‘Whisky Galore’ bottles for sale

Two bottles of whisky salvaged from the shipwreck that inspired the book ‘Whisky Galore!’ are to be sold in Edinburgh this week.

Taking place tomorrow (7 June), the sale is being conducted by Bonhams and will see the bottles of whisky, bottled by ‘Gilbey of London’ and ‘Peter Dawson of Glasgow’ go on sale for £6,000 – £8,000 and £4,000 – £6,000 respectively. Both are thought to have been bottled in 1940.

A professional diver called Donald McPhee salvaged the bottles from the wreck of the SS ‘Politician’ in August 1987. They were found in hold No.5 and were part of a cargo of whisky headed for Kingston, Jamaica and New Orleans. The ship, however, was wrecked in the Sound of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides during a storm in February 1941.

Famously, many bottles (over 200,000) were washed ashore and gleefully salvaged by beach-combing locals – much to the fury of HM Customs & Excise. Worsening winter weather soon broke the ship up and consigned the remaining bottles to the deep.

The incident though inspired the novelist Sir Compton Mackenzie who wrote ‘Whisky Galore!’ in 1947 as a result.

In 1949 the book was later turned into one of the best-known and best-loved films in the Ealing comedy canon, starring Basil Radford and Joan Greenwood; with the locals’ ingenious efforts to hide their new stocks of whisky from the suspicious tax man forming the basis for a raucous farce that has seen the film remade (unnecessarily and not to great applause unfortunately) and a musical.

There are many other whiskies going under the hammer at the sale, including a 1949 50-year-old Macallan Millennium decanter with an estimate of £15,000 to £17,000. The full line-up can be viewed here.

The bottles are just the latest in a reasonably long line of shipwrecked wines and spirits that occasionally come, quite literally, to the surface. A few years ago a Paris auction house sold the wine collection of designer Yves Saint-Laurent which included a bottle of Champagne salvaged from a Swedish ship that was sunk in the Baltic by a German submarine in 1916.