Alexander Findlater (1797 - 1873)

Born 9 Mar 1797 in Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland

Ancestors

Died 9 Aug 1873 at age 76 in Dublin, Ireland

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Biography

Alexander Findlater, the founder of the business in Dublin, was born in Glasgow, on 9 March 1797, the second son of John Findlater, Supervisor of Excise at Greenock (brother to Old Uncle Alex). His father died at a comparatively early age, leaving a widow with a large family in circumstances requiring that Alexander should soon begin to earn his own living. A letter to Alexander from his brother Joseph describes their mother as ‘not overloaded with money’. To supplement her income she had a lodger: ‘We have a Mr Bennet in the house at present, he is a very fine young man—he has the parlour and bedroom for half a guinea.’ (This gentleman, who became Alexander’s business contact in Glasgow, struck up a friendship with the youngest daughter, Janet, born in 1804; the couple were married at the Manse, Newlands on 6th August 1834 by Rev. Charles Findlater She died of typhus in Glasgow in 1850.

Scotland’s industrial revolution was under way in the 1820s and people were flocking to the towns; in the country the old farming patterns were changing. The population of Glasgow, which in 1780 was 42,000, was to reach 274,000 by 1840. As usual, there was a human cost. The tenement slums were (at the time) said to be far worse and more squalid than in Dublin, with their occupants existing in frightful degradation. In towns all over Scotland, merchants and industrialists were laying the foundations for the shipping and industrial empires of the latter part of the nineteenth century. Glasgow was establishing its great industries, mainly shipbuilding and cotton. There was an increasing concentration of business power in a few families: to achieve efficiencies shipping was consolidated into a small number of large firms. Successful industrialists amassed colossal fortunes, and lawyers, doctors and small businessmen also did well. However, Scotland, at the height of its industrial success, was a most unequal society. It is easy to imagine that an ambitious young man whose family connections were more with the excise than the great shipping or industrial firms might explore options outside the country. Alexander began his career in his early teens in the office of his elder brother William, a shipbroker in Greenock, where a large portion of Clyde shipping then berthed. William was born in Glasgow in 1792. In 1813, aged twenty-one, he was the hero of a remarkable incident in Greenock; the story, told by George Williamson, another participant, gives a good impression of the young man’s mettle.

The following circumstance occurred in the year 1813, about the time I was appointed Procurator-Fiscal of the town of Greenock. I happened one day to go down the quay (now the Steamboat or Customhouse Quay), when I saw a great crowd of persons assembled at the corner of the harbour, west of where the Customhouse was afterwards built. It was low water at the time, and I observed two lads, having the appearance of apprentice seamen, standing up to the waist in the water, having hold of a woman, who was also in the water, and whose head they were attempting to put under water, with the evident intention of drowning her. At the same time I observed also in the water, a young gentleman whom I knew to be Mr William Findlater, a clerk in a counting-house in town, doing his best to protect the woman. I did not hear any words uttered by the persons in the water. As I could not bear the sight, I resolved to endeavour to rescue the woman. I learned that the offence was that she had given information to the Press-gang against some sailors. A war with France was then raging, and every effort was being made by the Government to procure men for the navy. The vulgar supposed that certain persons gave information where sailors were to be found, and that the Press-gang somehow or other got hold of these men more readily than those of whom they had no information. I am not aware that this was the case, for I do not remember hearing anything said of the gang having gone to houses to pick up men. They used to prowl about the quays and shipping to catch men, and I have seen them myself do so. Be that as it may, the name of Informer was odious, and it was supposed that every insult might be offered to such as bore the character, and that even life might be forfeited, as seemed likely to be the case in the instance I am now detailing.

I have said that I resolved to endeavour to extricate the woman from her very dangerous position. A stair at that time led down to the water, but as the parties were at some distance from the stair, I did not think it prudent to go into the water. Luckily, or, I should rather say, as a special Providence directed, I observed a boat belonging to Allan M’Lean, pilot, coming into the West Harbour, with M’Lean on board. The boat came alongside a vessel at the Quay, not far from the spot where the people in the water were. I leaped directly into M’Lean’s boat, and desired him to push her over to where the woman was, but he at first peremptorily refused to do so, fearing, no doubt, that he would participate in the odium attached to the name of Informer, if he gave any assistance. He afterwards yielded, and came ashore, saying he would hold me responsible for the safety of the boat.

I took an oar, and pushed the boat over without any resistance from M’Lean. On reaching Mr Findlater, I gave him my hand, and he got into the boat. Before I had this done, the young sailors had got the woman out of Mr Findlater’s hands, and put her into another boat, into which they themselves also went, and proceeded out of the harbour. We followed in our boat. At the harbour mouth, as the wind drove the boat out into the river the young men used all their force [trying] to throw the woman into the sea. Mr Findlater and I got our boat alongside of the other, on which one of the young men lifted an oar, and aimed a blow at me with it, but I warded it off with the oar I held, and then stretched out my hand, and called to the woman to give me hers.

