Scotland's Biscuit Makers: McVitie's, Macfarlane Lang, Crawford's and the Factory Biscuit

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Company dates are unusually unstable in this subject. Sources disagree on when McVitie's opened at Harlesden (1901, 1902 or 1910), when United Biscuits bought Crawford's (1960 or 1962) and when Crawford's left Leith (1970 or the 1990s). These are shown, not resolved. Lizzie Collingham's The Biscuit (Bodley Head, 2020) is a well-referenced general history; facts she reports are treated as Established unless other sources conflict. Her book is mainly about England and Ireland, so the Scottish material here is assembled from scattered passages. Firms' own histories are used for founding dates and labelled as company claims where they are the only source.

Why Scotland made biscuits

established Scotland had a biscuit tradition long before it had biscuit factories, but it was oat-based. The food historian Lizzie Collingham, in The Biscuit (2020), quotes the fourteenth-century chronicler Froissart on Scottish horsemen who carried a bag of oatmeal and a metal plate under the saddle to bake their own oat biscuits. In north-east Scotland the word "biscuit" was still used for soft barley-meal scones at the start of the twentieth century, she notes. Wheat biscuits were town food, made by bakers in Edinburgh, Leith and Glasgow for ships, shops and better-off households.

established Industrial biscuit-making began with the Royal Navy. Collingham records that Thomas Grant, superintendent at the Portsmouth victualling yard, introduced steam-powered mixers, rollers and cutters in 1832. His machines could make 7,000 tons of ship's biscuit a year. Commercial firms followed: J. D. Carr in Carlisle in the 1830s and Huntley & Palmers in Reading in 1846. Scottish bakers already sold beyond Scotland. When the Jacob brothers moved their bakery to Dublin in 1851, they announced in the Waterford Mail that they meant to win "a portion of the present demand for those imported from Carlisle and Edinburgh". Which Edinburgh makers they meant is not recorded.

established In Collingham's account the decisive Scottish step came in the 1880s, when McVitie & Price in Edinburgh and Macfarlane Lang in Glasgow moved into modern steam-powered factories in their home cities and, by the early 1900s, had opened branch factories in London.

McVitie & Price, Edinburgh

shared The firm's origins are dated in different ways. Grace's Guide records a bakery shop opening in Rose Street in 1830 and Robert McVitie founding the business in 1839; Wikipedia says McVitie, born in Dumfries in 1809, moved to Edinburgh in 1834. In 1880 his son, also Robert, took charge and moved the firm into fancy biscuits. Charles Edward Price, a former Cadbury traveller, became a partner in 1888, and the St Andrew Biscuit Works on Robertson Avenue, Gorgie, was completed the same year. A fire destroyed it in 1894; it was rebuilt within the year.

established Alexander Grant, a baker from Forres, joined in 1887, created the McVitie's Digestive in 1892 and became general manager in 1901 and managing director in 1911. Collingham records that he kept the Digestive formula secret and insisted on mixing it himself, travelling between Edinburgh and London once the firm had a London factory. The bread and catering side was split off in 1898 as McVitties, Guest & Co, and in 1922 McVitie & Price bought the Edinburgh bakery Simon Henderson and Sons (Grace's Guide).

shared The London factory at Harlesden is dated 1901 by Collingham, 1902 by Wikipedia and 1910 by Grace's Guide. A Manchester factory followed in 1914 or 1917. McVitie's chocolate digestive came in 1925 and Jaffa Cakes, according to Wikipedia, in 1927. The firm also made royal wedding cakes, for the future George V in 1893 and for Princess Elizabeth in 1947 (Grace's Guide). Carol Foreman, in Made in Scotland (2nd edn, 2010), a popular history drawn from company material, says the 1893 cake stood six feet four inches high and that 14,000 people queued to see it when it was shown in Edinburgh for two days. See the separate card on the Digestive biscuit for Grant's career.

