refined, and came in either crushed or sugar-loaf form. Holland's importance as a

supplier lay in the combination of its industrial capacity with its access to

colonial-cane and German beet-sugar markets. Cargo purchases and charters were

arranged on instructions from Dundee by intermediary houses, of which two

-Engelhardt and Schneider of Amsterdam - were especially prominent. The vessels

were sailing ships for the most part, although the little steamer Staperayder carried

the odd consignment of imported sugar from London to St Peter Port, and further

branch supplies might have gone from the metropolis by rail to Southampton,

subsequently passing across the Channel in vessels of the London & South Western

Railway Company.

The sugar trade overall could be problematical in as much as supply shortages,

middleman inefficiency, unscheduled stops, and adverse weather conditions might

cause unpredictability in journey times. Delays were a nuisance when stocks were

low and warehoused fruit was deteriorating. Alex Keiller's letters to his brother in

Guernsey provide a running commentary: 'The beet sugar crop is not to turn out so

large as reported'; 'I hope both the vessels from Amsterdam & Rotterdam will

manage to get out with your sugar before the frost'2; 'The Rollo & Swallow are

certainly making long passages from Havre & Amsterdam....You had better not make any lozenges for London';

3 'I hope the Maria will arrive soon at Guernsey. If

you are likely to run short of crushed you may telegraph us & I will try & get some

in London for you'.4 There is no record of any of the Keillers visiting Holland to sort

73

out their difficulties. As for price fluctuations, these were never a source of major

concern.5

The Seville trade was, as observed, tightly seasonal, and also meagre when

compared with that conducted in eating-oranges between the Azores and Britain, or

with imports of Valencia oranges.6 It can be calculated that Guernsey's needs for an

entire season in the early 1870s could have been met by a single large consignment7

had Keiller's found the right ship and been happy to receive the fruit all at once. The

vessels were a mix of sailing and steam ships - small, fast, and operating along a

variety of routes; to Guernsey or Dundee, direct; to Guernsey for partial unloading,

and then on to Dundee; to London, for reshipment to one or both of the

manufacturing centres; or to some other English or Scottish port for transfer to

Dundee.8

This, too, could be an awkward trade. 1873 was a particularly bad year. 'We have so

far not been very fortunate with our ships this season', wrote Alex.9 He had been

delighted to announce the chartering of a large schooner called the Earnest, which

would shortly come to Guernsey with all the oranges that William might require for

the 1873-74 season. In the event, the vessel failed even to turn up for loading at

Seville.10

Another, the Surprise, had a collision off Yarmouth on its way up the

North Sea coast, and had to put into that port for repairs." In mid-December, some

traditional metropolitan weather intervened: 'For some days', Alex reported, 'there

has been a dense fog in London which almost entirely suspended business in the

City & at the docks. Consequently our 200 boxes oranges per Moratin have not

been got round to Dundee...but I hope they will be for tomorrow's steamer or we

shall be put to very great inconvenience. Your 50 boxes have not been forwarded

either to S'hampton'.12

There had already been awkward shortages earlier in the

year, and John Mitchell Keiller had been despatched to London to see what extra

supplies he could pick up.13

Towards the end of the 1872 and 1873 seasons, the firm

was also taking small consignments of oranges from Sicily, known as 'Palermo

sours'.14

Numerous 'first class houses' - British, by the names of Noel & Co and John

Cunningham, and Spanish, called Campania, Cazenove, and Santalo - attended to

collection, loading, and shipping in Seville,15

and were paid through bills drawn on

Keiller's or their bankers. The dependence on such men, however, was not total as

in the sugar trade. The Keillers were happy to visit southern Spain themselves to

check both agencies and suppliers, and enjoy the beauty and vibrancy of the Andalusian capital. William Murray, a salesman, was sent south on an orange

vessel in October 1871 in the expectation that 'he would be better of the sea

voyage'.16

74

His instructions indicate a pleasantly relaxed mix of activities. 'So soon as you

reach Seville', wrote Murray's employer, Alex Keiller, '& have seen Mr Santalo &

the other firms that are to ship bitter oranges on our ac/- this season including Mr

Cazenove...you will please send us a telegram stating the number of boxes sours

likely to be shipped by all the merchants...and also stating the day the London is

likely to be despatched from Seville.... You can write.us immediately you land &

tell us how you feel after your voyage & state what kind of weather you have in

Seville. After you have ascertained the number of boxes naked sours that can be

procured for shipment for us ask Cpn. Doyle to stow them in the warmest part of the

ship & if they could be put in compartment by themselves. The hatch over that

compartment might be kept down all the way to Leith. By doing so the sour oranges

will be improved in colour & benefited otherwise'.17

'At any time that you are not engaged in business', Alex continued, with lessons in

common etiquette, 'there is no harm in you joining D.S. [David Shepherd, from

Dundee] or any other & visiting the sights &c at Seville. Of course you must

stipulate he pays his full share of the expenses but don't you of your own accord

suggest that he is to accompany you. Let the proposal come from him. You are at

liberty however to ask the Capt to join you if he has any spare time in going to visit

the sights or going to the theatre in the evening which is well worth seeing & also

the large cafes in the principal street, you of course paying all expenses & treating

the Captain most liberally, of course anything of this sort at my expense. You had

also better give the mate when you return from Santalo's two or three dollars to treat

the crew.... While you are in Spain be careful of yourself & take a good nourishing

diet & a bottle of good wine & when you come back in December we shall hope to

see a great difference for the better'.18

Murray was away for two months, and on his

return Alex Keiller thought him 'quite a different man'.19

Peels came largely from Sicily, and the business gave James Keiller a pleasant

break from harassments back home. Messina, his main location, was, according to

George Dennis, a cosmopolitan city of 'grandeur and romantic beauty', its harbour

presenting 'a scene of constant movement and bustle as steamers are arriving and

departing hourly'.20

The Keillers were fortunate in their choice of centres for

overseas dealings; St Peter Port, Seville, Messina - and even Amsterdam, if they

ever visited. James's other place of work was Palermo - 'this delicious abode', in

Goethe's words.21

Oranges, lemons, and citrons were the exports,22

lemons in

particular being the fruit that brought Keiller's to the island.

The trading season was similar to that in Spanish oranges, Dennis in 1864 dating

the start of the harvest to September.23

When Alex Keiller discussed the business in

the early 1870s, though, it seems that the fruit was bought not fresh from the trees

75

but from local brine picklers. In October 1871, well before James's visit, Alex set

out a plan for the Sicily trade. Someone should go down to Messina in the autumn

'& remain all through the pickling season up to March month'24

- although he later

suggested that buying could be put off until January.25

The person concerned would

need 'some knowledge of the Italian language' to permit 'free intercourse with the

native picklers', whereby he could explain to them 'the advantages of being able to

get large orders & cash payment for their produce'. And after the picklers had been

persuaded, the Keiller representative could look around for an agent to handle all

this business in subsequent years.26

With their Scottish perceptions of Sicilian

business standards, however, they worried about securing fair deals. In October

1871 Alex Keiller knew of only one 'really honest shipper of peel'. Dealers, it was

thought, tended to underload the containers27

and charge excessively high prices.

They seemed for the most part 'a lot of untruthful scoundrels'.28

Alex expressed himself 'greatly pleased' with his son James's work in the island

through the 1872-73 season.29

Exports were booked in Messina and Palermo, and

went out in boxes30

or pipes31

in a variety of steam and sailing vessels,32

directly or

indirectly to St Peter Port and Dundee.33

Pipes were generally more commodious

than boxes, taking 'so many thousand good-sized oranges & lemons'.34

In February

1873, James chartered the steamer Zelina of Liverpool to carry 500 pipes to

Guernsey.35

The main effort at the time was to overcome Guernsey's chronic

shortage of peels and consequent inability to meet the growing volume of orders

coming down from London.36

Fruits for jam, unlike the others discussed, were not exclusively an import. The

importance of domestic supplies goes right back to Keiller's first years, when soft

fruit could be purchased in abundance from their immediate hinterland. A letter of

Alex Keiller's dated June 1873 - when the fruit season was just opening - gives a

mass of jumbled detail on the purchasing of strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries,

and red and black currants. 'It is exceedingly difficult to decide about fruit this

season', he declared, going on to name Scottish, English, Irish, Dutch, and German

sources of supply - of which Scottish and Dutch were probably the most important,

the former notably for strawberries.37

Import-trading overall was run from Dundee. The head office, in the person of Alex

Keiller, assumed responsibility for the placing of orders, the chartering of vessels,

and the general co-ordination of the different strands of activity38

- with the

assistance of a network of agency houses in London and abroad.

76

II Domestic Sales and Combinations

There are no ledgers to show the balance of domestic and overseas sales, but if we

assume rough correlations between Dundee profits and the home trade, and

between Guernsey profits and sales abroad, then the figures set out in the preceding

chapter become a useful guide. Bearing in mind that the branch was frequently

reprimanded for its low efficiency - i.e. that Guernsey needed a considerably higher

volume of sales than Dundee to produce the same level of profit - we might

calculate that home sales took about three-quarters of the firm's total output in the

late 1860s, with exports representing the other one-quarter.

The surviving correspondence provides only the sketchiest additional hints as to the

volume of Scottish and English sales. In October 1872 we learn that Dundee output

over the previous 11 months had been 55,800 packages containing about 4,000 tons

of goods39

- figures which, without comparative context, are largely meaningless.

Some months later, Alex Keiller wrote to one of his associates in London, William

Taylor, asking him to collect the £12,000 due from metropolitan accounts, 'with full

discount';40

ten days later, most of that sum had been assembled.41

And such simple

invoicing might have been compounded by credits whereby Keiller's drew bills on

the larger customers or their bankers. It was not all promotional push, however:

Keiller's refused to do business with the civil service co-operative societies in

London, such stores being referred to alternative suppliers for their marmalade.