She was lying in the bottom of the boat with her hands grasping the gunwale, and her feet firmly pressed against the opposite side. One of the young men was in the act of beating her fingers with a thole pin to make her let go her hold, when our boat got alongside. Had a few more minutes, or perhaps seconds, elapsed before we reached her, she would without mercy have been thrown into the sea, and a foul murder would have been committed in presence of hundreds of men, women, and children, who stood on the Quay, idle spectators of what was going on. When I held out my hand, the woman eagerly grasped it, and I drew her into our boat. I then addressed myself to a number of persons who were standing on the end of the West Quay, and implored them to assist me in landing the woman, and protecting her from further violence. I knew some of the persons I addressed, particularly a ship master of the name of L . . . n, but he would not interfere, and my appeal was answered by a volley of stones from the crowd.

We let our boat drift out of reach of the stones into the river, and proposed to row down to Mr Scott’s building-yard, and there put the woman on shore. On getting abreast of the yard, the carpenters were all assembled (it being dinner hour), and I made an appeal to them, but they would not allow the woman to land. There appeared, therefore, no alternative but to row alongside the Press-tender, then lying at the Tail of the Bank, which we did, put the woman on board, and left her there. Mr Findlater and I returned to the harbour with the boat.

Had the police of the town done their duty, a scene so disgraceful could not have been witnessed. I had the principal actors apprehended and imprisoned, but so little account was made of the offence, that no conviction followed. One of the young men apprehended was under indenture to a tradesman in town. Mr Reid, hardware merchant, a decent, sober, religious man, who was his cautioner, appealed to the magistrates, who ordered his liberation to prevent his forfeiting the penalty in the indenture. Such was the state of the police of the town, and such the state of public feeling, that persons who had attempted a deliberate murder were allowed to escape without any trial or punishment. There was no Sheriff in the place then, nor for two years afterwards, and there were only two or three police officers. I remember shortly before that seeing a man who was said to be an informer driven about the streets, all besmeared with mud and blood, then thrown down and abused, and no one dared to interfere to rescue him from the band of miscreants who were following him.

Outrages and homicides were of frequent occurrence, and little account was made of them. My predecessor in office paid no attention to such matters. No notice was taken of the above occurrence in the Greenock Advertiser. It was passed over as a thing unworthy of notice. I heard nothing of the woman for a month or six weeks after this. One day, while I was sitting at my desk, a woman came in and inquired if my name was Davidson. On my saying it was Williamson, she instantly dropped to her knees, pulled off her cap, and implored God’s blessing on me for having saved her life. I did not at first recognise her as the woman whose life had been attempted, as above. I inquired how she got on shore from the tender. She told me the people of the brig had landed her where some boats lay turned upside down on the beach, and that she had crept under one of the boats, and concealed herself for several hours, and then had found her way to a friend’s house, where she lay for several weeks, bruised and hurt all over by the cruel treatment she had received. I forget what she called herself. She was a little, short-made Irish woman, about thirty years of age. On reviewing this narrative many years after the occurrence, I feel some pleasure in reflecting that I was instrumental in saving the life of a fellow creature.

After some time with his brother, when he was in his sixteenth year, in 1813, Alexander accepted an assignment to the island of Newfoundland from the firm of Shannon, Stewart & Co. He was to operate as clerk, storekeeper and bookkeeper to the shipping company. The contract was not over-generous: he was sent out steerage, and was initially to be paid less than 10s a week (all found), for which he was ‘not to absent himself from said service day or night’. He was not to deal on his own account. The carefully indited contract survives in pristine condition. At this time the economy of Newfoundland was undergoing a mini-boom, ‘brought on mostly by the reopening of the Spanish market for salt cod, on exceedingly favourable terms, two years earlier’. The boom conditions attracted immigrants, especially from the Waterford area of Ireland who quickly became a dominant group, so that by 1815 it was estimated that three-quarters of the population of the capital, St John’s, were Irish Catholics. As far as I can deduce from surviving letters, Alexander was stationed on Newfoundland’s Atlantic coast, in a fishing village called Ferryland, about fifty miles south of St John’s.* The principal product traded in was dried cod. Alexander’s role seems to have been to organise the catching and drying of an appropriate amount of fish, and to serve as a ‘feeder’, preparing cargo for the brig Bennett to take north to St John’s. It must have been a somewhat lonely period and he seems to have taken a bit of time to find his feet. In January 1814 his principal wrote bleakly: ‘I hope and trust that you will conduct yourself in a way to prevent fault being found.’ A year later the principal wrote again, when Alexander’s colleague in Ferryland had slipped away to St John’s: ‘I must remark my surprise at his appearance here leaving only yourself in charge of all our concerns at Ferryland, a circumstance that cannot fail to be taken notice of by everyone.’ However, Alexander steadily proved his worth, and in March 1816 he was appointed official Agent and Manager in Ferryland, with the power to bind the partnership.

This success was, however, short-lived. The Newfoundland economy had been hit a serious blow when Spain subjected its dried cod to ‘rapid and enormous tariff increases’. After the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, other European countries followed, and French fishermen began to provide increased competition. By late 1815 nervous creditors were demanding immediate payment, and the domino effect set in, with one bankruptcy causing another. ‘By mid December there were 700 writs issued and nearly forty insolvencies’.4 The local journal provided a ‘dismal record of insolvencies, dissolutions of partnerships, notices from merchants quitting the fishery or withdrawing from business in outposts, notices of sheriff ’s sales and other bleak testimonials of failure’.5 Shannon, Stewart were not immune. A month after Alexander’s appointment as manager, his principal wrote: ‘It is with the most heartfelt sensation that I have to communicate to you of Shannon, Stewart & Co having stopped payment about 10 January.’ The firm was bankrupt, and his contract of employment, which still had a year to run, was worthless. (The outcome throws a different light on Alexander’s careful preservation of the contract among his papers.)

