The Search for God and Guinness

by Stephen Mansfield

  Arthur would remain in Dr. Price’s employ until the archbishop’s death in 1752. In his first decade of manhood, from his eighteenth year until he was twenty-eight, Arthur improved himself through labor but he also knew difficulty and pain. From 1739 through 1741, Ireland endured a period of the most severe weather on record. The cold was hardly to be believed. “Birds froze in mid-flight, crops failed, food shortages occurred and diseases followed,”

  Patrick Guinness has written. Young Arthur would have seen this hardship, would likely have helped Dr. Price tend the needy, and would have learned firsthand what widespread suffering means. Then, in August of 1742, Arthur’s mother, Elizabeth, died. She was only forty-four and she left behind six children and a husband who needed her dearly both as lover and friend but also as practical worker in the home. Arthur, too, only eighteen, would have suffered horribly from her loss.

  This decade in Arthur’s life would also have been filled with projects and plans. Dr. Price was ever coming up with new designs for the estate, with new ideas for the crops or experimental ways to increase the livestock. During this time, he even decided to take the roof off the ancient hilltop cathedral at Cashel, his ecclesiastical seat, thus creating one of the great ruins in Ireland. He was never able to rebuild, though he did construct a smaller cathedral nearby. The ruin remains to this day and offers visitors a chance to snicker at the often quixotic Dr. Price.

  Still, whatever his faults, it was the generosity of Archbishop Price that made much possible for the Guinness family. When he died in 1752, Dr. Price left £100 to his faithful agent, Richard. This was a grand sum, equal to nearly four years’ salary. But then, in an astonishing show of affection and largess, Arthur’s godfather left him the same amount—£100. For a twenty-eight-year-old secretary and assistant manager, it was a gift that transformed private hopes into possibilities.

  Now events would speed up in Arthur Guinness’s life. Slightly more than three months after the archbishop’s death, Richard Guinness married again, this time to an Elizabeth Clare, widow of Benjamin Clare, a Guinness family friend. Elizabeth ran the White Hart Inn at Celbridge and this soon became Richard’s responsibility too. Arthur followed, and from 1752 to 1755, he honed his brewing skills by making the beer sold at the inn. He was nearing thirty, though, and had yet to make his mark. While he served his father and stepmother well, he likely harbored dreams of striking out on his own.

  He took the first dramatic step toward his ambitions when in 1755 he purchased a small brewery in Leixlip, a village on the road from Celbridge to Dublin. He would only run this brewery for a few years before leaving it with his brother, Richard, and moving to Dublin to make his fortune, but we should not rush too quickly past this period in his life. Given who he would become, we can look back on these years and realize they were the times of perfecting and honing that a great man always requires. During this season, Arthur was going beyond the basics of brewing to a mastery of its mysteries.

  Brewing was still unscientific at this time. Thermometers were only beginning to be used and yeast was barely even imagined by most brewers. Instead, there was much sniffing, much tasting of the ingredients, much going with feel as much as with thought. There were well-documented processes, yes, but a great beer could not be made according to charts and instruments alone. The technology simply wasn’t sophisticated enough. So a young brewer like Arthur would have needed time to sharpen his senses, to watch older masters and to investigate brewing by trial and error. He needed the experience of brewing at the White Hart Inn and then at his small brewery in Leixlip. Still, he knew he was destined for more and so in 1759 he made his move to Dublin, a move that determined everything that came after in his life.

  It is obvious, given the step he was about to take, Arthur had chosen brewing as his life’s work. He may have felt something of a moral mandate for this. He was stepping onto a broader stage of brewing just as the Gin Craze was decimating much of his world. In 1689, Parliament had forbidden the importation of liquor. Unwilling to do without, the people of Ireland and England had begun making their own. By the early 1700s, one in every sixth house in London was a gin shop, some with signs proclaiming, Drunk for one penny, dead drunk for two pence, clean straw for nothing. For the lower classes, gin solved everything. It was fed to infants when they cried, given to children to make them sleep, and consumed to the point of intoxication by most every adult. It poisoned men’s souls, making them lazy, mean, and wild. One bishop complained, “Gin has made the English people what they never were before—cruel and inhuman.” So it was with the Irish, as well.

