Sir Peter Mackie, 1st Baronet

Mackie caricatured by Spy (Leslie Ward) for Vanity Fair in 1908.

Sir Peter Jeffrey Mackie, 1st Baronet (26 November 1855 – 22 September 1924) was a Scottish whisky distiller and writer.

Mackie was born at St Ninians, Stirling. His father, Alexander Mackie (died 1884), was a distiller. His mother was Jane Simpson Brown (died 1886).

He was educated at Stirling High School and in 1878 joined his uncle's firm, James L. Mackie & Co, at the Lagavulin distillery on Islay. In the mid-1880s he became a founding partner in Mackie & Co, which was set up to market Lagavulin and other whiskies in London. In 1890 the two businesses amalgamated as Mackie & Co (Distillers) and began to blend White Horse. In 1895 Mackie's became a limited company and Peter Mackie became chairman, a post he held until his death. In 1924 the firm was renamed White Horse Distillers Ltd and became a public company.

Mackie travelled and wrote extensively on politics, especially on tariff reform and Imperial Federation. In 1918 he made a gift of pedigree cattle to Rhodesia to encourage ranching and cattle breeding. He also financed the Mackie Anthropological Expedition to Uganda. He was also a major landowner (owning 12,000 acres (49 km²) in Argyllshire), a Justice of the Peace for Argyllshire, Ayrshire and Lanarkshire, and an active member of the Scottish Unionist Association, serving as chairman from 1922.

He was created a baronet in the 1920 Birthday Honours.^[1]

Footnotes

References

• Biography, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Obituary, The Times, 23 September 1924