He was sent a notably pompous, and cool, testimonial from his principal–‘I consider myself in duty bound in justice to your character to take this method of expressing my sentiments of your having acted during the whole of your servitude to my entire satisfaction.’ Alexander’s superior was probably in no mood for pleasantries. Bankruptcy was taken extremely seriously in Newfoundland: there was nothing abnormal about whipping civilians ‘for debt’. Thirty-six lashes on the bared back was not an unusual sentence.

It appears that nineteen-year-old Alexander went from Newfoundland to Quebec, in Canada, in July 1816, and later to Montreal, where a letter from William suggests that though he had work, it was very hard. (The winter of 1816–17 was one of the coldest the locals could remember.6) Alexander had evidently asked his brother what he should do. William could only suggest that if the work was endangering Alexander’s health, he should leave immediately. The advice was the more poignant because the original purpose of the letter was to announce the death of their brother—poor James, of a fever in St Croix. (Another brother, Charles, had died the year before, aged seventeen, at sea near New Orleans.) St Croix, a tiny island in the West Indies, was a Danish colony. James evidently had a rough time, as the letter says. ‘There is no telling what hardships he may have lived through . . . as he had no friends on the island his effects were confiscated by the Danes.’

Years later, on his death, one newspaper reported that Alexander had later been involved in a distillery in Canada, until a great fire led to the winding-up of the business. Returning to Scotland he worked for some years for Messrs Blarvey, eminent distillers, before deciding to set up on his own account in Dublin in 1823. In 1822 William, having married Sophia Huffington of Fahan, Donegal, settled as a shipbroker in Londonderry. They had one son and three daughters. No doubt reports from William led Alexander to believe that Ireland offered a field for energetic commercial enterprise. Contacts already in Dublin would have promoted the decision. His friend William Burns, thirty-one-year-old nephew of the poet, was busy laying down business roots there and was later joined by Gilbert Burns, another nephew of the poet. Alexander himself was well connected; he would have had an introduction from Old Uncle Alex, the Collector of Excise in Glasgow, to his opposite number in the Custom House Dublin. After all they were both employees of branches of His Majesty’s revenue service and co-operated on such items as smuggling and illicit distillations.

Alexander was twenty-six years old when in 1823 the ship on which he was a passenger slipped into a berth on George’s Quay on the opposite side of the river Liffey to the Custom House. George’s Quay and Rogerson’s Quay were spectacular, the home of mariners, shipbuilders, ship brokers, rope and sail makers and ships’ chandlers.

Ireland in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was a much more populated country than Scotland. The 1821 census shows that the population of Ireland was almost seven million, compared to Scotland at two million and England and Wales at twelve million, giving Ireland one-third of all the people in the British Isles.* However, in 1823, Dublin was a busy place, with plenty of activity and potential. There was a still-thriving industrial sector but decline was setting in as a result of the withdrawal of protective duties following the Act of Union. Dublin was still the ‘second city of the Empire’ but its pre-eminence was rapidly to be overtaken by industrial towns such as Manchester, Liverpool and Belfast. Its 200,000 population lived between the canals that embraced the city centre. In 1830, although many of the aristocracy had removed to London, there were still twelve hundred nobility and gentry in the city, five thousand merchants and traders, supported by nearly two thousand lawyers, six hundred medical men but only twelve dentists. The Catholic merchant and professional classes were steadily growing in prosperity.

For visitors, Dublin was an impressive city, described by Walter Scott as ‘splendid beyond my expectations’. Karl Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels was also impressed, but characteristically saw a little deeper: ‘The traveller to Dublin finds the approach as imposing as when he visited London’, he wrote. ‘Dublin Bay is the most impressive in the British Isles . . . the city itself is most attractive and its aristocratic quarter is laid out in a more tasteful manner than any other British town. By contrast the poorer districts are among the ugliest and most revolting in the world.’

The peaceful invasion by Scottish merchants was in sharp contrast to all the warring factions that had invaded the land over the previous nine centuries. The new invaders were welcome, and quickly integrated into their adopted land, became citizens and contributed to its institutions. They did not crave after their roots, nor hold property elsewhere to depart to. Their commitment was total. As Walter Thomas Meyler noted in his 1870 autobiography St Catherine’s Bells ‘instead of investing in the funds to lie idle and useless, they [the Scottish merchants] expended their profits in enterprises valuable to the country of their adoption, extending employment and circulating the wealth they have acquired amongst the community from whose support they derived it. Foremost among them was John Jameson from Alloa who established his distillery in Dublin in 1780. Thomas Heiton followed in 1818 and served his apprenticeship in his brother-in-law’s coal and steel business before setting up on his own. John Arnott set up his first store in Cork in 1834.*

Other great names survive into the twenty-first century: for instance, Dunlop who re-invented the pneumatic tyre;† Millar who came over on the invitation of the Jamesons and opened a wine, spirit and cordial business in Thomas Street, then very much the hub of brewing and distilling; Mackey the agriculturist and horticulturist;9 Alexander Thom of Thom’s Irish Almanac and Official Directory who ran the leading firm in the printing industry of that time; Weir the prestigious Grafton Street jeweller and Johnston the Ballsbridge miller, one-third of the 1889 amalgamation that became Johnston Mooney and O’Brien.