Alex Keiller refused to 'take the chance of losing our wholesale customers ...who

object to us supplying them'.42

Elsewhere in England, accounts are mentioned for Northern England, Liverpool,

York, and Bristol43

- in which latter port the firm had to cope with problems of

adulteration. James Keiller was sent down to investigate, and found the issue an

awkward one. 'I had no idea', wrote Alex, 'that so many difficulties would have been

found to be in the way of getting the better of the scoundrel who filled our pots with

the vile rubbish'.44

There was also a new, growing market in Ireland. William

Taylor was despatched to Belfast and Londonderry with a list of local accounts to

investigate in October 1873.45

London was important not just as a centre of consumption, but as a base for

competition. The so-called 'London confectioners' had advantages - of access to

shipping, raw materials, and markets - that greatly concerned Keiller's.46

Once the

Scottish firm's own special, contrived asset - cheap Guernsey sugar - was done

away with by the British parliament, it was logical for Keiller's to set up store

themselves on the banks of the Thames. In advance of that establishment, London

producers were kept under constant surveillance, and gave the perhaps

over-anxious Keillers a series of benchmarks for the quality and price of their own

77

produce. Clarke Nickolls & Co of Hackney Wick, one of the larger and more

enduring houses, caused alarm in March 1873 by producing a softer peel than

Keiller's. In 1874 Alex Keiller made it quite clear that, in peel, he was 'guided

by...the price London makers are charging'.47

Around the same time they got word

from their main Scottish traveller, William Murray, that London lozenges were

selling in Aberdeen at prices lower than Keiller's. Alex's immediate reaction was

that London producers should be allowed no advantage: 'Scotch makers ought to be

prepared to meet the London makers'.48

By May, the reduction had been effected.49

As for marmalade, it was noted in Dundee in 1871 that Crosse & Blackwell's new

prices were 'certainly low', although offset by the fact that they did not 'pay any

carriage'.50

Alex focused a wary eye on the future owners of his firm, asking both

John Mitchell Keiller and James Boyd to bring pots of their marmalade up to

Dundee for inspection.51

A number of important Scottish names in the confectionery and preserves business

appear in the Keiller letters. These included John Moir Clark of John Moir & Son,

Aberdeen; Alexander Abercrombie of Robert Witherspoon & Co, Glasgow; Hugh

Lamberton of John Gray & Co, Glasgow; Alexander Buchanan of John Buchanan

& Brothers, Glasgow; Alexander Ferguson of Edinburgh, confectioner to the

Queen;52

and Keiller's near neighbours, Low's of Dundee. Moir's were the firm that

Alex Keiller took most seriously in the matter of marmalade competition: 'we must

be guided by the price Moir & Son Aberdeen is charging for OM', he observed in

1874.53

Such submissiveness renders their release of George Stewart in 1873 all the

more difficult to understand. Two years earlier they had been pleading with Moir,

with the help of the Glasgow marmalade-makers, Hugh Lamberton and Alex

Abercrombie, on a special visit to Aberdeen, 'to promise that they will not reduce

the price below 367- nett for bulk marmalade without first intimating their intention

to do so'.54

The problem implied here - involving the concern of three of the largest Lowland

producers - might help to explain the trend towards a price-fixing combination in

the early 1870s. On 6 February 1872 a number of confectioners, including Keiller,

Lamberton, and Abercrombie, held a meeting in the Salutation Hotel, Perth. This

gathering had been suggested by Abercrombie, and strongly supported by Keiller.55

Lamberton himself had become a cause for worry, with reports circulating about his

recent sales of marmalade at 34s per cwt, carriage paid.56

The meeting decided to

set up an Association of Scottish Confectioners under Abercrombie's chairmanship.

The main purpose was to put an end to price undercutting. In order to secure a coherent membership, the individual firms in the Association granted each other

discounts of five per cent for any mutual business they might conduct.57

Alex

Keiller listed the Association's members in the Edinburgh area; Alexander

78

Ferguson, Shiels & Son, Currie & Co, John Miller (Leith), and John Rough

(Dalkeith).58

In Dundee, there were only two members; Keiller's and Low's.59

In

Aberdeen, there were John Milne, Shepherd, Me William, and Sellers. Moir,

ominously, was missing.60

Glasgow included Abercrombie of Witherspoon's and

Lamberton of Gray's, and almost certainly, a representative of John Buchanan &

Bros - formed in the mid-1850s and on its way to becoming the largest

confectionery business in Scotland.61

How was common practice to be imposed? A week or two after the Perth

agreement, a traveller from John Milne's offered a retail confectioner in Dundee a 5

per cent discount, telling the man, Robert Ormond, that this special allowance could

be made for sales of sweets to non-members. Along with John Moir & Son's past

excesses, this offer suggested that the Aberdonians were not prepared to play ball.

'Now there is no doubt as to what the Abdn people intend & are doing', these being

men 'who are determined not to work out the agreement fairly & who have no

objections to their neighbours being bound but who wish to have the latitude that

Mr Milne is taking just now. Ormond did not buy anything...but the mischief done

is all the same'.62

Some harmony, however, was restored at the next Perth meeting,

on 25 July 1872, when the confectioners, as a body, agreed to raise the price of

lozenges and pan goods by 2s per cwt to 66s and 64s respectively, and boiled goods

by ¼d per lb - 'to cover extra costs of production'.63

By the following spring, discord reappeared - this time, with Keiller's themselves as

miscreants. Alexander Abercrombie called a special meeting in Glasgow on 23

April to consider the Dundee firm's old, and now irregular, habit of circularising its

customers. Alex Keiller expressed his 'astonishment' at the furore. At the very least

he should have been wired, so that he could have 'a fair chance of defending

himself. After all, 'any number of the trade had the liberty of sending out circulars'.

Unwilling to budge, he considered he had no choice but, dramatically, to 'withdraw

from the agreement for Scotland'64

- unless a critical motion passed in Glasgow was

at once rescinded. The prospect of the largest firm in the business being let loose as

a rogue competitor was too much for the other members, and the issue was resolved

by 28 April - with Keiller's retaining the right to circularise as they chose.65

Alex

Keiller's anger, however, took a little longer to settle. Abercrombie was due a

testimonial dinner on 8 May, and Alex let it be known that he would not be

travelling through to Glasgow for the occasion. Charles Maxwell was also told to

stay away.66

'I fully intended to be present at the presentation of the testimonial',

Alex wrote to Hugh Lamberton, 'but after what has taken place since our last Perth meeting I must decline forming one of your party on the 8

th'.

67 Affairs seem, though,

to have been back to normal by the autumn.68

79

Alex Keiller, as past episodes have shown, found criticism very difficult to endure.

James Keiller, William Keiller, William Robertson, and now Alex Abercrombie -a

key figure in the Scottish trade - had felt the blast when they presumed to query

Alex's practices. Yet another breach of good relations came when Alex opened a

letter of 13 March 1873 from one of his commercial travellers, William Murray -the

beneficiary of the sea trip to Seville in 1871-72, and a source of useful market

reports from his territories in the north-east.69

Alex noted the 'bother' and 'irritation'

he expressed in his account of some transaction in Stonehaven. 'You must avoid

such displays of temper & in respectful terms answer inquiries put to you. I cannot

comprehend your object in writing & speaking as you sometimes do', he continued,

'even if you had not been treated in the kindly manner you have been ever since you

came into the employment of the firm'.70

III Exports to Europe and the Empire

Exporting, as observed, was largely in the hands of the Guernsey branch by the

early 1870s - a matter of evolution, not of initial policy. James Keiller & Son appear

to have approached their overseas business with self-protective secrecy on the one

hand, and a certain lack of enthusiasm and drive on the other. Goods were carried

initially to London, either directly by sea or indirectly by sea and land. Through the

agencies of various merchant houses in the capital, they were then transhipped for

sale overseas.

On the first stage, St Peter Port to London, most of the vessels were small

paddle-steamers owned by the New South Western Steam Packet Company which

did the scheduled rounds of the Channel Islands, collecting cargoes at the various

ports for shipment to Southampton. Most of these consignments, and all of

Keiller's, were transferred to the cars of the London & South Western Railway

Company and taken up to London. A direct sailing service to the capital, dating

from 1854, was also available, but this was operated by only a single boat up to the

early 1870s, and by just two for the rest of the decade.71

Examining Customs Bill of Entry for Southampton and London for the January

-March quarters of 1862, 1870, and 1878, one finds that Keiller's despatched 36

part-cargoes in the first year, 49 in the second, and 39 in the third - 124 in all, of

which as many as 102 went on the Southampton route. In the busiest year, 1870, the

sample shows Keiller's sending out goods on roughly three out of four working

days. Their practice, obviously, was to despatch little packages of sweets and preserves with great regularity, which meant - taking into account as well the high

value-to-weight ratio of their produce - that the consignments of covered chests,

barrels, and casks took up comparatively little space, being packed away

80

inconspicuously among a wide range of other island commodities.72

This might

represent a quite deliberate attempt at secrecy, considering the inconvenience of

such frequent trips to the docks, and London buyers' possible dislike of their larger

orders coming up in dribs and drabs. Alex Keiller certainly disapproved of any

unnecessary publicity, and conveyed his opinions to his brother, who, in this one,

local part of the trade, did have some autonomy in the chartering of vessels. 'It

seems to me unaccountable that you persist in shipping so large a quantity of goods

by each trip of the Staperayder.... The fact that 500 or 600 cases come at a time by

Staperayder from Guernsey will attract attention of the confectioners in London.

