Fell Fine Bakers: the thread about Robert McVitie, Alexander Grant and their enduringly popular biscuits

Edinburgh’s industrial heritage is often overshadowed both by the prominence of law, education and medicine in the city and the dominance of its western neighbour (I’m talking about you, Glasgow!) However there were some sectors where Edinburgh became a national powerhouse. Where Dundee is renowned as the City of Jute, Jam and Journalism it is more commonly forgotten than remembered that Edinburgh had Beer, Books and… Biscuits! Such was the significance of the baking industry that in 1939 three of the UK’s four largest biscuit producers had their origins in Edinburgh and Leith, producing between them over 79,000 tons of biscuits per annum. This was 43% of the total output of members of the National Association of Biscuit Manufacturers (it should be noted that these bakers all had multiple factories around the UK, and Edinburgh was not itself producing 43% of all biscuits!).

In Edinburgh itself, the largest biscuit bakery was McVitie & Price. This company started out way back in 1830 when Dumfries baker Robert McVitie (senior) came to the city to join his father. The latter had had inherited property here from his brother and together they opened a bakery at 129 Rose Street (now an Indian restaurant, where many years ago I had the hottest curry of my life!) When Robert married Catherine Gairns in 1844 the money she brought allowed the business to expand. More salubrious premises at 23 Queensferry Street were acquired and Robert took a keen interest in European baking trends. He introduced the Viennese loaf to Scotland and styled the family shop “Boulangerie Francaise et Viennoise“. Robert retired in 1884 at 75 and his son Robert (junior) took over and split the retail and baking operations apart, moving the latter to larger premises at 8-9 Merchant Street.

One day in 1887 a young man by the name of Alexander Grant, a baker from Forres, walked into McVitie’s shop on Queensferry Street looking for a job. Robert (junior) was behind the counter and told him there were none going. “It’s a pity“, Grant remarked, “for I’m a fell fine baker.” Turning to leave, he picked up a scone from a display, examined it and declared “well, onyways, ye canna mak scones in Edinburgh“. McVitie hired him on the spot and it was as well that he did as Grant proved to be the golden goose that would lay the Digestive biscuit in 1891, making McVities a household name and a fortune in the process.

Grant kept the precise recipe of his biscuit secret, personally supervising the mixing machine room. Machines would lie idle if he was away in London on business, awaiting his return by train. His elder daughter Elizabeth would later take over custodianship of the secret recipe to ensure that mixing and baking could go on constantly.

Robert McVitie proved to have a skill for hiring the right people. One such hire, George Andrews Brown, was sent to establish a sales branch in London were he found the company’s large Scotch biscuits didn’t sell and that their version of the Rich Tea was too hard for southern tastes. He fed this back to Edinburgh, where Grant developed the smaller, crisper, modern version of this biscuit in response. Brown is also credited with the idea of the filled, cream sandwich biscuit: think of him and dunk his memory the next time you enjoy a Bourbon or Custard Cream. In 1888 McVitie engaged a commercial traveller from Cadbury’s – Charles Price – on the basis that if his sales proved him he would be made a partner in the firm. Price sold the biscuits and McVitie was true to his word, the company becoming McVitie & Price. Charles Price joined at a pivotal moment when the company was looking to expand and had just bought land on Stewart Terrace in Gorgie (which had only been incorporated into Edinburgh a few years earlier in 1882) to build a new industrial bakery, the St. Andrew’s Biscuit Factory.

Disaster struck in 1894 when a fire completely destroyed the new factory, causing £25,000 (c. £2.6M in 2023) of damage. The fire was discovered by Price, working late.Firemaster Wilkins, all available men and two steam fire engines were soon on the scene, but could not save the factory.

This setback might have caused lesser men to crumble, but McVitie, Price and Grant stepped up to the challenge and would turn the adversity into an opportunity. They found that there was no spare factory space in Edinburgh – or even in Scotland – to rent and had to go as far away as Malton in Yorkshire to set up a temporary works. Grant was put in charge of this operation and proved himself a capable manager. The St. Andrew’s Works arose again from the ashes, much enlarged and completely modernised. It was now the largest and newest biscuit factory in the country, capable of baking 1 ton of biscuits, per oven, per day.