As far as I can ascertain Alexander came to Dublin to trade in whiskey. He may have held the agency for the Glasgow Distillery Co. or represented a spirit merchant called Thomas Harvey in Glasgow. He arrived at an opportune time in the spirit business. In 1823 the duties on spirits, in Ireland and Scotland, were reduced by 56 per cent to 2s 4d per imperial gallon, a change, the commissioners observed, ‘the beneficial effects of which, in the great object of suppressing illicit trading, by enabling the legal distiller to carry on his trade in competition with the illegal trader, were found in both divisions of the kingdom to surpass the most sanguine’. In 1821 the quantity of spirits produced in Ireland on which duty was paid was 3.6m gallons, in 1825 it had increased to 8.8m gallons, and in 1836 to 11.9m gallons; certainly a good trade for Alexander to embark upon. Brewing, distilling and shipbuilding industries were in fact the only industries to increase as a result of the Act of Union.10

Alexander was to develop his business around family and trusted associates, mainly those with Scottish roots. His brother William was in Londonderry, and so was the eldest of the family his sister Helen, who was married to a merchant there, Robert Corscaden. In Glasgow William Bennet (who married Alexander’s sister Janet) acted as a general broker, assembling a wide range of produce, in particular rum, sugar and coffee which were shipped there from the Bahamas and Latin America. In Liverpool his brother John and his brother-in-law John Snowden, married to sister Susanna, were both ships’ captains. The youngest brother, Adam Seaton, went to Brazil at the age of sixteen to engage in trade.

From the beginning Alexander and his brothers set their sights high; in 1825 he received a letter from his brother Joseph in Glasgow, addressed to his lodgings ‘at Mrs Catherine Dawes, 5 Gardner Street (lower)’. As well as discussing the type of merchandise to be sent to Adam in Brazil, Joseph wrote:

‘You will have heard no doubt of the great failures amongst Banking Houses in England. They have created considerable distress amongst the lower classes in that quarter, the circulation of a number of them being small notes—I am much afraid there will be a few here [Glasgow] sharing the same fate . . . [he adds] James Johnston has got a fine situation in a Bank at Londonderry. His salary I believe is £250.’

Alexander certainly moved quickly to establish himself. In 1826, maybe earlier, he, with William Burns, was trading, across the river from the Custom House, as The Irish & Scotch Whiskey Stores at 7 Burgh Quay. By 1828 he had added Hawkins Street, North Wall, High Street and North King Street to his premises as well as recording sales for a ‘Spirit account’, which must have been wholesale. The North King Street premises had a store around the corner in Halston Street. By 1830 a branch at Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) had been added (four years before the opening of the Dublin–Kingstown Railway), first trading as The Irish and Scotch Whiskey Stores, and in 1832 Hawkins Street was combined into the Burgh Quay operation, the former acting as the stores for the wholesale. From this date he traded under his own name ‘Alex. Findlater’.

This was an opportune location. Alexander’s arrival in 1823 had coincided with the foundation of the first Catholic Association, the focus of Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic emancipation which eventually culminated in the Act of Parliament passed in 1829 granting Catholics the right to sit in parliament and in 1832 the right to vote. Conciliation Hall, later the Tivoli Theatre (and in the twentieth century the Irish Press headquarters), was nearby and was the rendezvous for Daniel O’Connell, the father of Irish democracy, and the foremost politicians of the day. Another of Alexander’s Scottish friends, William Todd, had set up business just across the river, in the drawing-room of 10 Eden Quay, dealing in carpets.

The goods he traded in

The very earliest ledger entries in the Findlater archive are dated July 1826, three years after Alexander’s arrival in Dublin.* He is already in a reasonable way of business. He buys 13 puncheons of malt (whiskey) from Shaw & Turbett and 20 puncheons from William Burns. A puncheon was a large barrel containing 126 to 130 gallons—so he has bought the equivalent of nearly 40,000 modern bottles. This is over-proof whiskey, which requires to be diluted to bring it to normal sales strength.

Whiskey is always distilled over-strength. A strength between 11 and 25 per cent over-proof as against the then standard resale strength of 25 per cent underproof (75 per cent proof) requires the merchant to increase the total volume by 40 per cent by adding pure water. Once the dilution process was complete, the contents of the barrels had to be bottled, corked and labelled. Alternatively the whiskey was despatched to publicans and small traders throughout the country in five and ten gallon earthenware jars now used as display pieces in pubs Alexander made several small sales of both Scotch and best Irish in that year to his landlady Catherine Dawes, charging 10s per gallon and pro-rata for half and quarter gallons. A Henry Major got much better value—he must have been a trader—paying 8s 6d per gallon for his supplies of 11 per cent over-proof Scotch. On another occasion a gallon of best rum was sold at 12s a gallon and a dozen Cape wine at 20s.