The shipments you make by Staperayder all appear in shipping lists & I do not

think that our goods coming up by Southampton in one or more parcels at a time are

quite so likely to attract the attention of other parties in the same trade'.73

Improper labelling carries this issue of secrecy a good deal farther. Surplus

Guernsey produce was already being sent up to Dundee for bottling and distribution

as Scottish fare in the home market.74

Keiller's also believed that 'Guernsey'

marmalade and confections would hold less appeal for people of British descent

around the empire than would produce carrying the comforting and familiar name

of 'Dundee'.75

When the Board of Customs insisted on correct Guernsey

inscriptions at the end of February 1873, Alex Keiller again found himself in a state

of high indignation. It was, he insisted, a 'disgraceful matter'.76

Inordinately long

and detailed letters were sent off to Guernsey over a period of about three weeks in

the early spring. James in Sicily was told all about it;77

and Alex himself took his

objections down to London.78

It is clear that the question mattered a great deal to

him - partly for the reasons given, and partly because once more he was suffering

the embarrassment of being caught out. The Customs had been acting on the

authority of an 1872 Act of Parliament, designed to protect manufacturers from

foreigners bringing goods into Britain, giving them British names and trade marks,

and re-exporting them to the colonies and dominions.79

This Act should have been

good news for Keiller's, ridding them of duplicitous competition, but as they too

were considered 'foreign' by the Customs, operating under a separate fiscal regime,

they became targets of the new law. Alex argued his case in London with William E

Baxter, an old commercial acquaintance and travel writer who now held the post of

Joint Secretary of the Treasury in the Gladstone government.80

'I know he will help

me if he can', wrote Alex. A meeting took place, and Baxter agreed that the

Customs fire might have been misdirected, advising Keiller to petition the Board.81

It was still 'a great annoyance', Alex wrote to James in Sicily, 'the Customs interfering on this matter & we being so excessively busy in export goods at

present'.82

That interference was about to be stepped up, Baxter and the petition

notwithstanding. The Staperayder came into the Thames from Guernsey with a

81

large quantity of Keiller produce, and was refused clearance by the authorities, and

there were fears for other goods at the time on their way up from Southampton. It

seemed that Alex might be beaten after all, and he surmised that perhaps 'just James

Keiller & Son' would look fine, and that it was always open to them to add at the

bottom: 'These goods have been manufactured or made in our Guernsey factory for

the past sixteen years'. This action, surely, would reassure 'any of our friends abroad

who may miss the word Dundee ... that they had not lost anything so far as quality is

concerned'.83

He sent off a telegram and letter to Baxter protesting about the latest

turn of events, and was told in reply that 'as the alteration in the Law with regard to

trade marks shall not be in force for six weeks', goods like those of Keiller's could

be released in the interim. This news was a great relief,84

and less than a fortnight

later, following an initial judgement by the Customs and subsequent submissions

by Cheeswright & Miskin, the owners of the Staperayder?5 on Keiller's and their

own behalf, Alex was able to inform James in Italy that the problem had been

resolved: 'we will be able to go on as before by simply either omitting Dundee or in

addition to Dundee adding 40 Pollet Street Guernsey'.86

It was a fair outcome; the

Customs had held to its insistence that Guernsey marmalade should be marketed

honestly; and Keiller's were required to make the minimum change necessary.

As for the export markets themselves, nowhere in the Keiller correspondence is

there any sense of an overall geographic or selling strategy. The firm had, as

suggested, largely stumbled into foreign trade through their prior contacts with the

London market. Keiller's became anxious about their commerce abroad, but not in

the sense that they agonized over ways to increase it; their concern was exclusively

focused on competition from the 'London confectioners'. If there was some shortage

of supplies from Guernsey, the discussion invariably centred on the opportunities

this gave to their metropolitan rivals, and hardly ever on the inconveniences

suffered by customers overseas.

Only two European markets are treated in the correspondence for the early 1870s;

Vienna and Paris. In the first, Keiller's were making half-hearted attempts to set up

agencies; and in the second, they seem to have been sorting out the past rather than

pioneering the future. An underlying problem here might have been continental

self-sufficiency over a wide range of sweetmeats. James Boyd and James Keiller

were told to call in at the Vienna Exhibition on their way home from Italy in the

spring of 1873, and to arrange an exhibit there.87

Someone, Alex insisted, would

have to be appointed to look after the case '& clean it as often as it may require. The

dust in such a place makes it needful to clean the glass very often'.88

82

He was none too pleased when he learned that the goods had not been inspected for

damp damage when they arrived in the city. 'I thought sufficient care had been

taken that the marmalade would prove the best as to quality & condition that could

be made & if you have not been able to make a good show in that our special article

better had we not put in an appearance at the Vienna Exhibition at all'.89

Keiller's, in

the event, did very well, winning a Grand Medal of Merit for their marmalade and

at once advertising the fact on their pots.90

As for the agencies, Boyd and Keiller were instructed to seek the assistance of a

certain Louis Aufrecht at the Goldschmidt banking house in the city - known to the

Keillers from his Dundee days as an importer of German butter with Jaffy

Brothers.91

The idea now was to appoint him Vienna agent and ask him for the

names of other possible middlemen over an unspecified territorial range.92

Aufrecht

proved willing, and Alex instructed his young emissaries to settle the matter at

once.93

Such positive action, however, was not matched by any particular optimism

or provision. Alex told his son: 'We have no marmalade to offer', despite the

preserve being their main presentation at the Exhibition. As for the new Vienna

agency: 'I do not suppose that we will be able to do much business on the Continent

through Mr Aufrecht' - but at least his name could go on the packages, and he could

inform interested parties as to Keiller's range of produce.94

Some unfinished business had now to be attended to elsewhere. 'When you consider

that you have done all that is needful at Vienna', Alex Keiller wrote to James Boyd,

'...it might be advisable to come back via Paris' where an effort could be made to

close some outstanding accounts,95

The debtors were called Harenger and Wight.

The former's account would probably be easy to sort out; Wight's, however, was

more troublesome. In Alex Keiller's words, he had 'made away with my assets.

Maineray writes about making him bankrupt at a cost to us about six pounds'.96

There is no record of Harenger's and Wight's responses.

The point of importance is that on a homeward journey taken up in part with

promotional efforts, Keiller and Boyd went only to Vienna and Paris, and in the

latter city acted in an almost entirely retrospective manner. The only exception was

an enquiry to a certain M Delafosse, who had lately settled a bill for £31 10s 4d, as

to the possibility of his wanting some more marmalade later in the season; and this

only arose because the man 'does not order'.97

What is more, Europe was receiving

the attention not of any single-minded little cohort of salesmen but of two young

men returning from Italy - one of them not yet a partner, and the other recently denied a partnership.

Beyond Europe, there were no excursions at all. Keiller's sold goods in Shanghai,

83

Bombay, and Colombo in Asia; Cape Town and Port Elizabeth in Africa; and

Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Auckland, and Dunedin in Australasia,

There is no mention whatever of the Americas - not even of Canada. The common,

feature of the places cited was their substantial British - and, specifically Scottish

-populations. It is unlikely that many pots of 'Dundee' marmalade were sold to

Singhalese or Gujerati consumers.

The system as it later developed was for William Black, Keiller's main agent in

London, to take orders from various export houses in London and relay these to

Dundee. Alex Keiller then passed on the relevant detail to William in Guernsey; the

preserves and sweets were sent up to the capital in the manner described; and Black

saw to it that the various ordering merchants got what they had asked for. These

exporters, many with Scottish names, then despatched their goods to their

corresponding houses abroad. Sometimes consignments went out on Keiller's own

account. Shanghai was attended to by Taylor & Bennett and Cruickshank & Smart;

Bombay by Jeremiah Lyon; South Africa by Benjamin Brothers and Nicholson &

Co; Australia by Bright Brothers & Co, McDonald Smith & Co, McFarlane Blyth

& Co, Bright Brothers, Denny & Co, Dunn & Co, James Dickson, Masterton & Co,

and McGibbon & Co; and New Zealand by Warracks, Balfour & Co, Turnbull &

Co, and Bright Brothers again.98

None of these relationships was pursued with any particular vigour, and some were

positively troubling. Shanghai seemed particularly problematical. Its great distance

from Britain meant that, for convenience, manufacturers such as Keiller's needed

some system of bill-drawing on merchants in London or in the treaty port itself if

funds were to be secured fairly quickly. This arrangement, apparently, was not

available, and Keiller's had to wait the full duration of the voyages there and back, 'I

do not wish to make any consignment to China', wrote Alex Keiller in 1873. 'It will

likely be 12 months before we get any return from them'.99

Profitable ventures had

already been accomplished, but there was no strong wish to continue them.

Similar negativity featured in the India trade. In a shipment of sweets to Bombay,

difficulties arose as a result of faulty packing by the Guernsey branch. Tinfoil had

been omitted from part of a consignment of 5,400 half-pound bottles, and the

London merchant who handled the export, Jeremiah Lyon, was asking for a small

rebate of £3. Alex acknowledged the fault, but sped as usual to the moral high

ground. 'It looks so much a nasty little attempt at a swindle on a small scale that I am

quite disposed to close J Lyons account if it is pressed further & will willingly cancel the order at present on hand for 18 cases [6,480] bottles'.