The company could hardly keep up with demand. Their trade in London, secured by George Andrews Brown, grew ten-fold between 1896 and 1900; from £10,000 to £100,000 a year. It made no commercial sense to transport all these biscuits to the southern metropolis from Edinburgh and so an even bigger new factory was built in Harlesden in London. Opening in 1902, the Edinburgh Biscuit Works employed 2,000 workers and had an output three times that of the St. Andrew’s works. Grant took an obsessive approach to the establishment of the operation in London, travelling down every other day by train for the first 3 months of business to personally oversee the mixing of all biscuit doughs, returning to Edinburgh on the overnight train to keep his other eye on mixing there too. To ensure nobody else could bake biscuits behind his back he took the only copies of the biscuit-cutting dies with him, back and forth between Edinburgh and London. This tireless approach to work was very much in Grant’s nature. He worked a 6 day, 60 hour week, read every trade journal cover-to-cover, and still found time to study Food Chemistry at the Heriot-Watt College.

Another key to the success and meteoric rise of the company was royal patronage. This began in 1893 at the wedding of the future King George V and Queen Mary, when Queen Victoria’s personal confectioner was overwhelmed by demand and so the wedding cakes were contracted out. McVitie & Price were the only Scottish firm to get one of the five prestigious cake orders and rose to the occasion, producing a gigantic cake standing 6′ 4″ tall (1.93m), 8′ (2.43m) in circumference at the base, weighing 466lbs (211kg) and costing 140 guineas (c. £15.5k in 2023). The cake was exhibited for 2 days in Edinburgh and fourteen thousand people queued to see it before it was shipped to London, . This “major work of baking and confection art” was declared by Princess Mary to be the stand out of the lot.

This secured a Royal Warrant of Appointment for McVitie & Price and established them as the go-to bakers of royal wedding, anniversary and christening cakes for the best part of the next 65 years; they produced wedding cakes for both the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. In accordance with an old tradition, the top tiers of the wedding cakes were kept and sent back to McVitie’s for redecoration as the christening cakes for the first children of the union.

Robert McVitie died aged only 56 in 1910. The company was converted to a Limited structure as McVitie & Price Ltd, even though the latter partner had officially retired in 1906 when he took up the seat of Edinburgh Central in the House of Commons as Liberal Party MP. The new board sensibly promoted Alexander Grant to the positions of both Chairman and Managing Director, cementing his position as the foremost industrial baker of his age. In 1916, after nearly dying from double pneumonia, he convinced the National Bank of Scotland to back him in a buyout of the company, which he continued to run with the single-minded determination for which he was renowned, right up until his death in 1937.

It was the pressure of overwork that nearly killed grant during WW1 – the company had a huge government contract to bake iron ration biscuits for the men in the trenches. The factories in Edinburgh and London could not cope with this demand and so a new operation was started in Stockport, Manchester. To help ease the strain, he brought his son (Robert McVitie Grant) and his son-in-law (Hector Laing senior) into top level positions in the company, but not before they worked their way up from the bottom at Grant’s insistence: they started out stoking ovens on the night shift so that they would be familiar with every aspect of the business. On his wedding day, Hector Laing’s father-in-law-to-be insisted he came into work in the morning before being officially passed as fit to wed his daughter. It was worth it though, as Grant’s nepotism made Laing a very wealthy man indeed.

In 1928, McVitie & Price unleashed the Jaffa Cake (“something new in biscuits“) onto the market. Surprisingly, it wasn’t much of a success – at least not yet.

Grant personally managed all details of his company from top to bottom. As well as being obsessive about the biscuit mixes and quality he took a keen interest in the sales side, appointing (and firing) all the salesmen personally. But he was also a sensible delegator. When Lord Thomas Horder, the royal physician, complained to him in 1933 that he couldn’t get Scandinavian rye crispbreads in the UK, Grant put his son to the task who came up with MacVita cracker.