The first record of purchases of Guinness and Jameson (James) was in February 1827. Shop bills and lists of prices were used for promotion, 7s 6d was paid for 1,000 in February 1827, 4s in December 1829 and 5s in 1828. 6,000 bottle labels cost 12s, 20 gross corks £1 10s and bottles were charged out at 2s a dozen. The bottles came from the Dunbarton Glass Co., William Burns being heir Irish agent here. Our main source for Scotch was the Glasgow Distillery Co. Alexander’s salary for the twelve months to June 1827 amounted to £80 [€7,000] and £150 [€13,100] for the eighteen months to December 1828, plus his share of profits.

The business was faring well: on 30 June 1827 the retail account was showing a net profit of £465 [€40,700] and the spirit account (wholesale) £134 [€11,700]. Stock on hand for spirits was £700 [€61,100] and on the retail account £585 [€51,000]. In February 1828 the fine (today we would call it key money) for the North King Street lease was £50 [€4,370], and £250 [€21,830] for the North Wall premises. There was a match tax of £1 4s, two years’ pipe water cost £2 15s 5d, the Chamber of Commerce subscription was one guinea and he gave a 7s 6d [€30] donation to the Catholic church in Halston Street. On another occasion the minister received 16s 8d and the priest 5s.

Wages varied between 11s (a porter) and 17s a week; some of those employed were later to be partners of Alexander in his ventures here and across the water, Todd, Gladstone, Carmichael and McKie (or Mackie). There was a couple, Mathew and Mary, who worked in Hawkins Street; he earned 7s and she 5s, making 12s for the week; by 1828 this was up to 14s.

Interest on £1,000 [€87,000] for the North King Street branch was £2 12s 1d and duty on 4 puncheons containing 440 gallons came to £77 18s 4d. By 1829 annual sales were £8,900 [€738,000]. The inventory in January 1830 for the four outlets amounted to £2,740 [€230,000], wholesale accounting for £2,276 [€189,000] of the total. In May 1830 the new premises in Kingstown was stocked up with a wide variety of goods: ale, malt, Cape wine, sherry, port, rum, soap, sealing wax, a coffee roaster, coffee mill and imported Dunlop cheese. This was followed by raisins, figs and tobacco, the latter at 3s per lb. In Dublin the bulk, one-off nature of some of the purchases

In Dublin the bulk, one-off nature of some of the purchases suggests that Alexander was doing a substantial ships’ stores or export business from the North Wall premises on the north side of the river, from the Burgh Quay/Hawkins Street premises on the south side of the river and in Kingstown from his premises there. For example, in October 1830 Hawkins Street handled 2 loads of English meat, 2 loads of East country meat, 103 hams, 2 barrels of Dunlop cheese, 1 barrel of red herrings, and 5 bags of barley while across the river they handled in one particular instance 40 cwt of yellow soap and 20 cwt of white soap. But the main commodity was whiskey.

In January 1831 Alexander purchased 10 puncheons of malt and 20 puncheons of grain whiskey from the Glasgow Distillery and these sorts of purchases were made at regular intervals. They were not exclusively Scotch—for example, 5 puncheons were purchased from John Jameson in 1833. Sugar was bought in cone-shaped loaves. In August 1833 he bought 44 loaves of refined sugar totalling 12 cwt 1 qtr and 15 lbs at 86s per cwt; thus each loaf was 31½ lbs and 1lb of sugar cost about 10d.

Monthly sales for his outlets in Burgh Quay, Kingstown, North King Street, High Street and the North Wall rose from under £1,000 a month in 1828 [€86,000] to over £1,500 in 1830 [€129,000] and £2,400 by 1834 [€210,000]. This is the equivalent of annualised sales in the year 2000 of £500,000, £1m and £1.6m respectively and this was only the start of his great commercial career.

By 1830 Alexander, now thirty-three, was laying the foundation of a substantial commercial empire. He was able that year to bring his mother over from Glasgow together with a manservant, John Harries. The following year his brother William died, leaving a widow and four children, for whom Alexander took responsibility. Joseph had died in Glasgow three years earlier, at the age of twenty-one. He had not married.

In 1831 there was a revolution in Brazil, and Don Pedro I abdicated. Adam, Alexander’s younger brother, who had been in Brazil for eight years, was by then in partnership trading as Miller & Findlater. During the riots in Rio de Janeiro the firm’s premises were burned down. The firm relocated in Bahia (today called Salvador) and operated as both shipping agents and merchants dealing on their own account. Made-up fabrics and textiles were shipped out to Bahia and sugar and cotton back to Europe. Ships plied to and from Liverpool, Falmouth and Hamburg. In 1834, for example, silver coins were consigned to London and gingham, handkerchiefs, hair cords, shirtings, Indian books, book folds and Verona handkerchiefs, and special cloths such as madapottams, pullicates and osnabergs, went back out to Bahia.