100 This attitude was

absurdly self-defeating, especially when, in Alex's mind, London confectioners

were permanently poised to invade their export business. The trade to Ceylon also

84

had its mishaps, though not such as to bring about any further posturing. A

merchant from the island called at the Dundee office in June 1873 to say that many

of the tins of marmalade he had received over the previous six or seven months had

'proved in bad condition from the tins not having been properly soldered'.101

In South Africa, commercial contacts were fairly recent, William Keiller displaying

a telling ignorance of elementary Cape geography. Goods intended for a Mr Carter

in Port Elizabeth had been addressed to him at, simply, 'Cape of Good Hope'. Port

Elizabeth in fact lay over 400 miles east of the Cape. Alex was quick to inform his

brother that the Cape 'includes a number of ports at considerable distances from

each other. It will be a source of expense to Carter this error & he may ask us to

pay.’ 102

The Guernsey house was also at fault in the New Zealand trade when it sent a

Dunedin consignment up to London without bothering to check if shipping space

was available.103

Dunedin had obvious importance as the location of one of the

largest Scottish populations in the Empire. New Zealand, like Australia, enjoyed

tariff autonomy, and was imposing duties - 'high', in Alex's judgement - on some of

the items that Keiller's were exporting. This fact notwithstanding, sales in 1871

through the houses of Bright Bros & Co and Turnbull & Co, had provided net

returns of 6% and 8% respectively.104

Australia showed a wider range of profit - from McFarlane Blyth & Co's ¼% in

Melbourne to Bright Brothers' 12½% in Brisbane.105

Alex, though, expected 'a poor

return' from 1873 consignments to Brisbane and Sydney;106

and one Australian

merchant who had bought Keiller confectionery, complained that it was all 'very

badly sweated & will result in very heavy loss'.107

Australia, nevertheless, probably

ranked as Keiller's main overseas market. It had the highest number of importing

merchants, and Sydney provided another marmalade medal, in 1879, for publicity

on their pots.108

Long distances were not much of an irritation for Keiller's in as much as high

transport costs were concerned. That was a matter for the exporters, and it was up to

them and the receiving merchants to attend to whatever compensatory price

mark-ups seemed necessary. In any event, such high-value commodities were

relatively cheap to carry; the main problem came with credit. This matter, of course,

was not always an issue for Keiller's as London exporters might carry the financing

of the trade themselves, or draw against the overseas importer. Keiller's, however, mention the issue often enough to suggest that a good deal of their exporting was

done on own-account. As we have seen, some returns from their China trade were

coming in only after the full transport and sales exercise had been completed. The

85

firm remained creditors in as much as they were out-of-pocket for a full year, with

no bills of exchange - either drawn by them, or received from the customer - to ease

their plight. Not surprisingly, they felt the pain. When they were having problems

with an Australian merchant named McGibbon, Alex Keiller declared: 'we should

not have given any credit beyond a month to any person in the Colonies & we will

keep to that arrangement in future'.109

That was a clear enough statement of

principle - and one totally lacking in expansionary resonance.

The tone, moreover, was oddly moralistic and dismissive for a matter of

commonplace business. 'If they wish they can either send drafts on London with

orders, or give the names of some house in this country who will pay amount of our

invoice on receiving documents'.110

That would have been normal enough practice,

but hardly the way to tempt overseas merchants into buying Keiller produce. As

long as the credits were, in the end, covered by real goods, the marketability of

which had been tested, there was very little danger in arranging, for example,

acceptance credits. The firm congratulated itself in February 1872 when the

Melbourne traders, Masterton & Co, crashed. "They fortunately are not in our debt

at present,' observed Alex, 'we having kept back goods until we received remittance

for same'.111

As so often with Alex Keiller, one finds oneself not so much listening to some

judicious business deliberation as observing a morality play, with Alex himself as

both victim and punisher. Resident in Dundee, exclusively a manufacturer, and

focused mainly on his own domestic markets, he had not acquired the perspectives

and flexibilities of an international trader. He was not, in this respect, an odd man

out. Credit-giving generally, even in the domestic business, was still rare - one

writer describing it, more than thirty years later, as a suspect 'auxiliary'.112

Keiller's

were the supreme makers of marmalade, but now considered themselves beset by

wily competitors, defective employees, and troublesome colonials. This attitude

seems to have been registered not as experience, but as degradation; and as Alex

Keiller had no inclination to change, the rapid growth of the export market had to

await a new generation. It also had to anticipate a transfer of manufacturing from

Guernsey to London - for only the metropolis provided immediate, easy access to

long-distance vessels as well as an environment where new, imaginative

approaches to overseas selling could be developed.

86

NOTES

1. For alternative account; with Channel Island focus, see W M Mathew, The Secret History of

Guernsey Marmalade: James Keiller & Son Offshore, 1857-1879 (St Peter Port 1998) pp 35-49.

2. AK-WK 6 Dec 1871

3. ibid 31 Jan 1872

4. AK - William Black 5 Oct 1871; AK-WK 6 Dec 1871, 31 Jan 1872, 13 Oct 1873; also 9 Dec 1871,

5 Feb 1872

5. ibid 23 Nov 1871, 28 Feb, 15 Apr 1872

6. Basil Lubbock, The Last of the Windjammers (Glasgow 1927) pp 437-39; James Simpson, Spanish agriculture: the long Siesta, 1765-1965 (Cambridge 1995) pp 139-41, 217-18.

7. From AK-WK 27 Sep 1873

8. ibid 2 Dec 1871 30 Sep 1872; Mathew, Secret History, pp 37-39.

9. AK-WK 3 Dec 1873

10. ibid 22, 24 Sep, 3, 18 Dec 1873

11. ibid 3, 4 Mar 1873

12. ibid 12 Dec 1873


14. AK - unnamed correspondent 22 Mar 1872; AK - James Keiller 14 Mar 1873

15. AK - William Murray 16 Oct 1871; AK-WK 6 Nov 1871

16. AK-WK 6 Dec 1871

17. AK-WilUam Murray 16 Qct 1871

18. ibid; also AK-WK 16 Nov 1871

19. AK-WK 19 Jan 1872

20. George Dennis, A Handbook for Travellers in Sicily, (London 1864) pp 468-69, 471.

21. ibid, p 2.

22. ibid, p xviii; Dennis Mack Smith, A History Of Sicily. Modern Sicily after 1713 (London 1968) pp 369, 389-90.

23. Dennis, Handbook Sicily, p xviii.

24. AK - James Keiller 28 Oct 1871

87

25. AK-WK 1 Feb 1873

26. ibid 28 Oct 1871

27. ibid

28. AK - James Keiller 4 Mar 1873; also AK-WK 1, 11 Feb 1873

29. AK-WK 11 Feb 1873

30. Dennis, Handbook Sicily, p xviii; AK-WK 28 Feb 1871; AK - James Keiller 13 Feb 1873

31. Casks, normally of 105-gallon capacity; AK-WK 28 Oct 1871

32. AK-WK 9 Nov 1871, 3 Jan, 26 June, 31 July, 24 Sep, 3 Dec 1873; AK - James Keiller 13 Feb, 4

Mar 1873

33. ibid; and 31 Jan 1873

34. AK-WK 28 Oct 1871

35. ibid 24 Feb 1873

36. ibid 13 Feb 1873

37. AK - unnamed correspondent 21 June 1873

38. AK-WK 11,14 Nov 1871, 9 May 1873

39. ibid 21 Oct 1872

40. AK-William Taylor 15 Mar 1873

41. AK-Charles Maxwell 25 Mar 1873

42. AK-WK 19 Mar 1872

43. AK - James Boyd 14 Apr 1873; AK - James Keiller 17 Oct 1873

44. AK - James Keiller 17 Oct 1873; also 20 Oct 1873

45. AK - William Taylor 21 Oct 1873; also AK-WK 11 Feb 1874


47. AK-WK 11 Feb 1874; also 11 Apr 1873


49. AK - James Keiller 12 May 1873

50. AK - unnamed correspondent 12 Dec 1871

51. AK - John Mitchell Keiller 23 Apr 1873; AK - James Keiller 12 May 1873; also AK-WK 21 Oct

88

1872, 11 Feb 1874

52. The Post-Office Edinburgh & Leith Directory 1873-74 (Edinburgh 1873) p 223.

53. AK-WK 11 Feb 187

54. AK - Hugh Lamberton 2 Feb 1871

55. ibid 29, 30 Jan 1872

56. ibid 30 Jan 1872

57. AK - Alexander Ferguson 22 Mar 1872; AK - unnamed correspondent 22 Mar 1872

58. AK - Alexander Ferguson 22 Mar 1872


60. AK - John Milne 26 Mar 1872

61. Confectionery, 13 Sep 1896, p 496.

62. AK - unnamed correspondent 22 Mar 1872

63. AK-WK 26 July 1872

64. AK - Alexander Abercrombie 24, 25 Apr 1873

65. ibid 25, 29 Apr 1873

66. Implied in AK - Hugh Lamberton 3 May 1873

67. ibid 5 May 1873

68. AK - Charles Maxwell 21 Oct 1873

69. ibid 25 Mar 1873

70. AK - William Murray 15 Mar 1873

71. More detailed treatment in Mathew, Secret History, pp 41-43.

72. Customs Bills of Entry. Bill A. Ships' Reports, Including Southampton, Liverpool, Bristol and Hull (British Library, Colindale)

73. AK-WK 12 Peb 1873; see also Kevin le Scelleur, Channel Islands' Railway Steamers (Wellington 1985) p13.

74. eg AK-WK 11 Nov, 18 Dec 1871; AK - William Black 5 Oct 1871

75. AK-WK 4 Mar 1873

76. ibid 13 Mar 1873

89

77. AK-WK 24 Feb, 3, 4, 5, 10, 12, 13, 14, 31 Mar 1873; AK - James Keiller 18 Mar 1873

78. AK-WK 24 Feb, 3 Mar 1873

79. ibid 24 Feb 1873

80. Concise Dictionary of National Biography, I, A-F (Oxford 1992) p 175.

81. AK-WK 24 Feb, 4 Mar 1873

82. ibid 4 Mar 1873

83. ibid

84. ibid 5 Mar 1873

85. ibid 12, 13 Mar 1873


87. AK - William Black 5 Apr 1873; AK-WK 7, 14 Apr 1873



90. Illustrated in 'Dundee marmalade - the sequel', The Courier and Advertiser (9 July 1997)


92. ibid 30 Apr 1873

93. ibid 7 May 1873

94. ibid

95. ibid 27 Mar, 14 Apr 1873

96. ibid 6 May 1873

97. ibid 27 Mar 1873

98. AK-WK 8, 21 Nov, 29 Dec 1871, 4, 29 Jan, 22 Feb, 15 Apr 1872, 6 May, 12, 13 June, 7 July; AK - William Black 13, 16, 19 June 1873; AK - W Nicolson & Co 19 June 1873