Macfarlane Lang, Glasgow

established A company history published for the centenary period, now in the Trades House of Glasgow's online library, gives the firm's early story. James Lang, a trained baker, opened premises in the Gallowgate on 2 June 1817, next to the Saracen Head Inn, where the mail coaches left. His nephew John Macfarlane took over the management in 1841 and later moved the bakery to Green Street in Calton. A bread factory was built on Wesleyan Street in 1880, and in 1886 the Victoria Biscuit Works rose beside it. Machine biscuit production began that July, and the firm became Macfarlane, Lang & Co.

shared Foreman adds that John Macfarlane named the business John Macfarlane & Sons when his two sons joined in 1878, but Glaswegians went on calling its bread "Lang's Breid", which is why the founder's name returned to the title. Among its biscuits she names Granola Digestives, a rival to McVitie's, Gypsy Creams and Chocolate Viennas, and she repeats the firm's boast that Queen Victoria always had a tin of its cheese-flavoured Parmena biscuits on her luncheon table. That boast is the company's own.

established The firm then divided its markets. The Imperial Biscuit Works at Fulham opened in November 1903 to serve London and southern England, while Glasgow kept the Scottish, northern English, Irish and export trade. The bread business became a separate company, Lang's Bread Company, in 1919. Work began in 1921 on a new biscuit works at Tollcross covering more than 18 acres; Paul Sweeney's history gives its opening as 1925. The same company history describes a first-aid room with a trained nurse, dining rooms seating about 600 and a laundry for workers' overalls. According to Sweeney, a factory at Osterley replaced Fulham in 1931 and closed in 1980.

established The University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections hold the records of Macfarlane Lang & Co Ltd from 1817 to 1948, chiefly financial papers, valuations and agreements, with related publicity, price lists and production records (GD381/2) running to 1969. They are the main archival source for Glasgow's biscuit industry.

United Biscuits

established In 1948 McVitie & Price and Macfarlane Lang merged to form United Biscuits, a public company. Hector Laing, Alexander Grant's grandson, had become a director of McVitie & Price in 1947. The Scotsman's obituary says his special skill was production and that he was soon recognised as an expert in automating biscuit-making. He became managing director of United Biscuits in 1964 and was chairman from 1972 to 1990.

shared Collingham, citing Peter Pugh's history of the company, credits Laing with automating McVitie's Harlesden factory in 1954. Suppliers delivered flour, sugar, fats and syrups in bulk lorries, and ingredients were piped into storage and on to the mixers untouched by hand. Laing is quoted as dreaming of a day when you could "push a button by your bed and start up the whole factory". She calls him chairman of McVitie & Price at the time; the other sources opened do not confirm that title.

shared Foreman describes the early group as a loose one. Under its first chairman, Peter MacDonald, McVitie's legal adviser since the 1930s, McVitie & Price and Macfarlane Lang kept their identities and competed with each other, and McVitie's own three factories in Edinburgh, London and Manchester even used different recipes for the same biscuit. The operations were integrated into a single company only in 1965, with Hector Laing as managing director. She calls Laing Alexander Grant's son-in-law; he was his grandson.

established The group also narrowed its range. Before the war the Harlesden factory had made 387 varieties. In the 1950s, Collingham records, George Miller, the sales manager, and Laing agreed to concentrate on four core lines: Digestive, Home Wheat, Rich Tea and MacVita. United Biscuits then bought Crawford's and, in 1965, William Macdonald & Sons, bringing the Penguin into the group.

established Production steadily left Scotland. The Gorgie works stopped making biscuits in 1969. United Biscuits was sold to Yıldız Holding in 2014 and placed in Pladis. Production at Tollcross ended in 2022. Paul Sweeney, then a Glasgow MSP, wrote that this closed "205 years of biscuit-making in Glasgow", counting from James Lang's bakery.

