By Cold, Hard Football Facts publisher Kerry J. Byrne
Arthur Guinness, an 18th century Irish Protestant who ran a small brewery in Dublin, spawned one of the world’s most recognizable brand names.
The name Guinness today appears on beers brewed in 50 different countries and sold in 100 more. From the pubs of North America to the red-light districs of Asia, chances are you can find a pint of beer that bears the name Guinness.
The name Guinness appears on something else rather remarkable: the best-selling copyrighted book in history. About 100 million copies of Guinness World Records (previously the Guinness Book of World Records) have been sold since 1955, when it was created at the behest of a senior Guinness brewery executive.
You’d have to look long and hard, in other words, to find someone who hasn’t heard of the beer or the book that bears the imprint of Arthur Guinness.
Yet Arthur Guinness himself (pictured here in the only known image of the man) remains something of a mystery – shrouded in myth and folklore and misinformation.
I know he’s a mystery. I've been tracing the roads Arthur Guinness criss-crossed during his life, hoping to learn more about a man who's at once ubiquitous and anonymous.
HUMBLE ROOTS
Dublin is the physical and spiritual home of the Guinness empire. It says something about the global reach of the Guinness brand that its Dublin brewery is the single most popular tourist attraction in Ireland – a country that attracts more than its fair share of visitors.
It was here, on Dec. 31, 1759, that Arthur Guinness obtained a famous 9,000-year lease for a small plot of land in the St. James’s Gate neighborhood, a section of Dublin that gets its name from an ancient toll gate at the western edge of the city.
His purchase, according to the original lease, included a home for his family, a fish pond, gardens, a stable for horses, and a rundown old brewery that had been out of operation for about 10 years. The entire estate measured less than 40,000 square feet, or about one acre.
Today, the St. James’s Gate brewery sprawls across dozens of acres on the south bank of the River Liffey. It features a gym for employees, a theater, scores of buildings in various states of repair and use, and a state-of-the-art brewhouse with enough computers and wall-sized control grids to run a nuclear power plant.
The Dublin brewery provides, among other things, all the Guinness Draught Stout for Ireland and the “Diaspora” markets: England, Australia, Canada, and the United States. It also makes Guinness “essence” – a viscous, black malt extract – and ships it to Guinness breweries around the globe which then turn it into Guinness Foreign Extra Stout. The Anglo world may know little about FES, as it's often called, but it's a huge market. Guinness FES is the national beer of Nigeria, for example, and the populous African nation is poised to surpass Ireland as Guinness’s No. 2 market after Great Britain.
The St. James’s Gate brewery is an industrial behemoth, but has its more romantic recesses, though tourists never see them: In a vast kegging room, I once joined brewers as they did their final quality control check, pouring from a tap in perfect two-part form the freshest pint of draught Guinness one will ever taste. A brick hop storage warehouse, built in the 19th century, is kept naturally cool by a hollow floor built over water. Next to this warehouse are giant roasting drums that turn golden barley into the black, acrid grains that give Guinness its famous color and distinct, toasted flavor.
(Before recently enacted industrial emissions standards, an east-moving wind would carry the dank, tactile aroma of roasting barley all across Dublin. The city smelled like beer, in other words, until the EU messed it all up.)
The St. James’s Gate brewery also boasts a solemn archive that is a repository of all things Guinness: The original of the only known portrait of Arthur Guinness is kept here. So is his original 9,000-year lease; more than 200 years of brewers’ recipes and notes; Guinness family biographies; and employee records. Frequent visitors to the archives include Irish-Americans seeking information about family members who once worked here. Guinness’s past is an important part of the company’s identity. The company employs a staff of archivists in Scotland and here in Dublin to chronicle its history.
What little the archive contains about Arthur Guinness himself comes mostly from mundane civic records. He was accepted into a trade group of Dublin brewers in July 1759 (six months before he purchased the brewery); he was married in 1761 to Olivia Whitmore, a cousin of Irish parliamentarian and nationalist Henry Grattan; he became brewer to Dublin Castle, the local seat of British government, in 1784; and brewed his last ale in 1799, so that he might concentrate on making a dark, tasty kind of beer called porter that was the foundation of his growing reputation.
Guinness, the name, is synonymous with stout. But one learns at the Guinness archives that Arthur Guinness himself never brewed a beer called stout. It was only after his death that his porter evolved into the stout now synonymous with his name. And while beer-lover’s folklore would have you believe the Guinness stout you drink today has never changed, the truth is that the beer has constantly evolved. Even the way it’s served has changed: the “traditional” two-part pour of draft stout most people associate with the beer today is a post-World War II creation. Before that, the beer was almost always served from a bottle.