The ledgers of the company, Miller & Findlater, 1830–1839, have survived in almost pristine condition. The most surprising discovery from these books is the export of large quantities of bottled porter during this period. The porter was brewed by Arthur Guinness, then bottled, corked, and labelled and packed in straw into barrels by Findlaters for despatch. The porter was sold as Findlater’s Pure Dublin Porter—in January 1832 10,000 porter labels were printed. In 1835 we consigned 45 barrels of bottled porter from Burgh Quay to Miller & Findlater in Bahia, each barrel containing 3½ dozen quart bottles. In another

In another consignment there were 108 casks containing 3½ dozen each, making 378 dozen, and 75 casks each containing 6 dozen pint bottles, making 450 dozen. A good quantity of ale was shipped; for instance, in September 1834 Burgh Quay purchased 20 barrels of Cairns and North Wall 10 barrels. There were also purchases of 6 guinea ale from an Andrew Roy at £6 +s per hogshead less 7½ per cent. This compares with Guinness porter at £2 2s 3d and Cairns ale at £1 18s a barrel,* suggesting that Roy’s ale was of a much A perfect specimen of a Findlater Whiskey jar

Whiskey is always distilled over-strength. A strength between 11 and 25 per cent over-proof as against the then standard resale strength of 25 per cent underproof (75 per cent proof) requires the merchant to increase the total volume by 40 per cent by adding pure water. Once the dilution process was complete, the contents of the barrels had to be bottled, corked and labelled. Alternatively the whiskey was despatched to publicans and small traders throughout the country in five and ten gallon earthenware jars now used as display pieces in pubs.

Alexander made several small sales of both Scotch and best Irish in that year to his landlady Catherine Dawes, charging 10s per gallon and pro-rata for half and quarter gallons. A Henry Major got much better value—he must have been a trader—paying 8s 6d per gallon for his supplies of 11 per cent over-proof Scotch. On another occasion a gallon of best rum was sold at 12s a gallon and a dozen Cape wine at 20s.

The first record of purchases of Guinness and Jameson (James) was in February 1827. Shop bills and lists of prices were used for promotion, 7s 6d was paid for 1,000 in February 1827, 4s in December 1829 and 5s in 1828. 6,000 bottle labels cost 12s, 20 gross corks £1 10s and bottles were charged out at 2s a dozen. The bottles came from the Dunbarton Glass Co., William Burns being

• Details survive of our trading for all but the first three years in the span of old Findlaters from 1823 to 1968. These are in bound ledgers, journals and cash books and form a wonderful archive with a wealth of information.

Next page FINDLATERS their Irish agent here. Our main source for Scotch was the Glasgow Distillery Co. Alexander’s salary for the twelve months to June 1827 amounted to £80 [€7,000] and £150 [€13,100] for the eighteen months to December 1828, plus his share of profits.

The business was faring well: on 30 June 1827 the retail account was showing a net profit of £465 [€40,700] and the spirit account (wholesale) £134 [€11,700]. Stock on hand for spirits was £700 [€61,100] and on the retail account £585 [€51,000]. In February 1828 the fine (today we would call it key money) for the North King Street lease was £50 [€4,370], and £250 [€21,830] for the North Wall premises. There was a match tax of £1 4s, two years’ pipe water cost £2 15s 5d, the Chamber of Commerce subscription was one guinea and he gave a 7s 6d [€30] donation to the Catholic church in Halston Street. On another occasion the minister received 16s 8d and the priest 5s.

Wages varied between 11s (a porter) and 17s a week; some of those employed were later to be partners of Alexander in his ventures here and across the water, Todd, Gladstone, Carmichael and McKie (or Mackie). There was a couple, Mathew and Mary, who worked in Hawkins Street; he earned 7s and she 5s, making 12s for the week; by 1828 this was up to 14s.

Interest on £1,000 [€87,000] for the North King Street branch was £2 12s 1d and duty on 4 puncheons containing 440 gallons came to £77 18s 4d. By 1829 annual sales were £8,900 [€738,000]. The inventory in January 1830 for the four outlets amounted to £2,740 [€230,000], wholesale accounting for £2,276 [€189,000] of the total. In May 1830 the new premises in Kingstown was stocked up with a wide variety of goods: ale, malt, Cape wine, sherry, port, rum, soap, sealing wax, a coffee roaster, coffee mill and imported Dunlop cheese. This was followed by raisins, figs and tobacco, the latter at 3s per lb. In Dublin the bulk, one-off nature of some of the purchases

In Dublin the bulk, one-off nature of some of the purchases suggests that Alexander was doing a substantial ships’ stores or export business from the North Wall premises on the north side of the river, from the Burgh Quay/Hawkins Street premises on the south side of the river and in Kingstown from his premises there. For example, in October 1830 Hawkins Street handled 2 loads of English meat, 2 loads of East country meat, 103 hams, 2 barrels of Dunlop cheese, 1 barrel of red herrings, and 5 bags of barley while across the river they handled in one particular instance 40 cwt of yellow soap and 20 cwt of white soap. But the main commodity was whiskey.

In January 1831 Alexander purchased 10 puncheons of malt and 20 puncheons of grain whiskey from the Glasgow Distillery and these sorts of purchases were made at regular intervals. They were not exclusively Scotch—for example, 5 puncheons were purchased from John Jameson in 1833. Sugar was bought in cone-shaped loaves. In August 1833 he bought 44 loaves of refined sugar totalling 12 cwt 1 qtr and 15 lbs at 86s per cwt; thus each loaf was 31½ lbs and 1lb of sugar cost about 10d.