99. AK-James Keiller 17 Oct 1873

100. AK-WK 13 June 1873

101. ibid 16 June 1873

102. ibid 6 May 1873

103. ibid 10 July 1873

90

104. ibid 23 Nov 1871

105. ibid 14 July 1873

106. ibid

107. ibid 5 Oct, 29 Dec 1871, 4, 29 Jan 1872

108. Medals were subsequently awarded in Melbourne (1881) and Calcutta (1884), W M Mathew,

'John Mitchell Keiller'(fbrthcoming article for New Dictionary of National Biography)

109. AK-WK 18 Jul 1873

110. AK-WK 18 June 1873

111. ibid 22 Feb 1872. Acceptance credits could probably have been arranged without much difficulty

with the prominent London merchant bankers, Antony Gibbs & Sons, British principals of Bright

Brothers & Co (later Gibbs Bright & Co), Keiller's main Australian importers. See W M Mathew,

The House of Gibbs and the Permain Guano Monopoly (London 1981) pp 109 n 68, 120, 223-226.

112. Confectionery, 12 Oct 1906, pp 778-79.

91

CHAPTER SIX

Family Conflict and the mid-Victorian Legacy

I 'Distress and Pain'

The words above are Alex Keiller's, and succinctly describe the character of his

relationship with his brother William. Almost the entire correspondence between

the two, much of it on a daily basis, comes to us in Alex's hand. It is usually clear,

however, what sorts of circumstances the elder brother is referring to; and, in any

event, a conflict of the sort revealed is so subjective in nature that Alex's very

contempt for his brother stands on its own, regardless of other facts. Oddly, William

does not suffer too much for not having his case presented, surviving instead almost

as a figure of sympathetic concern.

A number of Alex's critical observations over a wide range of issues have already

been quoted. The most general appraisal of the relationship came in his Christmas

greeting to William in 1871. 'Had we been from the first engaged in separate

concerns, it would have been of great advantage to both you & myself & saved a

vast amount of distress & pain to both our households'1. It would be difficult to find

a starker comment from one fraternal partner to another in the annals of

nineteenth-century business history. Clearly, the hostilities went back a long way,

and we cannot guess here as to their origins.

The main problem to surface from the mass of invective is the allegedly poor

management of the Guernsey branch. When complaints arrived about the sweated

confectionery sent to Australia, Alex told William he feared 'you have not had these

goods properly inspected before you packed them.... Did either you or Mustard do

so?'2 Many containers needed drying before the goods were placed in them. 'A few

minutes would do, & cost very little trouble to any of you'.3 When defective

marmalade was sent up to London at the start of the 1871-72 season, William said

he had been ill and therefore not responsible for the product. 'However', said Alex,

'it would have been more correct if you had just admitted at once that whether you

were confined to the house or not you should have instructed Robertson to send up

a sample pot of the first boiling for your inspection'.4 Such 'rubbish' was damaging

to the firm's reputation, demonstrating to the market 'that we do sometimes send out

stuff that London makers may well despise as inferior to their own'.5 Shortly after,

Alex anticipated the 'pleasant time for us here when you get your people to give up

making mistakes'.6

92

In the summer of 1873, William was apparently at fault for ordering tins from

Pounds & Co of Reading and asking them if the previous 2Mz per cent discount for

cash payment still applied - a reasonable enough precaution.7 Instead of giving

confirmation, however, Pounds conveyed some uncertainty as to any such Keiller

privilege, and William took the flak. 'Do not order any more lib tins from Pounds &

Coy', instructed Alex. 'You have managed the correspondence with this house very

badly'. Pounds, he went on, woundingly, had 'taken advantage of your simplicity in

business. I will do my best to keep them right in future'.8 Such extra labour was the

cause of extreme irritation: 'we have quite enough hard work to do in Dundee to

attend to the home trade without having the wretched annoyance caused by the

Guernsey blunderings'.9 Around the same time William had to bear once again the

serious charge of shifting the blame for errors onto his juniors. An ill-judged

Dunedin consignment had been attributed to Willie Bruce's carelessness. Alex

Keiller dismissed this with contempt. 'You may blame William Bruce for any

mistakes he makes when you are not on the island, but it is getting absurd for you to

throw off responsibility when errors are made at the work while you are in the

island'. Willie's own explanations were 'most absurd. It would be better to write

"Too much trouble to do thing correctly". You must all of you give yourselves a

good deal more trouble'.10

What a shame it all seemed; William's duties were 'such

that they ought to be managed with the utmost pleasure'.11

1873 also featured many criticisms of William's failure to meet his export orders in

time. 'I wish you could push our Guernsey folk to despatch their goods faster...',

Alex wrote to William Black in April. 'We have been arguing thus from this end but

it has so little effect'.12

The average delay, Alex complained to his brother, was as

much two months: 'make it your business to arrange that our buyers are more

promptly served in future'.13

Offers of assistance from Dundee were rejected: 'you

appear to get into an absurd state of excitement, & want to keep all the orders for

Guernsey'.14

He was surprised that 'a large quantity of your goods have not been

cancelled long ago'.15

The problem reappeared in early 1874, when there were still a number of old 1873

orders in need of attention. 'My idea is that you will never be otherwise than full of

orders, unless you make some extra effort to despatch your orders faster'.16

William

Black held the same view and, with his London perspective, was aware of the

effects of delays on Keiller's competitive position in the export market. 'Mr Black',

wrote Alex in February 1874, 'sends us five pages of extracts from his letters to

Guernsey to explain that he does his duty in urging forward the orders & some of these extracts state distinctly that some of our best export houses have had to get

some of their orders executed elsewhere.... We have had the Ball at our feet for a

long time, but once let others into the trade & we will have great difficulty in

93

keeping our position in the export trade'.17

The two brothers also contrived to have a protracted and quite bitter exchange on

accounting principles in the firm. The issue, as William presented it, was that the

Guernsey establishment should be explicitly capitalised, and that the interest on this

ought to be credited to the St Peter Port account. Alex's view was that since the

firm, Dundee and Guernsey combined, was capitalised as a single unit, the idea of

separate branch interest was nonsensical. In addition, if Guernsey was going to

fabricate an increase in its returns by some accounting sleight-of-hand, Dundee

would be justified in demanding payment from Guernsey for waivers and for

charges that hitherto had been willingly borne by the head office. These facilities

included 'the use of our clerks & ourselves in Dundee to manage the Guernsey

business'18

, as well as the unlevied interest on capital employed in the branch.

Moreover, discounts secured by Dundee on all Guernsey imports, apart from sugar,

had been credited to the branch.

The matter was first discussed in the surviving correspondence on 9 November

1871.19

By the 21st it had elicited a long, insistent letter from Alex: 'I trust that ...I

shall not require to waste time corresponding on a matter that is so exceedingly

simple'.20

His brother, however, was not to be persuaded, and repeated his case, to

Alex's consternation.21

'You cannot or will not admit that my statements are correct

& that your arguments on the subject are utterly absurd'.22

William kept his silence

when the accounts were drawn up in 1872, but at the beginning of October 1873

decided to have another run at the issue. 'The matter', declared Alex, 'I thought was

finally settled twelve months ago'. In some desperation, he took the correspondence

along to his solicitor, J W Thomson. The judgement seemed clear. 'Your action in

the matter', Thomson reportedly told Alex, 'is perfectly right. If you did anything

else you would not be keeping your books correctly'.23

The following day Alex

launched into another long exposition of his case to counter the 'utter absurdity' of

his brother's views, and to demand 'strict justice'24

, subsequently insisting that if

William had anything further to say on the matter he would 'do so as a Gentleman

should. Make full amends by apologizing for the trouble you have given'.25

He

pointed out that the other partners were on his side, and that they 'do not see that you

ought to afflict us with your long letters which evidently confuse your own mind &

take up my time replying to them'.26

If he persisted, the Dundee office would 'take

steps to stop any such nonsense'.27

Combined with the other contentious issues, the accounting dispute must have left enduring mental scars. It is difficult to avoid the notion that William was frequently

at fault, and that his business sense was considerably less acute than his brother's.

On the other hand, he received a relentless verbal savaging from Dundee – quite

94

unrelieved by wit, irony, or sentiment. Both men, sore and self-regarding, bore

responsibility for the sustained and damaging breach; William as the irritating,

incompetent subordinate, exiled far from his home city; Alex as the wearied,

judgemental elder brother, bearing on his shoulders the weight of a great enterprise.