So while you can learn a lot about Guinness in its archives, what’s notable is the information it does not contain. Namely, there is little to nothing in Arthur Guinness’s own words. No personal diary. No collection of correspondence. No clue as to why Guinness left the rural horse country of Kildare to try his fortune in Dublin.
Where, Guinness devotees might inquire, did Arthur Guinness learn to brew beer? Nobody seems to know for sure.
In 1928, a descendant named Herbert Seymour Guinness compiled a lengthy set of notes for a guidebook to the Dublin brewery that’s kept in its archives. “No evidence is forthcoming,” he wrote, “to indicate how or where Arthur acquired a knowledge of brewing.”
If I wanted to learn more about Arthur Guinness, I’d have to look elsewhere. So, with a roadmap of Ireland and a rented, five-speed diesel Ford compact, I set out to trace Arthur Guinness’s life – and hopefully learn more about this world-famous mystery of a man.
A LOCAL MAN
It is quite possible that Arthur Guinness never traveled farther in his life than one does during the 15-mile drive from St. James’s Gate to Celbridge, a small town in County Kildare west of Dublin.
Among the many things not known about Arthur Guinness are his place and date of birth. Celbridge may be the place. He certainly spent much of his life here. Arthur’s father, Richard Guinness, was a trusted servant of the
Reverend Arthur Price, the Archbishop of Cashel, who lived and worked here in Celbridge. According to at least one court record, Arthur was also a “servant” of Dr. Price as early as 1742, when he was 17 or 18 years old.
Some reports say that the bishop was also Arthur’s godfather, so Guinness was born with some connections to the Protestant power structure of 18th century Ireland. It also might help explain how Guinness later rose to become the brewer for Dublin Castle.
Oakley Park in Celbridge was once Rev. Price’s residence. Efforts to find more about Guinness here fell short: Today, it is a home for the mentally handicapped. But a woman at the reception desk said that Arthur Guinness had indeed lived here. She also said I could find more information across the street at the abbey.
Celbridge Abbey (pictured above) is a squat, sturdy stone building that looks like it’s about to be swallowed by the trees, shrubs and vines that surround it. Visitors can amble through the 300-year-old building and around a sprawling, verdant estate that borders a lazy stretch of the Liffey. Nature trails cut through the woods and through well-kept flower gardens. Ancient stone foot bridges cross a narrow, bubbling canal that parallels the river (pictured below). Did Arthur Guinness walk these paths and cross these bridges?
Nobody seemed to know.
The abbey offered a pamphlet with information about some of its most notable characters. Jonathon Swift, the
author of
Gulliver’s Travels, was a frequent visitor – the abbey was the home of a love interest. Grattan, the Irish patriot, was also a frequent visitor and his mother was born in the abbey. The pamphlet did not include a single word about Arthur Guinness.
The town had a historical society and I hoped to visit. A woman who sat on a bench by the Liffey, on the grounds of the abbey, knew a woman he worked there and gave me the number.
“Arthur Guinness was born in Celbridge. I know the date. I wrote a paper about it,” said Maura Gallagher, the woman from the historical society.
Her claim to know the birth date of Arthur Guinness captured the attention of the archivists at St. James’s Gate. But it proved a dead end. Gallagher would write several months later. She offered no birth date. But she did offer some interesting information:
“The Guinness's were the ale makers for (Rev.) Arthur Price, (who) gave Richard Guinness £100 to build an ale house 150 yards from his own home, Oakley Park House, and it was in this house that Arthur Guinness was born.”
Gallagher attributes this information to Patrick Guinness, a descendant of Arthur Guinness who is researching a book about the family. If it is true, then one mystery is solved: Arthur Guinness was born in Celbridge, in a brewery no less. Arthur Guinness, one might surmise, was born to make beer.
BEGINNINGS OF A BREWER
The village of Leixlip is just four miles from Celbridge – an easy journey even for an 18th century Kildare horseman like Arthur Guinness.
It is quite possible that Guinness learned to brew beer in Celbridge. It's fairly certain that his career as a professional brewer began here in Leixlip.
One of the few insights into Guinness, the man, in his own words, comes from an appearance he made before the Irish House of Commons in 1773. During a discussion of Irish trade restrictions, he told legislators that he been a brewer “for 17 or 18 years.”
It is known from one of the more tangible pieces of Guinness-related evidence – another lease – that 17 years before his appearance in front of the House of Commons, in 1756, Guinness and his brother, Richard, had purchased a brewery here in Leixlip from a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania merchant named George Bryan. The brewery cost £256. The purchase was aided by a £100 inheritance Guinness had received from his godfather, the Rev. Price. And so was opened in Leixlip, around 1756, the first known brewery to carry the name Guinness.