William Crawford & Sons, Leith

established Wikipedia and the industrial-history site Let's Look Again agree on the outline. A bakery making ship's biscuits opened in 1813 at 31 The Shore, Leith, in a public house. Robert Mathie took it over in 1817 and employed five men by 1851. In 1856 William Crawford (1818–89) bought it. He opened a shop on Leith Street in 1861 and moved it to 2 Princes Street in 1866. By about 1880 wheatmeal biscuits, close to digestives, had replaced ship's biscuit as the main product. A purpose-built factory with its own railway siding opened on Elbe Street in 1879, and the firm traded as William Crawford & Sons from 1880.

established Crawford's became a British firm rather than a Leith one. In 1897 two Crawford brothers, sent to start an Australian subsidiary, instead set up the Fairfield Works on Binns Road, Liverpool. Let's Look Again reports that by 1939 Crawford's was the fourth-largest biscuit maker in Britain, with 14 per cent of the market by volume, and that in 1962 it employed about 3,000 people in Liverpool and 1,000 in Leith. Shortbread, cream crackers, digestives, ginger nuts and, later, custard creams were among its lines.

shared The end of the independent firm is dated differently. Wikipedia gives United Biscuits' purchase as 1960, for £6 million; Let's Look Again gives 1962 and £6.25 million. Let's Look Again says the Leith factory closed in 1970 with the loss of 703 jobs, while Wikipedia describes the demolition of the Elbe Street works in the 1990s with about 200 jobs lost. The two may refer to different stages or buildings. Foreman gives 1962 for the United Biscuits purchase.

shared The firm's own story pushed its origins back. Crawford's advertised itself as the "Oldest of Biscuit Manufacturers", and Foreman, following company material, says William Crawford opened his Leith bakery in 1813. The records above show that the 1813 bakery passed to Crawford only in 1856. Foreman adds that Crawford's made a thinner shortbread at Liverpool for English buyers, introduced assorted shortbread in round tins in 1910–11 and pioneered Butter Puffs.

The People's Food (1938)

shared Collingham describes The People's Food (1938) as a survey of about 5,000 households in six British cities conducted by the biscuit manufacturers William Crawford, and Wikipedia's history of Crawford's calls it the first British national biscuit survey. A contemporary review in The Spectator names the authors as Sir William Crawford, described as an advertising practitioner, and Herbert Broadley, with fieldwork by Sales Research Services and the research department of Crawford's firm. Sir William Crawford ran the London advertising agency that bore his name. This card has found no evidence that he was connected with the Leith biscuit family, and the survey should not be presented as a biscuit-company study without that evidence.

established Whoever made it, the survey is a useful snapshot. Collingham reports that it found biscuits eaten at afternoon tea in about 10 to 15 per cent of well-to-do households, a new mid-morning tea-and-biscuit break among the better-off, and skilled working families spending around 1s. 8d. a week on biscuits. The Spectator reviewer warned that the income and nutrition estimates rested on thin evidence.

Gray Dunn and the Glasgow wafer

established Urban Realm's history of the Kinning Park factory records that Gray Dunn began in 1853, when John Gray, a Quaker, went into partnership with Peter Dunn, a flour miller, to make biscuits, bread and cakes. Gray died of cholera within a year and his brother William took over. The firm moved from Morrison Street to a bakehouse on Stanley Street, Kinning Park, in 1862, rebuilt after a fire in 1875. The works was extended in 1893 and again in 1934 and 1958. At its peak it employed about 1,200 people.

established Gray Dunn launched the Blue Riband, a milk-chocolate wafer, in 1936, and later made Breakaway, chocolate digestives, Hampden Caramel Wafers and chocolate gingers. Rowntree's took a stake in 1924, and the firm passed with Rowntree Mackintosh to Nestlé in 1988.

shared Accounts of the end differ. Urban Realm says Hill Biscuits bought Gray Dunn in 1992 and the managers bought it in 1997; STV says Nestlé owned it until the 1997 buyout; Wikipedia's Blue Riband article says Nestlé moved Blue Riband production from Glasgow to Newcastle in 1994. All agree that the firm, by then making supermarket own-brand biscuits, went into receivership in January 2001. The building was demolished between 2013 and 2017.

