Every time I express my love for whisky to others, I inevitably get comments about how hard it must be to try to belong to such a men’s club. And every time, I have to restrain myself from rolling my eyes and flipping my hair in a fast motion to express my discontent. What people don’t seem to get, is that for every old bearded man corresponding to the cliché of the whisky drinker, there are many well respected women working in the industry.
Actually, women have always been instrumental to the development of alcohol, whether pioneering brewing for the first time or setting up some of the greatest whisky distilleries. Bessie Williamson is the perfect exemple of that intrinsic link between female developers and the popular brown spirit. The daughter of a clerk who was killed fighting in World War One, she was on holiday for the summer on Islay in 1934 with a friend and applied for a summer job working as a shorthand typist at the Laphroaig whisky distillery. She rapidly rose through the ranks, first by managing the office at Laphroaig, then taking on additional management responsibilities when owner Ian Hunter suffered a stroke in 1938 and turning her into a legendary figure in the history of Islay’s whisky industry
Read the full article on Dress To Kill Magazine
Comentarios