Monthly sales for his outlets in Burgh Quay, Kingstown, North King Street, High Street and the North Wall rose from under £1,000 a month in 1828

Next page ALEXANDER THE FOUNDER (1797–1873) AND HIS BROTHERS [€86,000] to over £1,500 in 1830 [€129,000] and £2,400 by 1834 [€210,000]. This is the equivalent of annualised sales in the year 2000 of £500,000, £1m and £1.6m respectively and this was only the start of his great commercial career.

By 1830 Alexander, now thirty-three, was laying the foundation of a substantial commercial empire. He was able that year to bring his mother over from Glasgow together with a manservant, John Harries. The following year his brother William died, leaving a widow and four children, for whom Alexander took responsibility. Joseph had died in Glasgow three years earlier, at the age of twenty-one. He had not married.

In 1831 there was a revolution in Brazil, and Don Pedro I abdicated. Adam, Alexander’s younger brother, who had been in Brazil for eight years, was by then in partnership trading as Miller & Findlater. During the riots in Rio de Janeiro the firm’s premises were burned down. The firm relocated in Bahia (today called Salvador) and operated as both shipping agents and merchants dealing on their own account. Made-up fabrics and textiles were shipped out to Bahia and sugar and cotton back to Europe. Ships plied to and from Liverpool, Falmouth and Hamburg. In 1834, for example, silver coins were consigned to London and gingham, handkerchiefs, hair cords, shirtings, Indian books, book folds and Verona handkerchiefs, and special cloths such as madapottams, pullicates and osnabergs, went back out to Bahia.

The ledgers of the company, Miller & Findlater, 1830–1839, have survived in almost pristine condition. The most surprising discovery from these books is the export of large quantities of bottled porter during this period. The porter was brewed by Arthur Guinness, then bottled, corked, and labelled and packed in straw into barrels by Findlaters for despatch. The porter was sold as Findlater’s Pure Dublin Porter—in January 1832 10,000 porter labels were printed. In 1835 we consigned 45 barrels of bottled porter from Burgh Quay to Miller & Findlater in Bahia, each barrel containing 3½ dozen quart bottles. In another

In another consignment there were 108 casks containing 3½ dozen each, making 378 dozen, and 75 casks each containing 6 dozen pint bottles, making 450 dozen.

A good quantity of ale was shipped; for instance, in September 1834 Burgh Quay purchased 20 barrels of Cairns and North Wall 10 barrels. There were also purchases of 6 guinea ale from an Andrew Roy at £6 +s per hogshead less 7½ per cent. This compares with Guinness porter at £2 2s 3d and Cairns ale at £1 18s a barrel,* suggesting that Roy’s ale was of a much

• Guinness hogshead = 52 gallons (54 gallons in the industry generally), Guinness barrel = 32 imperial gallons until 1881 (36 gallons in the industry generally), Irish barrel = 42 Irish gallons = 32.96 imperial gallons (S. R. Dennison and Oliver MacDonagh Guinness 1886–1939 Cork: Cork University Press 1998 Appendix pp 271-2)

Next page FINDLATERS

Todd Burns 47 Mary Street after rebuilding following the very extensive fire that occurred in the early part of 1902 destroying the main structure; fortunately the premises and stock were insured.

superior quality. It is probable that this ale came from John Roy & Co., ale and table-beer brewers who in 1822 were at 28 North Anne Street, just around the corner from Alexander’s outlet in North King Street. In 1836 the street directory shows John Jameson as the brewer at this address.

In 1834 Alexander formed one of his best partnerships, that with William Todd and Gilbert Burns, in Mary Street, trading as the department store Todd Burns. Alexander seems to have funded the development. His ledger accounts for the workmen’s weekly wages at around £22 10s, and with, a nice touch, drink money for labourers 2s 2d; 2 tons of slates from Dockrells cost 62s 6d per ton, 14 iron pillars £32, nails £1 10s and rubbish cartage 21s 4d. He also paid for the slaters, plasterers and £40 on account for mahogany.

The store proved one of the most profitable of his investments. He had a quarter- share in the profits from 1838 to 1848 and one-fifth from 1849 to 1873; he also received interest on loans and undrawn earnings. Dublin was obviously ready for a new department store.* Profits climbed from £9,296 [€7,100] in 1838 to £13,000 [€1m] in 1843. In the years of the Famine, 1849–9, profits were down three-quarters, but rose again in the 1850s to an average of over £10,000 [€1,000,000] and increased to over £20,000 [€1.9m] in the 1860s, finally standing at £21,765 [€1.9m] at the time of his death in 1873. The highest was £27,870 [€2.5m] in 1866. These were superb profits.