Macdonald's and the Penguin

established William Macdonald opened a biscuit business in Glasgow in 1928 and launched the Penguin in 1932. Collingham places it among the interwar chocolate biscuits: Jacob's Club (1919), McVitie's chocolate digestive (1925) and Rowntree's Kit Kat (1935). The firm later worked from the Glengarry Bakery at Hillington, and Grace's Guide lists Munch Mallow, Yo-Yo and Bandit among its biscuits. United Biscuits bought it in 1965. GlasgowWorld reports that Hillington closed in 1967 and that production moved to Tollcross, which was doubled in size. See the separate Penguin card.

established Foreman fills in Macdonald's career. He was a biscuit salesman who set up as a food commission agent in 1925, imported cream wafers from Antwerp, and began coating other makers' biscuits in chocolate in a former ordnance factory at Cardonald before becoming a manufacturer in 1928, at 53. He allowed no fat but butter. After the Second World War the firm made only the Glengarry and the Penguin until Munchmallow in 1950, followed by Yoyo, Bandit and Taxi. Foreman dates the United Biscuits takeover to 1964; the press report cited by Grace's Guide is from January 1965.

Duncan's of Edinburgh and Rowntree in Scotland

established Rowntree of York, which took a stake in Gray Dunn in 1924, also owned Edinburgh's best-known chocolate maker. Duncan's was a confectioner rather than a biscuit firm, but it belongs to the same story of Scottish family firms absorbed by larger groups. Mary Duncan and her eldest son William started a cake business in Dundee in 1861 and moved in 1884 to 205 High Street, Edinburgh, where they made boiled sweets and then chocolate. The firm moved to Beaverhall Road in the 1890s; Foreman says 1895, Wikipedia 1896. Rowntree acquired it in 1927 and kept the Duncan name, and the Hazelnut Bar became its best-known product, advertised with the slogan "Duncan, the Scots word for chocolate". From the late 1960s, Foreman says, the factory made Rowntree lines such as Walnut Whips. Rowntree closed it in 1987; a management buyout reopened it, and in 1991 Jeremy Salvesen bought the business and moved it to Bellshill. Duncans of Scotland went into liquidation in February 2003.

Tunnock's, Walkers, Paterson's and Nairn's

established The Scottish firms that survive are the ones that stayed small for longest. Thomas Tunnock bought a bakery in Uddingston for £80 in 1890. His son Archie created the Caramel Wafer in 1952, and his grandson Boyd the Teacake in 1956. The company says it had about 600 staff in 2020; Wikipedia gives 550.

established Joseph Walker took over a village bakery at Torphins in 1898, aged 21, with a £50 loan, and moved to Aberlour in 1921, according to the company. Walkers now employs well over 1,000 people and reported turnover of £184 million in 2023, according to Wikipedia. It is still family-owned.

established Paterson's began in 1895 as a husband-and-wife bakery in Rutherglen selling home-baked oatcakes. It now bakes in Livingston and joined Burton's Biscuits in 2019. Nairn's was founded by John and Sarah Nairn in Strathaven in 1896, now bakes in Edinburgh and describes itself as the largest oatcake producer in the UK. Both claims of market leadership are the companies' own.

established Collingham adds a forgotten Glasgow maker. Thomas Lipton's grocery chain set up its own biscuit factory in Glasgow and in 1896 advertised biscuits in small, cheap packets "at price hitherto unknown". It was an early attempt to sell factory biscuits to working-class shoppers.

Work in the biscuit factories

established Biscuit factories needed a few skilled bakers and engineers and a great many unskilled hands. Collingham shows that most were young women and girls, who iced, sorted and packed biscuits for less than half men's wages and usually left on marriage. From the early twentieth century piece rates increasingly replaced weekly wages. Her detailed evidence comes from Huntley & Palmers in Reading, Carr's in Carlisle and Jacob's in Dublin, where workers were searched for stolen biscuits and boys were dismissed at 19 to avoid paying men's wages. The Scottish factories have no study of comparable depth.

