The Field Marshal's whisky: how Haig & Haig became the bottle America faked

In November 1921 the cartoonist Clare Briggs drew a fat, happy bootlegger on the telephone. "Hello Pete, say send over about ten thousand more of the Haig and Haig labels. Yeh, Five Star. It's going good." Nobody reading it needed the joke explained. Of all the Scotch names in Prohibition America, Haig & Haig was the one most worth printing on a bottle of something else.

The name belonged to a Scottish family that had been distilling for centuries, and in 1919 one of its owners was the most famous soldier in the British Empire. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig sold out that June. Three years later, with American Prohibition in full swing, he was back on the board of the company that made the whisky. And the bottle that made the brand famous here had no name at all. How that happened is the last section.

1901 to 1914: the agent who wrote to the President

Theodore Roosevelt became President on September 14, 1901, after McKinley died. Eleven days later a letter reached him from 99 Pearl Street, New York, on the letterhead of Roosevelt & Schuyler, "sole agents for the U.S., Canada & Mexico" for Haig & Haig Scots Whisky, along with Ruinart champagne. It was signed M. Roosevelt Schuyler. "My dear Theodore: Will you give me a thirty seconds audience some time early next month? I would like to have you make us purveyors to 'the White House,' and would like to explain why and how." The White House stamped it received two days later. Whether the White House ever bought a case is not in the file.

The whisky was not cheap. A Birmingham, Alabama, store in 1903 sold Haig & Haig Three Star at a "regular price" of $2 a bottle. In 1907 John Haig & Co. of Markinch registered an American trade mark for another of its whiskies, Old Highland, with a kilted Highland soldier on the label. In 1911 it registered DIMPLE SCOTS.

That same November of 1911 a Birmingham dealer listed "HAIG & HAIG, GLASGOW" and under it, in parentheses, "(Pinched Bottle)." A year later a Christmas list in the same paper offered Haig & Haig 3 Star, Haig & Haig 5 Star and "Haig & Haig Pinch Bottle." Keep those parentheses in mind.

In 1914 the Patent Office granted a design patent to John A. Haig, of Ladymead, Ascot, England, for a "bottle or flask." Collectors often say the Pinch was patented. It was not, at least not in America. The only Haig bottle patent in the American record is this flat flask with a round dimple on each face.

When war broke out in Europe that August, Roosevelt & Schuyler ran a notice in the New York papers. Insurance and exchange had added about 24 cents a case, they said, or 2 cents a bottle, and nobody should pay more than that. Then the claim: "As HAIG & HAIG is more largely consumed in the United States than any other brand, we take the liberty of informing our friends of the actual conditions." That is the importer's own claim. It still tells you how big the name was on the eve of Prohibition.

1919 to 1925: the Field Marshal sells, then comes back

On June 4, 1919, a London dispatch reported that the family firm had been sold to the Distillers Company. "Chief owners of the business of John Haig & Co., just sold to the Distillers company, were Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Lieut. Col. Oliver Haig and Major John Haig. They will receive more than a half million dollars for their interest." An American editorial page had fun with it: "Withdrawal of the Haig brothers from a famous liquor firm makes it less surprising to learn that Marshal Haig drinks milk."

He did not stay out. In July 1922, by then Earl Haig, he was "elected a director of the Distillers' Company at the annual meeting held in Edinburgh. The chief product of the company is whisky." The Associated Press added that some people thought it "rather detracts from the Field-Marshal's dignity." When the Distillers Company joined with Walker and Buchanan-Dewar in 1925, an American paper noted that "Earl Haig, who led the British armies during the war, is a director in the company." The writer guessed that of the combine's exports the year before, "at least 3,000,000 gallons went to the United States." That was the writer's guess. The United States was supposed to be dry. Earl Haig died in January 1928, still five years before Repeal.

1921 to 1925: the label worth faking

The money was in the gap. A rum runner told the New York Herald in 1922 that at West End, Grand Bahama, "Haig & Haig and Dewars cost us $25 and $27" a case. "It is delivered in New York for $85 and $95." In Washington that March, the Evening Star had a chemist analyze bootleg samples. One was a "Haig & Haig" that sold for $15, with its proper straw casing, "smelling almost of the heather of Scotland." It ran to 106 proof. The test for wood alcohol was positive. And "in that beautiful smoky bottle reposed the oil of bay, the essential of bay rum," the barber shop hair tonic. The same article explained where the bottles came from. Junk shops sold the empties: "There are hundreds of 'Haig & Haig' and 'Gordon Gin' empties sold to bootleggers."