II The Future

Whether by emotional self-indulgence on the part of the responsible parties, or

some long-term family strategy of weeding out the likely deviants from

participation in the firm's affairs, the Keillers managed, in the course of less than

half-a-century, to destroy the wide dynastic base provided by the founder. Margaret

Keiller, aided by the poor health of her step-children, had begun the process after

her husband's death in 1839. Alex, her second child, had continued it; first, by the

commercial excommunication of his elder son, James; and secondly, by his

sustained and withering assaults on his marginalized brother, William. He might

also have been guilty of a fatal negligence in the case of his youngest brother,

Wedderspoon. The consequences of the first conflict have been considered. The

results of the second, concerning William, were that this surviving brother, at the

age of 49, departed the Keiller's management and took himself off to Wimbledon

with his family and his partner's claim on profits.28

He never returned to Dundee as

a resident. His three older sons, by his first marriage, were educated as Englishmen;

at Mill Hill School, and then at King's College, London.29

All emigrated to New

Zealand in the 1880s.30

William did not attend John Mitchell Keiller's funeral in

February 1899, and was himself dead a few weeks later.31

As a result of these

departures - Barbara Keiller's children to North America, James Keiller to who

knows where, William Keiller to the London suburbs, and William's sons, William,

Edwin, and Ernest, to the Antipodes - the dynasty narrowed to the single person of

John Mitchell Keiller. And it might have ended there, for when he inherited, in

1877, he was unmarried; and after his marriage, in 1882, he remained childless until

1889. A son and heir did in the end appear - a second Alex - but he was a

nine-year-old English schoolboy when his father died, destined for a future as a

playboy sportsman and aviator and, later, as a notable amateur archaeologist.32

The

Keiller fortune, in the end, disappeared into the rich neolithic lands of Avebury in

Wiltshire,33

and in 1955 Alex died without issue. By then, the firm that had

provided his great wealth had long since been the property of other companies,

home and foreign.34

These are largely matters for a subsequent volume. When John Mitchell Keiller

assumed control of the enterprise in the late 1870s the strictly business future was

95

very bright. Thanks to his father's imaginative, if authoritarian and idiosyncratic,

leadership, Keiller's had held their position as market leaders in marmalade

production, to the extent of making their name and, to a degree, that of their city,

loosely synonymous with the product. The equation was so powerful that Alex

Keiller probably believed, with some innocence, that even marmalade made in

Guernsey could not be offered as anything other than a product of Dundee. And

they had never made the error of specializing in the preserve, remaining throughout

their first eighty years as major sweet-makers - and the paramount mid-Victorian

producers - enjoying in consequence the comparative security of diversified

manufacturing. They were powerful enough in Scotland to set their own terms in

the Confectioners' Association. They had comprehensively penetrated the English

market, and started selling in Ireland as well. And their imperial trade in Africa,

Asia, and Australasia - although still small and somewhat languorously pursued -

had given them a widespread name-recognition, and a range of mercantile

connections, that would be enormously valuable for any later commercial

expansion.

Their continuing strength in the mid-Victorian years had owed much to the daring

decision to extend production to Guernsey as a means of lowering costs. When this

advantage faded, with branch inefficiency and the repeal of British sugar duties in

the early 1870s, Alex Keiller was the first to recognize that Guernsey had little else

to offer, and that the firm would have to move yet again - this time to London and

all the advantages that a metropolitan location could confer. The final decision was

John Mitchell Keiller's, and the transfer took place in 1879, two years after Alex

Keiller's death. But it was Alex who had first alerted the firm to the desirability,

indeed inevitability, of a London site.35

John Mitchell Keiller, in inheriting the

business, also inherited that incontestable perception. Well before the end of the

century, London was to become the firm's main centre of production. In 1893,

Keiller's also became a limited company, with their head office in the City, and a

steadily growing body of English shareholders. The future was to become less and

less Dundonian; and, in consequence of the dynastic evaporation, it was to become

quite devoid of Keillers.

96

NOTES

1. AK-WK 20 Dec 1871

2. ibid 4 Jan 1872

3. ibid 29 Jan 1872

4. ibid 12 Jan 1872

5. ibid 13 Jan 1872

6. ibid 25 Jan 1872

7. ibid 7 July 1873

8. ibid 10 July 1873; also 28 July 1873

9. ibid 7 July 1873

10. ibid 28 July 1873

11. ibid July 1873

12. AK - William Black 2 Apr 1873

13. AK-WK 7 Apr 1873; also 10 Apr 1873

14. ibid 18 Apr 1873

15. ibid 28 Apr 1873

16. ibid 26 Jan 1874

17. ibid 11 Feb 1874

18. ibid 19 Feb 1874

19. ibid 8 Nov 1871

20. ibid 21 Nov 1871

21. ibid 23, 24 Nov 1871

22. ibid 27 Nov 1871

23. ibid 6 Oct 1873

24. ibid 7 Oct 1873

25. ibid 11 Oct 1873

26. ibid 17 Oct 1873

97

27. ibid 24 Oct 1873

28. Confectionery, 13 Feb 1899, p 136.

29. Br-Gen D H Drake-Brokham, Elizabeth College Register, II, 1874-1911 (Guernsey 1911) pp 37,

48.

30. KGen; Joblin, Behold the Plains, pp 76-77. For discussion of New Zealand as 'the Gentleman's

Colony', see James Belich, Making Peoples. A History of the New Zealanders (Harmondsworth

1996) pp 321-28.

31. Dundee Advertiser, 1 Feb 1899; Confectionery, 13 Feb 1899, p 136.

32. See forthcoming biography by Lynda J Murray

33. See, inter alia, Stuart Piggott, 'Alexander Keiller, 1889-1955' introduction to I F Smith, Windmill

Hill and Avebury. Excavations by Alexander Keiller 1925-1939 (Oxford 1965) pp xix-xxii; and

forthcoming biography by Lynda J Murray

34. Crosse & Blackwell, Nestlg, Okhai, Barker & Dobson, and James Robertson

35. AK-WK 4 May, 5, 27, 29 Oct, 12 Dec 1873

98

99

INDEX

Abercrombie, Alexander 77, 78, 79

Aberdeen 18, 77, 78

Adam, William 13

Africa/African 8, 17, 23, 83, 95; see also South Africa

Albert Square, Dundee 1, 26, 50

Alps 31

America, North 12, 31, 83; see also Canada, United States

Amsterdam 72, 74

Andalusia 8, 72, 73; see also Seville/s

Anderson, Lt Col 39n

Angus 7

Angus, George 12

Antigua 8

Arab farming 5, 6

Asia/n 5, 8, 17, 23, 72, 83, 95; see also Ceylon, China/Chinese, India/n

Association of Scottish Confectioners 77-79, 95

Atlantic & Great Western First Mortgage Company 31

Auckland 83

Aufrecht, Louis 82

Australasia/n 23, 72, 83, 95; see also Australia/n, New Zealand

Australia/n 83, 84, 85

Azores 7, 73

Baltic 8

Barker & Dobson Group 97n

Baxter, David 15, 18

Baxter, William, & Son 63

Baxter, William E 80-81

Baxter Brothers 44, 63

Belfast 76

Bell, Samuel 13, 24

Benjamin Brothers 83

Berlin 1

Black, William 59, 83, 92

Blacket Place, Edinburgh 14

Blairgowrie 58

Blucher, Gerhard Leberecht von, Field-Marshall 48

Board of Customs 80-81

Bombay 83-84

'Bonnie Dundee' 49

Boyd, James (sugar-refiner) 18, 34, 36, 37

Boyd, James 28, 30, 31, 33, 34-35, 36, 37, 48, 77

Boyd, John 36

100

Boyd, William 34-37

Boyd, William (nephew of William above) 37

Boyd, Mrs, Sr 35-36

Boyd, Mrs, Jr 35-36, 37

Boyd's (manufacturers) 28, 40n, 58

Brechin 9n

Bremner, David 4, 5, 19, 43, 52-55, 58-60, 63

Bright Brothers 83, 84, 90n

Bristol 30, 76

Brock Terrace, St Peter Port 47

Browning, Robert 18

Bruce, Agnes 46

Bruce, Elizabeth 46

Bruce, William Keiller 30, 31, 33, 34, 47, 48-49, 92

Buchanan, Alexander 77

Buchanan, John, and Brothers 77, 78

Cadbury, George 63

Cadbury, John 63

Cadbury, Richard 63

Cadbury's 23, 63

Calcutta 90n

Campania (merchant) 73

Campbell's Close, Dundee 4, 25

Canada 83; see also Montreal, Toronto

Cape of Good Hope 84

Carter (merchant) 84

Castel, Guernsey 48

Castle Street, Dundee lOn, 13, 17, 25, 33, 45,

Castle & Falcon Hotel, London 33

Cazenove (merchant) 73, 74

Ceylon/Singhalese 83; see also Colombo

Channel Islands 28, 40n, 45, 46, 48, 79, 86n; see also Jersey, Guernsey

Chapel Street, Dundee 26, 33, 50

Chapelshade/Chapelside, Dundee 14, 16

Charles II 6

Cheeswright & Miskin 81

Cherbourg Peninsula 46

China/Chinese 83, 84; see also Shanghai

Clark, John Moir 57, 77

Clarke, Nickolls & Co 77

Clyde, River 17

Colombo 83

Commercial Street, Dundee 50

Competition see Keiller, James, & Son, Competition

Cooper, Frank 63

101

Cox Brothers 44

Crabb (employee) 60

Crosse & Blackwell Ltd vii, 34, 77, 97n

Cruickshank & Smart 83

Cunningham, John 73

Currie & Co 78

De La Rue 54

Delafosse (merchant) 82

Demerara 8

Dennis, George 74

Denny & Co 83

Dickson, Masterton & Co 83

Doyle, Cpt 74

Dundee v, vi, vii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13-16, 17, 18, 19, 21n, 23, 24, 25, 26,

27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59,

60, 61, 62, 63, 66n, 67, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 92, 93, 94, 95; see

also street and other Dundee entries; Jute Industry; Linen Industry

Dundee Academy 12, 24

Dundee Harbour Board 32

Dundee Public Seminaries 12, 24

Dundee Sugar Refining Company 8, 15, 17

Dundee & Perth Shipping Company 8

Dunedin 83, 84, 92

Dunn & Co 83

Easter Keilor 1

Earnest 73

Edinburgh 7, 14, 18, 32, 33, 55, 59

Edinburgh University 24, 27

Education see Keillers, Education; also entries for Dundee schools

Engelhardt (shipping agent) 72

English School, Dundee 12

Europe/European 1, 8, 17, 27, 72, 81; see also France; Germany;