While Celbridge, the apparent birthplace of Arthur Guinness, seems to have forgotten its most famous son, Leixlip has embraced his legacy. A road sign at the Leixlip border proclaims it the home of the original Guinness brewery. Leixlip Castle, the town’s most stately residence – walking distance to the village center – is still inhabited by Desmond Guinness, a descendant of Arthur. A local historian, Seamus Kelly, had written about the Guinness brewery in his book, “A Walking Tour of Leixlip.”
The building that housed the brewery still stands, but is now a private home. It’s on the main street through the village, the River Liffey gurgling through its backyard. The location so close to the river was no surprise: A steady supply of fresh water was necessary for any brewery in the 18th century, so breweries were typically built next to rivers. The house today is a large, unadorned rectangular yellow house, covered in ivy, set back 100 feet from the street, protected by a stucco wall. A round green sign, virtually invisible to most passers-by, declares its significance.
“HERE ARTHUR GUINNESS AND RICHARD GUINNESS LEASED A BREWERY IN 1756.”
I knocked on the door of the home, hoping to find something tangible: a wooden bellows used by Arthur Guinness to stoke the brew kettle’s fire, half-buried in the backyard; a recipe for Guinness ale found stuck behind a wall; faded, handwritten musings from the mind of Arthur Guinness, collecting dust in the attic.
A black-haired young man, wearing an Oxford shirt and carrying a textbook, answered the knock at the door. "Yes, this was the Guinness brewery. No, there isn’t anything to see here. Sorry, it is just a home.”
SPREADING THE WORD
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries Guinness, the name, began to make its maiden voyages overseas, as Guinness porter arrived in England and then the West Indies. The seeds of Guinness, the empire, were being planted. But Guinness, the man, like most of his contemporaries, remained firmly rooted in a small circle of existence that included Dublin and a few villages in County Kildare.
One of these villages was Oughterard. It was an important religious center in pre-Christian Ireland and an ancestral home of Arthur Guinness’s mother. Today, it’s an unmarked rural outpost off the N7, the main southwestern motorway in and out of Dublin, unworthy of mention on most modern roadmaps.
“There’s nothing in Oughterard, you know,” said a waitress at the Dew Drop Inn in Kill, the closest village of any merit, where I stopped for a pint of, what else, Guinness. “There’s just an old cemetery.”
The cemetery sits on a lonely, windswept hilltop overlooking the Kildare countryside. A black, wrought-iron gate with “Oughterard Cemetery” forged into the top and painted in gold marked an entrance unceremoniously accented by the pastel-colored laundry of an adjacent house snapping in the breeze. There is room for two cars to park in front of the gate, and enough room for one adult to squeeze between the locked gate and the adjoining stone wall. Sheep grazed on the side of a dirt road beyond the gate that leads to the burial ground. There are signs, too, of human life: spent matches on the stone wall surrounding the cemetery; freshly cut grass inside the wall.
The cemetery is small, maybe 100 feet square, and dominated in the center by a crumbling stone vault and a tower of stairs that lead to the vault's roof.
It does not take long to find the gravestone. It says that Arthur Guinness died on January 23, 1803, at age 78, indicating that he was born sometime in 1724 or very early in 1725. It’s an interesting discovery for any Guinness biographer. In 1991, the Guinness company, determined to end the mystery of its namesake's birthdate, declared that Arthur Guinness was born on September 28, 1725. But if the age and date etched into the gravestone are correct, then the “official” date of Guinness’s birth – which the company admits is a guess – is conclusively wrong. (You figure such a large company would have picked a birth date that at least had a mathematical chance of being correct.)
The gravestone is unimpressive, even disappointing: three feet tall, 18 inches wide, the smallest of the dozen or so markers within the confines of the vault. It’s humbly situated, not in the sheltered inner sanctum of the vault, but stuck into the side of an unprotected outer wall.
Perhaps it’s an act of desperation to visit the grave of a man who died 200 years ago in a quest to learn more about him. But perhaps the modest condition of his final resting place offers something about Arthur Guinness that the future success of his company has made easy to forget. Arthur Guinness was not a titan of industry, dutifully recording his thoughts and deeds like an Industrial Age Jack Welch to one day share with the masses. It’s unreasonable to have expected him to be so cognizant of a place in history. In fact, he’d probably be shocked to see the massive, global reach of his name today.
After all, he lived his entire life within a few miles of this windy Kildare hilltop where his body now rests. His goals and dreams might have been suitably parochial and modest: move to the big city, open a little brewery, make a decent living for his family.
Arthur Guinness, after all, was not a name, an icon, a myth or a brand. It seems Arthur Guinness was just a simple man from a small town with a knack for making good beer.
