Cases of Cognac to Belfast
The Friend at Hand is more than just an Irish Whiskey shop in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter, it is also an emporium that houses a vast array of whiskeys and whiskey memorabilia; legacies of a bygone time which are definitely not for sale, providing instead a visible, authentic record of the many distilleries around the city in the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the items on display was the framed telegraph request pictured above. That evocative word - Cognac - near the top of the page caught my eye and, interest aroused, I noted the date: 8 August 1891. 1891 - This is a remarkably well preserved document but I wondered what on earth was an order for brandy doing as a display item in a whiskey store. I set about finding out. The telegraph as you can see was addressed to a company in Cognac. This lead me to an internet search but my initial queries on Bouhelleau or Bonhelleau and other variants returned zero results. The solution lay in that lovely...