Italy;Spain; Trieste; Vienna Euston

Terrace, St Peter Port 29, 47, 49 Exports see

Keiller, James, & Son, Exports

Factories see James Keiller & Son, Factories & Shops Family

Conflict see Keillers, Family Conflict

Ferguson, Alexander 59, 77, 78 Fife 7; see also St Andrews,

Tayport Florence 31, 35-37 Forfarshire Lieutenancy 9n

102

Forth & Clyde Canal 8

Foulon Cemetery, St Peter Port 24

Foundation see Keiller, James, & Son, Foundation

France/French 4, 6, 27, 47, 72; see also Le Havre, Paris

Free Church of St Paul's, Dundee 32

Fyffe, John Elphinstone 47

Gall, William 15

Gateshead 18

Germany/German 1, 27, 72, 75; see also Berlin

Gibbs, Antony Gibbs & Sons 90

Gibraltar 31-2, 40n

Gibson, Isabella 46

Glasgow vii, 7, 8, 17, 18, 23, 37, 55, 58, 59, 77, 78

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 74

Goldschmidt's (bankers) 82

Goodfellow, John 60

Govan, Alexander 30, 39n, 40n

Cowrie, Carse of 4, 7; see also Blairgowrie

Grammar School, Dundee 12

Grange, The, St Peter Port 47

Gray, John, & Co 77, 78

Gray, Dr Thomas S 39n

Gray's Close, Dundee 2, 5, 25, 33

Greenock 8, 18

Greig, Dr David xv

Grenada 8

Guadalquivir, River 7

Guernsey v, vi, 1, 2, 4, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 43-57, 59-63, 68n, 72, 73,

76, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 91, 92, 93, 95; see also Castel, Havilland Hall, Le Preel, St

Peter Port

Gujerat/i 83

Hackney Wick 77

Halifax 44

Halket, Jean 14

Halley, Catherine 16

Harenger (merchant) 82

Harwood, Henry 15

Hauteville Street, St Peter Port 48, 49

Havilland Hall, Guernsey 48

Hawkhill Place, Dundee 15

Henderson, Charles 48

High Street, Dundee 2, 13, 14, 20n, 50

High Street, St Peter Port 51

103

Hitchins, Eliza 66

Holland/Dutch 18, 27, 72, 73, 75; see also Amsterdam, Rotterdam

Horse Wynd, Dundee 14

Howff, The, Dundee 1

Howson, David 60

Hugo, Victor 48, 49, 66n

Hull 43, 63

Imports see Keiller, James, & Son, Imports

India/Indian 8, 83; see also Bombay, Calcutta

Innes, Thomas 15

Ireland/Irish 75, 76; see also Belfast, Londonderry

Italy/Italian 27, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 81; see also Florence, Messina, Naples,

Palermo, Rome, Sicily

Jackson, Gordon 8

Jam see Keiller, James, & Son, Jam-making

Jersey 47

Johnston, Helen 14

Jute Industry, Dundee 44, 60, 63

Keiller, Agnes [m Wedderspoon] (1770-1840) xiii, 2, 3, 11, 15

Keiller, Agnes (1808-27) xiii, 12

Keiller, Alexander Riddoch/Alex (1821-77) v, vi, xiv, 2, 4, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17,

23-24, 25, 26-34, 35, 36, 37, 39n, 40n, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48-49, 50-51, 52-53, 54-56, 57,

58-59, 60, 61-62, 72-75, 76-79, 80-82, 83-85, 91-95, 95n

Keiller, Alexander (1889-1955) vi, xv, 94

Keiller, Ann (1820-46) xiii, 14

Keiller, Arnold (1860-65) xiv

Keiller, Barbara [nee Robertson] (c!789-1817) xiii, 3, 11, 12, 15, 28, 94

Keiller, Barbara [m Bruce/Govan] (1818-96) xiii, 16, 29, 32, 40n

Keiller, Catherine [m Whimster] (1825-52) xiv, 14, 16

Keiller, Catherine [nee Bell] (d1922) xiv, 48

Keiller, David (1817-1847) xii, 12

Keiller, Edith [m Meredith] (1861-1943) xiv, 47

Keiller, Edwin (1865-1909) xiv, 47, 94

Keiller, Elizabeth [nee Mitchell] (cl813-71) xiv, 23, 24, 28

Keiller, Elizabeth/Bessie [m Clark] (1838-1905) xiv, 14, 24, 28, 32, 46, 47

Keiller, Ernest (1866-1944) xiv, 94

Keiller, Ethel (1873-1904) xiv

Keiller, James (1775-1839) vi, vii, 1-2, 3, 4, 7, 9n, 11-17, 19, 21n, 23

Keiller, James (1810-1849?) xiii, 12

Keiller, James (b!849) xiv, 11, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28. 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39n, 48, 74-75, 76,

79, 80, 81-82

104

Keiller, James, & Son, Competition 19, 43-44, 56-57, 63, 76-78, 81, 82, 83-84, 91-92 . Keiller,

James, & Son, Exports 1, 19, 23, 30, 32, 33, 43, 44, 46, 49, 52-53, 72, 76, 79-85, 90n, 91-92, 95

Keiller, James, & Son, Factories & Shops 2, 3, 4, 13, 24, 25, 26-27, 33, 43-44, 45, 50-52, 54, 55,

59, 60, 67n, 95

Keiller, James, & Son, Foundation 1-8 • -

Keiller, James, & Son, Imports vi, 1, 2-3, 4, 7-8, 16-18, 27, 30, 32, 34, 44-45, 46, 50, 53, 54,

55-56, 58, 60, 62-63, 67n, 72-75, 93, 95

Keiller, James, & Son, Jam-making 2, 4, 5, 7, 16, 19, 50, 52, 58, 72, 75,

Keiller, James, & Son, Labour 2, 3, 4, 6, 11, 43, 44, 45, 46-47, 50, 53-57, 58-60,63

Keiller, James & Son, Management/Partnerships v, vi, vii, 3, 11-12, 19, 23-34, 36- 37, 43-46,

48-49, 56-57, 60, 61-62, 75, 79, 83-85, 90n, 91-95

Keiller, James, & Son, Markets, Home 1, 5-6, 7, 8, 18-19, 43, 45, 52, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62-63, 67,

76-78, 95

Keiller, James, & Son, Markets, Overseas see Keiller, James, & Son, Exports

Keiller, James, & Son, Marmalade-making v, vi, 1-3, 4-7, 16-17, 19, 32, 43, 49, 50, 51, 52-57, 63,

67n, 68n, 69n, 73, 77, 80-81, 91-93, 95

Keiller, James, & Son, Peel-making 16, 50, 52, 56-57, 58, 63, 67n, 74-75, 87n

Keiller, James, & Son, Profits 5-16, 25, 27, 31, 44, 61-63, 76, 94

Keiller, James, & Son, Shipping 1, 2-3, 8, 18, 43, 44, 49, 55-56, 72-75, 76, 79-80, 81, 83, 84-85;

see also entries for individual ships

Keiller, James, & Son, Sweet-making vii, 2, 3, 4, 16-17, 19, 23, 43, 44, 45, 52, 58-60, 62-63, 70n,

76-78, 83-84, 91-93, 95

Keiller, James, & Son, Technology 6, 17, 43-44, 51, 53-55, 58-60, 63

Keiller, Janet [nee Mathewson] (c!737-1813) xiii, 1-3, 7, 11

Keiller, Janet [m Bryson] (1816-46) xiii, 12

Keiller, John (1737-1804) xiii, 2, 7, 11

Keiller, John (1811-1857) xiii, 12

Keiller, John Mitchell (1851-99) v, vi, vii, xiv, xv, 1, 2, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38n,

39n, 40n, 73, 94-95

Keiller, Margaret [nee Spence] (1800-50) xiii, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 23, 25

Keiller, Margaret [m Halley] (1823-53) xiv, 14, 16

Keiller, Mary [nee Steele] (d!893) xiv, 23, 48

Keiller, Mary [nee Greig] (1862-1907) xv

Keiller, Maud (1869-1943) xiv

Keiller, Rosemary (1813-43) xiii

Keiller, Thomas (1815-41) xiii

Keiller, Wedderspoon (1832-33) xiv

Keiller, Wedderspoon/Wedd (1835-66) xiv, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 25, 38n, 46-47

Keiller, William (1829-99) v, xiv, xv, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 35, 38n, 40n,

47-49, 51-54, 52-59, 61-62, 72, 73, 79, 80, 83, 84, 91-94

Keiller, William (1863-1926) xiv, 47, 94

Keillers, Education 12-13, 24-25, 27, 94

Keillers, Family Conflict vii, 12, 23, 26-31, 32, 33-34, 37, 47, 62, 79, 85, 91-94

Keillers, Residences 12, 14-15, 16, 20n, 24, 28, 29, 32, 38n, 47-48, 49, 65n, 66n; see also

Dundee and St Peter Port street references

Kettilby, M 5

105

King's College, London 94

King's Cross Station, London 33

Kinnear, James 9n

Labour see Keiller, James, & Son, Labour

Lamberton, Hugh 77, 78

Lanarkshire 7

Le Havre 72

Le Preel, Guernsey 48

Leith 74

Les Travailleurs de la Mer 49

Linen Industry, Dundee 17, 18, 19, 44, 63

Liverpool 16, 36, 75, 76

Logiealmond 40n

London vi, 7, 8, 17, 19, 26, 33, 36, 44, 50, 53, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 90n,