established Scottish memories fit the same pattern. Betty Wallace, who worked at Crawford's on Elbe Street in the late 1940s and 1950s, recalled for the Edinburgh history site EdinPhoto that she and the other women were on piece work, and that they were known as "Crawfords' white mice", after their white overalls. Wallace also remembered workers slipping small notes into tins of biscuits sent to servicemen. Another contributor, Doreen Boyle, whose mother left Crawford's in 1941, recalled a tally practice by which a count below 99 boxes was recorded as 199, earning the women a few extra pennies.

established Broken biscuits were a perk and a draw. Collingham reports that in Liverpool, on the days Crawford's workers received their bags of broken biscuits, poor children waited on the corner of Binns Road begging for them. Automation from the 1950s removed most hand work; by the 1970s, Collingham writes, the singing packing rooms had given way to machines.

What Scots ate

established For most of the nineteenth century factory biscuits were a middle-class food. Collingham's sample budget for an English factory baker on 18 shillings a week leaves nothing for fancy biscuits, and she estimates that low wages kept them beyond about two thirds of the British population before 1914. In Scottish homes the common biscuit was plain. Amy Fraser, recalling a late-Victorian Scottish childhood, remembered an Abernethy biscuit and a mug of milk at bedtime as almost the only biscuit the family knew, kept in a large square tin.

established Wartime changed this. The Glasgow diarist Pam Ashford, a shipping-firm secretary, ended her lunches with coffee and fancy biscuits and ate biscuits and cheese for supper. In November 1940 she found shops stripped of all but plain biscuits and paid a shilling a pound for chocolate ones, twice the pre-war price. Biscuits went on points rationing in August 1942; plain biscuits came off in March 1949 and sweet ones in May 1950. By 1945 a Mass Observation survey found people of all classes eating biscuits at almost any time of day. After the war sweet biscuits replaced cake in children's lunchboxes, the market in which Penguins, Caramel Wafers and Teacakes flourished.

• The Leith firm that became Crawford's began in 1813 in a public house on The Shore, making ship's biscuits.
• Macfarlane Lang's first bakery stood next to Glasgow's Saracen Head Inn, where the mail coaches left.
• In 1851 an Irish biscuit maker set out to beat imports "from Carlisle and Edinburgh".
• Crawford's women called themselves "Crawfords' white mice"; at Jacob's in Dublin the girls were "Jacob's mice".
• Before the war McVitie's Harlesden factory made 387 kinds of biscuit.
• In north-east Scotland a "biscuit" could mean a soft barley-meal scone.
• Glaswegians called Macfarlane Lang's bread "Lang's Breid" long after the Langs had gone.
• Until 1965, according to Carol Foreman, McVitie's factories in Edinburgh, London and Manchester could use different recipes for the same biscuit.

• Myth: Crawford's was founded in 1813. The firm advertised itself as the "Oldest of Biscuit Manufacturers", but the Leith bakery of 1813 passed to William Crawford only in 1856.
• Myth: The People's Food (1938) was a survey by the Leith biscuit makers. It is often credited to them, but its author, Sir William Crawford, was an advertising man, and no link to the biscuit family has been found.
• Myth: Hector Laing was Alexander Grant's son-in-law. Some accounts say so, but he was Grant's grandson.
• Disputed: when McVitie's opened at Harlesden. Sources say 1901, 1902 or 1910.
• Disputed: when United Biscuits bought Crawford's, and when Crawford's left Leith. The purchase is dated 1960 or 1962, and the Leith closure 1970 or the 1990s. The two dates may refer to different stages or buildings.
• Disputed: Hector Laing's title in the 1950s. One account calls him chairman of McVitie & Price when he automated Harlesden in 1954, but the other sources opened do not confirm that title.
• Disputed: company claims. Macfarlane Lang's boast that Queen Victoria always had a tin of its Parmena biscuits is the company's own, and so are the market-leader claims of Paterson's and Nairn's.
• Disputed: how far English and Irish factory conditions applied in Scotland. The detailed evidence on pay and searches comes from Reading, Carlisle and Dublin; the Scottish factories have no study of comparable depth.