He was a close friend and patron of his fellow Morayshire loon, Labour politician Ramsay MacDonald. He made campaign contributions to him and in 1924 caused a political scandal in the wrong sorts of papers by donating a Rolls Royce to the new PM for his personal use, plus 30,000 McVities shares to pay for its upkeep. This criticism stung Grant. In his eyes he was giving his friend – who was not in himself a wealthy man – a gift from his own pocket, and asking nothing in return, thus sparing the nation the expense of official transport. His receipt of the heredity Baronetcy of Forres 1924 was used to claim he had bought political favour. In reality, he received the honour for his efforts to help establish the National Library of Scotland. He donated £100,000 (c. £5M in 2023) towards this establishment, but did so by handing over a blank cheque for the Chairman of the National Library Committee to fill in as he saw fit, instructing his banker to make sure it was paid without question. A further £100,000 followed in the 1930s to help fund the construction of the building on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh.)

Always a generous man, pressed from the mould of the philanthropic Victorian industrialist, the scandal didn’t put Grant off of benefaction. In his home town of Forres, he gifted towards renovation of the Parish Church, a new fire engine and the public park, named Grant Park in his honour. He donated a golf course to Lossiemouth and paid for the reconstruction of Nairn public baths. His last act of generosity was £10,000 (c. £570k in 2023) in 1937 to provide for a 4,000 piece silver & crystalware banqueting set, hand made by Scottish artisans, for the Palace of Holyroodhouse. After attending the coronation of King George Vi and Queen Elizabeth in May 1937, Grant fell ill once again with pneumonia and died at home in Edinburgh on May 21st.

The company passed to his son, Robert McVitie Grant, who would form a close working relationship with Glasgow competitors Macfarlane, Lang & Co. in the 1940s in the spirit of the national wartime economy. This economy saw the product line slashed from 370 different types of cakes and biscuits to just 10 by 1945 (thus removing the Jaffa Cake from shelves for almost 20 years). Robert died suddenly in 1948 and largely as a result of this the two companies merged to form United Biscuits, an industrial giant. McVities were the senior partner in the merger and dominated the new corporate structure, although it was alternately run from factories in Edinburgh, Manchester and London. The company gave their individual factories relative commercial freedom (to the point in having their own specific recipes for the same biscuits, thus often competing with eachother). But this allowed the St. Andrew’s works in Edinburgh under Morton Young to take the initiative and reintroduce the Jaffa Cake, which by the mid-1950s was being churned out in Gorgie at the rate of 10,000 tins a day!

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Mary and Elizabeth #OnThisDay

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://theorkneynews.scot/2026/02/01/mary-and-elizabeth-onthisday/

Attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England

Beyond the NLS, Scotland has various libraries within the country. There’s over twenty public libraries in Edinburgh alone. The day after I visited the NLS, I traveled to Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RGBE) by bus. This garden is akin to Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. It has a beautiful plant collection, and a special library. However, the library isn’t accessible from the garden, a clear barrier to entry. Furthermore, the science, learning and archives section is only accessible by appointment. That is too bad. If it had been accessible from the garden I may have visited it. There are museums and various collections within the garden as well. Every plant has a specific identifying number associated with it.

Note: This serves as the beginning of my series, which begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be two more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in London and Belgium coming later this year. Links to those will be added to this post later.

The RGBE website describes the library as providing the “basic tools” to support research and organization of biodiversity into a “manageable framework to underpin ecological and biological research.” This makes it even more unfortunate that the “extensive” library, said to be the Scottish national reference collection for “specialist botanical and horticultural resources” with over one million items, cannot be accessed from the garden itself. A pamphlet purchased for two pounds says directly: “no access from Garden,” putting this barrier into writing.

The second part of my vacation involved staying one week at HF Holidays’ Derwent Bank house, which sits on Derwent Water lake, to hike throughout the acclaimed and well-known Lake District, in Cumbria. Some of the hikes were arduous, although that might not be the case if you were physically fit, unlike myself, who wasn’t as fit as other hikers. I wanted to hike there as it was blazing hot in Baltimore, where I live. Other hikers were primarily from England and the Netherlands. The hikes often involved going through sheep grazing areas, avoiding sheep poop in the process, with beautiful views, and a visit to the Castlerigg Stone Circle.

On the fifth day of hiking, on July 31st, the coach bus I was riding in, with fellow hikers passed by the Keswick library. It looked to be one big room filled with desktop computers. Further research indicated that this library offers printing, loanable dementia bags and storysacks, hearing aid batteries, and more. It’s located off the town’s main street, with some nearby parking lots (they call them “car parks” in England), plus a bus station 200 yards from the library. It also hosts board games, a Lego club, jigsaw puzzle building, mindful coloring, books to help with well-being and health, and more.

