We didn’t ever own a Chairman Meow (v. unlikely as I’ve got a cat allergy) but we did have a whippet called Walnut. Very sadly no longer with us any more, here he is about to do a bit of running on a modified cross-trainer. But what of Walnut Whips you ask – where did they come from?
Maybe you were thinking that this Duncan guy was peddling a cheap knock-off of the old favourite, perhaps because Walnut Whip isn’t a trademarkable name1, I certainly did at first. W & M Duncan and Company, also known as Duncan’s of Edinburgh, started out surely enough as a Dundee based cake baking business in 1861. Internet folklore suggests that the W stood for Walter Duncan, and the M for Mary, his wife.
It’s not clear (to me) when they started making chocolate and confectionary, but they opened a factory in Beaverhall Road, Edinburgh, via a short 2 year stint on the High Street, in 1886. W & M Duncan Ltd was incorporated on 29 November 1912.
Walnut Whips as we know them are said to have been invented here in 1910, making them Nestlé’s oldest continuing brand. As far as we know, they are still being made at the Halifax factory where production was moved to at some time prior to the divestment of the Duncan’s factory in 1987 – but we’re getting slightly ahead of ourselves.
So, in 1910 along came the Walnut Whip. The chocolate ‘cone’ was originally hand-piped by extrusion, into a rubber mould with 12 ‘formers’, contributing to the original appearance. This has been partially retained in appearance only, since this piping process was redundant somewhere between the 70s and 80s. This makes the modern Walnut Whip a good example of a skeuomorph, a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were necessary in the original.
The original fondant was much thicker, and broken walnuts were often selected to be put at the bottom of the whip, inside. The original flavour was nominally ‘vanilla’ but coffee and maple flavours were also once available, though there have been more recent attempts at introducing mint and caramel. Although the extra walnut inside has been removed, there have also been attempts to introduce ones without any walnuts at all.
Duncan’s first had shares purchased by directors of Rowntree’s in 1927, by 1931 most of those shares had been transferred to a subsidiary known as Associated Chocolate Manufacturers Ltd. It’s been suggested that Duncan’s became ‘fully integrated’ with Rowntree’s at a management level sometime around 1947, and so as a small, remote, satellite factory did well to last as long as it did after that. Rowntree and Macintosh merged in 1969, to form Rowntree Mackintosh Ltd. All shares in the company were transferred to this entity by 1980, and in 1982, Rowntree Mackintosh became a plc. By 1986, it was re-named simply Rowntree plc., but failed to fight off a takeover by Nestlé in 1987.
By the mid 80’s, the corporate style of rationalisation, centralisation and economies of scale was in full effect, so the writing was already on the wall for Edinburgh. 3 mentions in an otherwise sparse annual report must have been sobering reading for the employees, with jobs cuts at first despite machinery investment;
Walnut Whip production was moved to Halifax around this time, though some online sources suggest that it was quite a few years before the actual divestment (note, not closure, as you’ll see below). Nestlé continue to make Walnut Whips to this day, though not without some (intentional?) controversy.
Duncan’s factory was sold to their management in 1987. But what happened next? For a few more years, the factory continued, now going by the name Duncan’s of Scotland. Although the factory moved in 1991, and it’s believed twice more after, they were doing well with a government contract – to make the chocolate bars for British military ration packs. Previously, fully commercial items such as Rolos or Mars had often been put into the packs, but in the early 90s the move was made to standardise on block chocolate of slightly varying flavours. Duncan’s of Scotland won this highly lucrative contract;
This didn’t stop them also making bars for general consumption;
With recent conflicts being concentrated in warmer climates, the idea of block chocolate in the ration began to wane, though not before Duncan’s lost the contact around 2003 to… their former owners. Alright, so Rowntree’s let them go in 1987, but a year later Nestlé bought Rowntree’s – so the Yorkie brand was now part of the new group, and it was these bars which they sold to the UK government for the ration contract;
Duncan’s went into liquidation in 2003, the name then passed through several owners before becoming part of the J. E. Wilson & Sons (Kendal) Ltd. mint-cake outfit, who in turn went into liquidation c.2016. This was not helped by a £260,000 electrical supply design ‘mistake’, according to the insolvency notes, where in an otherwise scanty report, it was considered significant enough to have a line all to itself. Between 2008 and 2014 small production runs of flavours like Ginger and Toffee were made and sold in gift shops and wholesale to some independent store at home and overseas. Anecdotally, I do remember seeing the Ginger bar when I visited the Highlands myself around that time period. Quiggin’s, another Kendal based mint-cake company who bought the remains of Wilson’s, don’t seem to have or use the ‘Duncan’s’ name, but pleasingly they do have a number of very retro looking lines that wouldn’t look out of place coming out of the old Carson’s factory in Bristol when it was still running. But that’s another story, for another day.
Thanks for reading, I’ll leave you with a few images from the earlier years of Duncan’s, the first of which (pep-snap) wouldn’t look out of place in the glovebox of a Durango 95;
- Well this is almost interesting! Given that they first appeared in 1910, it looks as if ‘Walnut Whip’ was first sort of trademarked from 1966, but it makes it very clear that this is only in the form ‘ROWNTREE’S WALNUT WHIP’, and that;
“Registration of this mark shall give no right to the exclusive use of the words ‘Walnut Whip'”
I’m guessing that the IPO just weren’t buying the use of ‘WALNUT WHIP’ on its own, though in 1997 it was re-registered as NESTLE WALNUT WHIP, however maybe now without the disclaimer, or at least it doesn’t appear online. In 2010, they were given exclusive use of the phrase WALNUT WHIP in class 30 (= sweets n’ that) which currently lasts until 2030. ↩︎
Footnote: As ever when researching companies that started over 100 years ago, that have been the subject of international mergers and acquisitions, and ended up as mere accounting by-lines of a global conglomerate, I’ve had to rely on a number of sources including Wikipedia and a bit of slightly fruitless digging around at Companies House. For dates, I’ve preferred the summary of the JISC archives hub, but I haven’t been able to check the source material, in this case held in York.