James Watson and Company were among the largest wholesale whisky merchants in Scotland. Their premises occupied a substantial site on the corner of Trades Lane and Seagate in central Dundee, and in 1906 they employed roughly 300 people. The main building stood at 97 Seagate; the bonded warehouse, Customs Bond No. 4, sat next door at 99 Seagate, holding vast quantities of whisky maturing under government seal. Bonded warehouses were everywhere in industrial Scotland - the whisky industry's lifeblood depended on them - and they were enormously combustible. Everyone in the trade understood the risk. The buildings were designed and managed accordingly. On a normal evening, the precautions worked. The evening of 19 July 1906 was not normal.

An employee of Watson and Company was passing the building that evening when he noticed smoke coming from the roof. Within minutes, the building was ablaze. Then the vats began to ignite. A vat of maturing whisky does not burn quietly. The pressure of the heated vapour built until the wood gave way, and when each vat exploded it threw flaming alcohol into the air. Burning whisky rained down on Trades Lane and Seagate. It pooled in the gutters and ran downhill toward the harbour. The fire spread to neighbouring buildings. The premises of another whisky merchant on nearby Candle Lane were destroyed entirely. Dundee's own fire brigade was overwhelmed. Firefighters had to be summoned from Edinburgh - a journey of more than 60 miles by rail - to help fight what had become an inferno.

When the flames finally died down twelve hours after they started, the damage was estimated at £450,000 - an enormous sum for the time, equivalent to tens of millions today. The Watson workforce, several hundred strong, suddenly had no premises. Neighbouring businesses lay in ruins. That so few people were killed in a fire of this scale and unpredictability is partly luck, partly the timing - the workforce had largely gone home for the evening before the blaze took hold. But for the firefighters who fought it, and for the residents of the surrounding streets who watched flaming whisky run past their doorways, this was a night nobody who lived through it ever forgot. James Watson and Company rebuilt. New bonds, designed by architect David Baxter, were completed on the same site in 1907; they survive today as listed buildings. Whisky blending at Watson's Bond ceased only in 1981, and the bonds finally closed in 1987 - more than eighty years after the fire that nearly destroyed them.

The 1906 fire entered Dundee folklore almost immediately. Hand-coloured postcards depicting the blaze were printed and sold while the embers were still warm. For a generation of Dundonians, the night of the burning whisky was a touchstone story - the kind of event that anchors a memory in a way ordinary days never do. The bonded warehouse industry would carry on for decades, and Dundee would face other crises before the century was out. But the phrase "rivers of burning whisky" survived as a piece of local shorthand, a way of conjuring how vivid and surreal urban disaster can be when it arrives in a form nobody expected. Today the listed 1907 bonds still stand on Seagate, an architectural reminder of a night when one industry's entire reason for existing turned briefly into a weapon against the city that hosted it.