In 1835 the builders and shopfitters were again at work for Alexander, this time in Sackville Street, where he had taken a lease at the upper end of the street. He began trading here as Findlater Lennox & Co., tea merchants, Robert Lennox having learnt his trade in one of his other outlets. The 16-year-old monopoly of the East India Company had been abolished in 1833 and Charles Bewley, the most enterprising of his family at that time, had chartered a small schooner named Hellas, capable of carrying no more than two hundred tons, and imported the first cargo (2099 chests) of free tea from Canton to Dublin in 1835. The ledgers record our first purchases for the new outlet in 1835 as: 4 chests of Bohia (414 lbs) at 8s 6¼d; 6 chests of Congou (484 lbs) at 1s 9¼d; 6 cases of Congou (493 lbs) at 1s 10½d and 5 boxes of Caper (105 lbs) at 1s 2d— total £134 18s 6d. Tea was still an expensive luxury. In 1834 popular tea retailed at 4s per 1b., good Congou 4s 6d, strong Congou 4s 8d, fine full 5s, Pekoe 4s 8d and finest Pekoe 7s (5s represents about £14 in today’s money—by comparison, 1lb of Bewley’s breakfast tea in the year 2000 cost about £3.70). From then Findlaters’ tea business grew apace, in line with the rapidly growing Irish taste for tea. For more on tea see page 29, and 145 to 149 in chapter 6.

I made some interesting discoveries while looking through the old ledgers. Wine imports, for instance, were by no means all from France. Among the more obscure wines we shipped was ‘Bene Carlo’ (7s 6d a gallon in 1827) from Valencia, ‘Bucellas’ from Portugal, ‘Calcavella’ from Italy and ‘Constantia’ from the Cape, all in general circulation in this period. In 1830 good Cape wine retailed at 1s 2d a bottle, fine Cadiz sherry and fine port at 2s 3d bottle, Calcavella 2s 4d, old port 2s 6d, prime claret 3s 4d; but here’s the catch: were these quart or pint bottles? Most likely the former.

Shrub, which sold at 5s a gallon, was a drink made from sweetened fruit juice and spirit, typically rum or brandy. ‘Raspberry’ featured prominently; we had 2,000 labels printed in August 1827 at a cost of 4s and it sold at 7s to 8s a gallon which suggests it had an alcoholic content. Malt whiskey was 8s and 9s an imperial gallon which equals 6s 4d and 7s 2d an Irish gallon (1 gallon = 6 x 75 cl. bottles). Old Jamaica rum was advertised at 17s 6d an imperial gallon, 14s for an Irish gallon. In 1841 we were advertising best old Irish at 9s a gallon, Scotch at 8s 8d, and Islay at 1s an Irish gallon. White currant and ginger cordial of superior quality were also 10s a gallon. Later, rich raspberry vinegar was 9s a gallon; Guinness double stout porter 3s 10d per dozen quarts, Drogheda ale 4s and Cape wine of very special description 18s a dozen, again presumably quarts. In 1843 quarts of Guinness were 3s 6d and pints 1s 10d a dozen (2s in 1827), Drogheda ale 3s 8d and 1s 11d respectively, light bitter ale 2s 9d per dozen. Cider first appeared in 1827, but not very frequently afterwards.

In February 1836 there was an extension of porter exports to Quebec: 290½ dozen quarts and 156 dozen pint bottles, packed as usual in barrels; this consignment also included ale, 129½ dozen quarts and 54 dozen pints. In September there was a shipment to New York, in October to New Orleans and in November to Pernambuco, in Brazil. In January 1837 Guinness paid us a Christmas allowance on 630 hogsheads, 60 barrels and 36 half barrels of porter; I’d say that we were a valued customer. 1836 seems to have been the peak of the exports to the Americas. In that year Alexander’s brother John (my great-great-grandfather) died at sea, aged just thirty-four. He was Master of the brig James Laurie which went down off the Bahamas with a total loss of life. We rely on the Nassau Royal Gazette for the sparse information we have on the disaster, in an article entitled ‘Melancholy Shipwreck’:

The early part of the 25th of March last was somewhat squally and threatening. Nevertheless, Captain Findlater was anxious to get out of the harbour without delay, as the wind was fast veering to the westward, which might detain the vessel in port for several days. The passengers, with their luggage, hurried on board. The bar was passed, only a few minutes before the wind had come round to north-west. By two o’clock it blew a strong gale from that quarter but being so far fair as to allow a course to be shaped out to sea from among the islands. The brig made sail and was soon out of sight of the town. The weather throughout the night was wild and stormy and in the morning fears were expressed for the safety of the James Laurie; and those fears were, some days afterwards, increased by several articles which had been on board being found on the shores of Abaco. No less than thirteen passengers, beside the master and crew, were hurried into eternity, it must be presumed, in a very short time after their departure from hence who, it is reasonable to believe, perished that night or the day after.

John had married twenty-year-old Mary Anne Hughes in Liverpool on 18 April 1827. They had four children: John born in 1828, Helen in 1829, Joseph in 1831 and Elizabeth in 1833. A year after John’s death Mary Anne died of consumption (tuberculosis). The orphaned children were brought up with their Findlater aunt, Susanna Snowden and by their uncle Alexander who looked after the expenses.

Also in 1836 Alexander was associated with other prominent merchants in the establishment of a steam packet service between Dublin and Glasgow, as recorded in The Story of the Burns & Laird Lines.

• St John’s, at that time, was the centre of the region’s fishing industry, with a population of 10,000 in 1815 (up from 5,421 in 1806).

Victorian Chapel Memorials, Mount Jerome, Dublin, Ireland. Merchant of this city.

Sources