On 30th June 1878 there was an announcement in the Inverness Courier of the partnership created between Roderick Macrae of Beauly and William Dick of Redcastle. Together, the two gentlemen promised to provide horses and horse-drawn vehicles for hire to all Invernessians and visitors and to serve them to the best of their ability.
Today, Macrae & Dick is still a major provider of vehicles throughout Scotland and the high quality service promised by the company in the 19th century remains as important now as it was then.
Roderick Macrae was born in 1825 in Strathconon to parents whose forebears originated from Kintail. He was named after his uncle who had been a Captain in the British Army and had taken part in the American War of Independence.
Roderick attended school in Strathconon and learned English but when he was aged 12 his family was cleared off the land by the landowner to make way for a deer forest. Shortly afterwards he moved into the service of Mrs Matheson of Hedgefield (the mother of the distinguished Highland MP, Sir Alexander Matheson).
Subsequently Mr Macrae and Mr Dick announced on June 1878 that they had secured two stables and yards in Inverness and that they looked forward to "executing orders for posting and hiring in a style hitherto unknown in Inverness".
The partnership agreement was not actually signed until a year after its first announcement, such were the business ethics of the days when a "gentleman's agreement" was made by gentlemen!
Each Partner invested £1500 to create the partnership capital of £3000 and Mr Dick, who worked full-time as manager, received a wage of £50 per annum.
The profits, after wages and costs had been deducted, were shared equally between the two.
The business of Macrae & Dick expanded year after year, and in course of time, a unique clientele was built up amongst the landed proprietors in the North of Scotland and the shooting, fishing and stalking tenants who rented properties during the sporting season. By this time the railways had arrived in the North of Scotland which had additionally been made fashionable as a holiday retreat by the frequent visits there of Queen Victoria to Balmoral Castle.
Horses and carriages and other horse-drawn vehicles were hired out and on occasions were retained by overseas visitors for the duration of their stay in the UK. As many as 200 hundred horses were kept for this and other purposes, such as local cab hiring, transport of passengers and their luggage to and from the Caledonian Canal steamers and the running of coaches to places of historic and scenic interest in the neighborhood during the tourist season.
One example of the last was the "May Queen", a four-in-hand coach, which conveyed passengers from Station Square in Inverness to Culloden Battlefield.
Accommodation to house their expanding activities was becoming a problem for the partner but fortunately the old Inverness Royal Academy building on Academy Street with its extensive playground to the rear became available when the school moved to its new premises on Midmills Road. Mr Macrae and Mr Dick paid £7500 for the building and its one-and-a-half acres of grounds. They promptly sold the school building for £4500 and spent this sum erecting the massive building which stood on the former playground site until 1984 and which was the centre of the company's operations until the move to Longman Estate in 1983.
On the advent of the motor car, it was a natural development for the business to become interested in this new mode of transport, not only in the business of hiring cars but also in their sale and servicing. This aspect of the business increased steadily over the years as the horse hiring and posting element declined. Information on the make of cars for which the firm held agencies is scant but an advertisement in 1910 gives Albion, Renault and Arrol Johnston, and another in 1916 adds to this Sunbeam, Rover, Argyll, Overland, Ford and Studebaker.
Other advertisements offer "repairs to any make of car by expert motor engineers, experienced and careful chauffeurs, shooting boxes and country mansions specially catered for, mechanics dispatched to any address on receipt of wire,etc."
Macrae & Dick was incorporated, i.e. became a limited company, in 1922. Further expansion followed not only in the company's normal activities as motor agents, engineers and hiring contractors but also in ancillary fields of road haulage, road passenger and air passenger services. The air travel connection arose in 1932 as the result of the formation, in association with Captain E.E. Freeson, of Highland Airways Ltd. Highland Airways provided an air passenger service from Inverness to Wick and Orkney and, in 1934 was awarded the contract by the Royal Mail - thereby becoming the first air service operator to be granted the Royal Mail Pennant for the carriage of mail by air.. That company was sold in 1939 to British Airways. Today the company's operations are concentrated exclusively within the retail motor industry and related fields and Macrae and Dick holds the franchises for a number of quality manufacturers at various locations throughout Scotland.