91, 92, 94, 95

London & South Western Railway Company 72, 79

London & Westminster Bank 31

Londonderry 76

Low's 77,78

Low & Duff 58

Lyon, Jeremiah 83

Macadam, J H 44

McDonald Smith & Co 83

McDougall (Florence mission) 37

McFarlane Blyth & Co 83,'84

McGibbon & Co 83, 85

McGrady & Christie 45

McKean, Charles 14

Mackintosh, John 44

Me William (merchant) 78

Mainering (merchant) 82

Malaga 8

Maling, C J 18, 54, 56

Management see Keiller, James, & Son, Management/Partnerships

Manchester 36, 69n

Markets, Home see Keiller, James, & Son, Markets, Home

Markets, Overseas see Keiller, James, & Son, Exports

Markham, Gervase 5, 6

Marmalade see Keiller, James, & Son, Marmalade

Mary, Queen of Scots 9n

Masterston & Co 85

106

Mathewson, Janet see Keiller, Janet [nee Mathewson]

Maxwell, Charles 3-4, 25-28, 31, 36, 38n, 43, 54, 59, 61-62, 63, 78

Meadowside, Dundee 26, 50, 61

Messina 58, 74, 75

Mill Hill School 94

Millar, AH 27

Miller, John 78

Miller, Richard 50

Milne (manufacturer) 55

Milne, John 78

Mitchell, Elizabeth xiv

Mitchell, John xiv

Moir, John, & Son 56-7, 77, 78

Montreal 12

Montrose 16

Moratin 73

Mount Durand, St Peter Port 66

Murray, Hon R Dundas 7

Murray, William 73-74, 77, 78, 79

Murray gate, Dundee 3, 9n, 14

Mustard, James 48, 66n, 91

Naftel, Paul Joseph 40n

Naples 35, 36

Napoleon; Louis 49

Nassau Works, Anderston 61

Needier, Frederick 43-44, 63

Nelson Street, Dundee 15

Nestle Company 97n

Nethergate, Dundee 12, 24, 28, 39n, 61

New Inn Entry, Dundee 13, 25, 33, 50-51

New South Western Steam Packet Company 79

New Zealand 83, 84, 94; see also Auckland, Dunedin

Newcastle 18, 56

Nicholson & Co 83

Nicoll, Alick 32

Nicoll, Robert 10n.

Noel & Co 73

Normandy 49

North Woolwich 43

North Sea 1, 8, 73

Okhai Company 97

Oranges see Seville/s Ormond, Robert 78 Ouseley,

107

MH 51 Oxford 63 Ozanne, William 49

Paisley 69n

Palermo 73, 74, 75

Palermo sours 73

Paris 36, 81, 82

Park Street, St Peter Port 49, 51, 52, 54

Partnerships see Keiller, James, & Son, Management/Partnerships

Pasquier, Selina 56

Peel see Keiller, James, & Son, Peel

Perth 8, 40n, 77, 78

Plat, Sir Hugh 5, 6

Pollet Stree/The Pollet, St Peter Port 47, 51, 52, 81

Poor Law Assessment 12

Port Elizabeth 84

Portugal/Portuguese 5

Pounds & Co 92

Price, Laurence 56, 57

Profits see Keiller, James, & Son, Profits

Prospect Place, Dundee 15, 16, 24, 32, 41

Purie, Elizabeth 14

Quick, Mrs E 51

Rankine's Court, Dundee 14, 25, 33, 50

Rathay, Helen 46

Reform Street, Dundee 14, 50

Residences see Keillers, Residences

Riddoch, Provost Alexander 15, 17, 2In

Ritchie, Christian 46

Robertson, Barbara see Keiller, Barbara [nee Robertson

Robertson, James, & Sons 69n, 97n

Robertson, Margaret 14

Robertson, William 54-5, 56, 57, 69n, 79, 91

Rome 34, 35

Roquettes, Les, St Peter Port 47

Roseangle, Dundee 15

Rotterdam 72

Rough, John 78

Royal Academy of Arts 33

St Andrews 24, 30, 39n, 48

St Lucia 8

St Peter Port v, 23, 24, 29, 30, 43, 44, 46-47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 61, 72, 74, 75, 79, 93

108

Saint-Victor, Paul de 47

Santalo (merchant) 73, 74

Schneider (shipping agent) 72

Scott, William 38n

Seagate, Dundee 2, 3, l0n, 12, 13, 17

Sellers (merchant) 78

Seville/Sevilles 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 31, 53, 67n, 73, 74, 79

Shanghai 82

Shaw, John 59

Shepherd (merchant) 78

Shepherd, David 32, 74

Shiels & Son 78

Shipping see Keiller, James, & Son, Shipping

Shops see Keiller, James, & Son, Factories/Shops

Sicily 30, 34, 35, 58, 72, 73, 74, 75, 80; see also Messina, Palermo

Small, Rev Robert 8

Smith & Govan 39n

South Africa 83; see also Cape of Good Hope, Port Elizabeth

Southampton 44, 46, 73, 79, 80, 81

Spain/Spanish 3, 6, 7, 27, 31, 34, 40n, 53, 73, 74; see also Gibraltar, Malaga, Seville/s, Valencia

Spence, Elizabeth xiii

Spence, Margaret see Keiller, Margaret [nee Spence]

Spence, William xiii

Staperayder 80, 81

Stapfer, Paul 47

Stewart, George 56-57, 77

Stonehaven 79

Strathmore 1

Sugar see Keiller, James, & Son, Imports

Sugar Duties vi, 1, 7-8, 44-45, 48, 62, 95

Sugar-house Wynd 18

Sunderland 56 Surprise 73

Sweets see Keiller, James, & Son, Sweets

Tay, River 1, 7, 14, 18, 19, 24

Taylor, William 35, 76

Tayport 55

Thames, River 17, 19, 31, 50, 76

Theatre Royal, Dundee 13

Thorns, Anthony 48

Thomson, David 60, 71n

Thomson, J W 93

Thomson/Keiller, Mrs 34

Toronto 12

109

Town House, Dundee 13, 15

Trades House, Dundee 15

Trieste 30

Trinidad 8

Turkey/Turkish 31

Turnbull & Co 83, 84

Tyneside 18; see also Newcastle

United States 12

Valencia 7

Vauvert, St Peter Port 47

Vienna 30, 81-82

Vlarmaret, Helen Douglas 47

Wales/Welsh 56

Warracks, Balfour & Co 83

Wedderspoon, James 3

West Indies 8, 17

Wester Keilor 1

Weymouth 46

Whimster, Janet 16

Whimster, Margaret 16

Wiedemann (sugar-refiner) 18

Wiedemann, Sarah 18

Wight (merchant) 82

Wilson, Agnes 56

Wilson, C A 6

Wilson, Rev Dr 32

Wimbledon 94

Witherspoon, Robert, & Co 77

Yarmouth 73

York 63, 76

Yorkshire 43

Zelina 75

110

111

112

Publications of the Abertay Historical Society

In Print

No. 27 Kenneth J. Cameron, The Schoolmaster Engineer, Adam Anderson of Penh and St Andrews c. 1780-1846. (1988)

No. 28 Enid Gauldie, One Artful and Ambitious Individual, Alexander Riddoch (1745-1822), (Provost of Dundee 1787-1819). (1989)

No. 34, Ian McCraw, The Fairs of Dundee. (1994)

No. 35 Annette M. Smith, The Nine Trades of Dundee. (1995)

No. 36 Sylvia Robertson and Patricia Young, Daughter of Atholl, Lady Evelyn Stewart Murray, 1868-1940. (1996)

No. 37 Michael St John, The Demands of the People, Dundee Radicalism 1850-1870. (1997)

All publications may be obtained through booksellers or by post from

the Hon. Publications Secretary, Abertay Historical Society, Archive

and Record Centre, 1 Shore Terrace, Dundee DDI SBY.

Of all Dundee's commercial families, the Keillers are the most famous in the country at large, their name being indelibly associated with one of Britain's most enduring morning foods. To date, two members of the family have been accorded responsibility for the firm's remarkable success, in sweet manufacturing as well as marmalade production - the first, James Keiller, the founder (acting initially with his mother, Janet, and later with his second wife, Margaret); the second, his grandson John Mitchell Keiller, who seemed to consolidate the fortunes of the enterprise in the late-Victorian years. The Keillers in between have rested largely forgotten. It is a prime purpose of this study to accord that second generation a proper valuation; indeed, to argue that it was James Keiller's sons, and in particular Alexander Riddoch Keiller, who first notably capitalised on the marmalade innovation, rapidly expanded home and overseas markets, and took the extraordinary step of securing cheap sugar for their various lines of production by establishing branch factories in far-distant Guernsey.

The tragedy of the Keiller story however, is that Alexander Keiller, the true expansionist hero, was also the man who, wittingly and unwittingly, eroded the broad dynastic base that his father had left behind. Exclusivist tendencies at the highest managerial level meant that the family's involvement in the trade did not survive the century. By 1879, when this study ends, Keiller's still ranked as the paramount confectioners in the kingdom and, with much

confidence and optimism, had recently commenced production at a large new factory on the Thames at Silvertown; by that same year however, all the elements of dynastic demise were in place.

William Mathew was born in Ayrshire, holds degrees from Glasgow University and the London School of Economics, and is at present a Senior Fellow in History at the University of East Anglia. His earlier

books are The House ofGibbs and the Peruvian Guano Monopoly (1981), Edmund Ruffm and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South (1988), Agriculture, Geology, and Society in Antebellum South Carolina (1992), and The Secret History of Guernsey Marmalade. James Keiller & Son Offshore, 1857-1879 (1998).

ISBN 0 900019 34 4

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currently in print at that time, are as they were at the date of

the original publication.

Up to date information of all current books and prices for sale

can be found on the Abertay Historical Society Website -

http://www.abertay.org.uk/

http://www.abertay.org.uk/

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