The labels were easier to get than the bottles. A bootleg supply circular seized in 1923 offered labels for "Johnny Walker, Black and White, Haig & Haig, King George" and a dozen more "at $2.25 per dozen," cheaper in 100 dozen lots, all "warranted 'works of art.'" That summer a commission of Scottish churchmen touring the United States was shown seized liquor in San Francisco, "including 800 bottles, bearing the label Haig & Haig." Their verdict: "It isn't Scotch at all." The Rev. John Malcolm Munroe of the Church of Scotland called it "an insult to Scotland."

Some of it may even have been real, and it came in strange ways. In July 1922 a plane forced down for gasoline in Jonesport harbor, Maine, turned out to be carrying "200 bottles of Haig and Haig and Johnny Walker whiskey" packed in bags in the cockpit. The paper called it the first seaplane bootlegging case Maine officials had found. That December the 12,000 quarts of "Haig and Haig Scotch and Calvert rye" seized from the British schooner Message of Peace off North Carolina were ordered smashed and dumped into the Cape Fear River.

1929: in the glass, and in a Congressman's trunk

In March 1929 a Chicago Congressman named M. Alfred Michaelson, a dry who had voted for the Jones Act a month before, was indicted after his trunk "started leaking" at Jacksonville on the way up from Key West. Among the contents were "six quarts of John Haig whisky." He was acquitted that May.

In June a federal grand jury in Brooklyn indicted 140 people and companies in a bogus liquor ring. It charged that "the names 'Haig & Haig' and 'Johnny Walker' were among the 50 blown into glass bottles" by three glass companies. By then the fakers were blowing the name into the glass as well as printing the label. The same case reached the companies that became Schenley, over shavings scraped from Overholt barrels. That story is here, the Overholt side is here, and Johnnie Walker's Prohibition is here.

1934: Repeal, and a Kennedy

When Scotch became legal again, the American ads for Haig & Haig carried a new importer's name: Somerset Importers, Ltd., 230 Park Avenue, New York. In 1936 they put ages on it: "The 'Five Star' is 8 years old; the 'Pinch Bottle' over 12 years old." In 1940 a Washington columnist writing about the American ambassador to Britain spelled out whose company it was. "The Somerset Imports Ltd. is, or until recently was, largely Mr. Kennedy's in title or in trust. That is the company which the canny Kennedy, foreseeing the end of prohibition, used to make a small fortune importing Haig & Haig Scotch whisky, Gordon's gin and perhaps other spiritous liquors." Joseph P. Kennedy is often called a bootlegger. That has never been shown. The Haig & Haig franchise is on the record.

The pinched bottle

Go back to those parentheses in 1911: "(Pinched Bottle)." In 1958 Haig & Haig asked the Patent Office to register the shape of the bottle itself. The Office agreed, and its reasoning was later quoted by a federal appeals court in a case over the Tabasco bottle. It found that "from about the turn of the century until 1952, there was no way of identifying or ordering applicant's 'Pinched Decanter' or 'Pinched Bottle' whisky other than by describing the conformation of the bottle." The word Pinch came from the customers. They had to describe the bottle to ask for it, and the description became the name. The company formally adopted it as a word trade mark only in 1952. For half a century Americans ordered it by describing the bottle.

If you have an old Haig & Haig

Before Prohibition the American agents were Roosevelt & Schuyler of New York, and dealers sold Three Star, Five Star and the "Pinched Bottle." From 1934 through the late 1930s the importer on American labels and ads is Somerset Importers. Because the company only adopted "Pinch" as a trade mark in 1952, a label that uses Pinch as a brand name is likely from the 1950s or later. A straw casing proves nothing: the 1922 fake had one too. For the years, check the strip and the bottle size in How old is this bottle?

Haig & Haig in America, year by year

Where the sources disagree

How old the family business is. You will read 1627, 1655 and 1679. No record from the period turned up for any of them.

When Distillers took over. Some histories say John Haig & Co. merged into the Distillers Company in 1877. The 1919 and 1922 dispatches say Distillers bought control in 1919. Both may be partly true: the Haig grain distillery helped found Distillers in 1877, and the family blending firm was sold in 1919.

London or Glasgow. The 1901 letterhead puts Haig & Haig at Trinity Place, London. The 1911 ad says Glasgow.

The Pinch patent. Often claimed, never found. The shape was protected by trade mark registration in 1953 and 1958, not by patent.

"Best selling in America." Only the importer's own 1914 notice says so.

Kennedy the bootlegger. His biographer David Nasaw chased the rumors and found none that held up. The legal import business is documented.

The 1929 cases. The Brooklyn counts were charges. What happened to each defendant has not been found.