Gay Byrne was among the generations of inner-city Dubliners who benefited from having relatives employed by St James’s Gate Brewery. “People in our area who worked in Guinness’s always had a special status,” the late RTÉ broadcaster wrote in his autobiography The Time of My Life. During the Emergency, Byrne recalled, Guinness ships returning from Liverpool would give soft white loaves to his father while other Liberties residents chewed indigestible black bread.
According to Arthur Edward Guinness’s impeccably sober family history, however, many of his ancestors felt less than fully appreciated by their own country. Even though a large chunk of the company’s profits was spent on clearing slums, funding hospitals and developing public spaces such as St Stephen’s Green, their membership of the Protestant Ascendancy made them seem like remote figures.
“We Guinnesses have sometimes occupied a rather ambiguous position, not central to the establishment, but on the fringes,” the current Earl of Iveagh laments. “At times this lent itself to loneliness and misunderstanding.”
Quoting extensively from letters, documents and other archival material, Guinness’s 220-page narrative is a worthy exercise in putting human faces on a commercial phenomenon. He begins with his namesake Arthur Guinness, a dynamic entrepreneur from Kildare who in 1759 bought a 9,000-year lease on an abandoned site close to Dublin’s main water supply. His chronicle ends in 1927, after St James’s Gate had brewed up a global symbol of Irishness but well before Guinness’s merger to create the multinational Diageo. Along the way, every key member of this well-connected dynasty is respectfully profiled with copious details about their social, political and philanthropic activities.
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Netflix has just released House of Guinness, in which four siblings battle for control following the death of patriarch Benjamin Lee Guinness (Arthur’s grandson). Judging by this book, it appears that screenwriter Steven Knight (probably best known for Peaky Blinders) has taken a heavy dose of artistic licence.
A few colourful episodes do pop up, such as Daniel O’Connell supporters smashing Guinness casks with sledges and Benjamin’s son (yet another Arthur) being falsely accused of bigamy in the nationalist Freeman’s Journal. For the most part, however, it’s a stately procession of clever business decisions and noble charity work.
As the French novelist Henry de Montherlant warned, happiness writes white – and this solid, earnest tribute is distinctly lacking in the black stuff.