Lastly was a bookshelf almost akin to the Little Free “Library” collections in the U.S. (but without serving a physical manifestation of a “desire to privatize the world”), at the Penrith train station. See you at the next post, where my journey continues, in London!

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “Derwent Bank Lake District,” HF Holidays, 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Blogposts, fictional archives, Ancestry’s monopoly on federal records, the Little Free “Library” deception, powerful ICJ decisions, and the DNC’s sidelining of pro-Palestinian voices,” History Hermann, 3 Sept. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Here’s four photos I took from my third-floor room at the Derwent Bank house of @hfholidays.co.uk on August 1st, the last day I was there, looking down at the beautiful garden, and down across the Derwent Water lake to the beautiful landscape across the lake. I revised the image slightly from the original using an Instagram filter on here. I only stayed for a week, and this was only the second part of my trip (the first part was going to #edinburgh) but I throughly [sic] enjoyed my time there, even if the hikes could be rigorous at times,” Instagram, 9. Aug. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Photos of the Castlerigg Stone Circle which I took on July 28th, a place also known as the Druids Circle. I used some photo tools on here to make these images even better and pop out more, as the originals were rather dark. #castleriggstonecircle,” Instagram, 9. Aug. 2025.
• “Keswick Library,” Cumberland Council, 2025.
• “Libraries,” City of Edinburgh, 2025.
• “Library & Archives,” Longwood Gardens, 2025.
• Miline, Simon. “Why our work matters,” Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2025.
• “Our History,” Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2025.
• “Penrith (North Lakes) (PNR),” National Rail, 2025.
• “What We Do,” Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2025.

#CastleriggStoneCircle #castleriggstonecircle #Cumbria #DerwentBank #Edinburgh #England #gardens #HFHolidays #Keswick #LakeDistrict #lakes #libraryTourism #LongwoodGardens #maps #memory #museums #NationalLibraryOfScotland #Penrith #publicTransit #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #Scotland #shortBlogs

Curtain Raiser: Launch of the National Library’s Centenary Celebrations
28 March, Edinburgh | tickets £4–£12

Join National Librarian Amina Shah with special guests Damian Barr & Val McDermid for the official launch of the National Library of Scotland’s centenary year.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/curtain-raiser-launch-of-the-national-librarys-centenary-celebrations-tickets-1224999449329

#Scottish #literature #Library #NationalLibrary #NationalLibraryofScotland

How copyright chaos reigns among the UK’s top cultural institutions

The perennial attempts to widen the reach of copyright in the pursuit of yet more revenue is something that is to be expected from companies. After all, maximising profits is basically what companies do. But as previous Walled Culture posts have lamented, there is also a widespread tendency among non-profit cultural institutions – museums, art galleries, libraries etc. – to use copyright […]

#2d #3d #anarchy #artGalleries #britishLibrary #culture #foia #freedomOfInformation #libraries #museums #nationalGalleriesOfScotland #nationalLibraryOfScotland #publicDomain #tateGallery #uk #wallaceCollection

https://walledculture.org/how-copyright-chaos-reigns-among-the-uks-top-cultural-institutions/

For all interested in or studying the more recent past ...

Post-war OS maps as single sheets, overlay, or side-by-side for the period 1944-1973 are now available from the National Library of Scotland website:
https://maps.nls.uk/os/national-grid/

A great deal of information on post-war rebuilding and expansion can now be seen for free, as detailed as 1:1250.

A wonderful site just got even better. Well done to all involved. 👍🏼

#OSmaps #History #Maps #PostWW2 #NationalLibraryOfScotland

Shin sibh, a charaidean! Come along with me to George IV Bridge and the National Library of Scotland!

#Gàidhlig #DùnÈideann #Gaelic #Edinburgh #NLS #NationalLibraryOfScotland

Shin sibh, a charaidean! Thigibh còmhla rium gu Drochaid Dheòrsa IV is Leabharlann Nàiseanta na h-Alba!

#Gàidhlig #DùnÈideann #Gaelic #Edinburgh #NLS #NationalLibraryOfScotland