  Two prints by William Hogarth tell the tale. In his famous depictions of Gin Lane and Beer Street, it is the world dominated by gin that has fallen into disgrace. In Gin Lane, murder, suicide, hunger, and depravity prevail. Only the pawnbroker’s house is in good repair. The distillery is owned by a Mr. Kilman, Hogarth’s sly reference to what gin was doing to the people of his time. In Beer Street, though, all is orderly and clean and only the pawnbroker’s house is in disrepair. Men drink beer while fishwives learn ballads, a basket of books near at hand. Clearly, this was the understanding at the time: gin destroys lives while beer is healthy and safe, enhancing rather than eroding good society. Arthur Guinness would have absorbed this lesson—from Hogarth, from Archbishop Price, and from his own moral evaluation of the world around him—and would have come to see his chosen profession as a service to his fellow man.

  In 1759, Arthur made his move to Dublin. We should locate this moment clearly in time. It is the year that George Washington marries Martha Custis. The British Museum opens, the first life insurance company is begun in America, and British general James Wolfe begins the siege of Quebec and then loses his life on the Plains of Abraham. Composer George Frideric Handel dies this year but William Wilberforce the abolitionist is born, as is Scottish poet Robert Burns. Thomas Jefferson is a precocious sixteen-year-old, Voltaire’s Candide is all the rage in Paris, and throughout Europe newspapers report that tea cups now usually have handles, a departure from the handleless oriental design.

  It is a common error for writers of the Guinness story to draw a direct line between Dr. Price’s gift of £100 and the purchase of the Guinness brewery at St. James’s Gate in Dublin, as though the one made the other possible. This is far from the case, as we have seen. By the time Arthur moved to Dublin he was thirty-four. He had worked as Dr. Price’s secretary and assistant for eight years. He had brewed beer in his stepmother’s inn for three years. Then he had run a brewery of his own in Leixlip for nearly five years. The important matter is not that he used the £100 pounds to buy his brewery, because he did not, but rather that he made that gift even more valuable by investing it and adding to it his own skill and mastery of his trade. By 1759, then, he was able to do something exceptional, something that other men, perhaps even with the same resources, could not have managed to do.

  In medieval Dublin there was an old gate to the city through which people passed on their way to the south and west of Ireland, some on pilgrimages to the holy sites of Europe. Called St. James’s Gate because of the church and parish by that name nearby, it stood for nearly five centuries before crumbling to the ground. The name was retained for the location, though, largely because there had been a holy well on the site that was the centerpiece for an annual summer festival.

  In 1610, Barnaby Rich described the site in his New Description of Ireland and one passage from this work is almost eerie given what St. James’s Gate would one day be.

  “On the west part of Dublin they have St. James, his Well,” Rich wrote, “And his feast is celebrated the 25th of July, and upon that day, a great mart or fair is kept fast by the Well. The commodity that is there to be vended, is nothing else but ale, no other merchandise but only ale.”

  In 1759, there was a lapsed brewery on the site. (In fact, there had been a brewery there since 1670.) By the time Arthur Guinness walked the grounds to decide if he should buy it, the four-acre site included a br
ewhouse, a gristmill, two malt houses, and stables to accommodate a dozen horses. There was something else, too, something invisible that another man might have missed. There was the potential bound up in a city plan. For two years prior, work had been underway on Ireland’s Grand Canal. The intention was to link Dublin with the River Shannon and thus with Limerick. If this plan was a success, it would put the terminus of the canal at James’s Street in Dublin—nearly at Arthur Guinness’s front door, should he decide on the purchase. A canal would provide the transport that a thriving brewery required and Arthur—ambitious and now skilled in evaluating investments—knew what the project might mean for whoever brewed beer at St. James’s Gate. He decided it should be him.

  The Guinness brewery, as seen from across the River Liffey today

  On December 31, 1759, Arthur Guinness leased the property from the Rainsford family who owned it. The terms were £100 down and £45 a year, which was nothing exceptional. However, somehow Arthur talked the Rainsfords into giving him a lease for up to nine thousand years! It was one of the most unusual rental arrangements in history and it stands today as a symbol of Arthur’s exceptional business acumen. It could be that the bold, swirling signature Arthur used to seal the lease—the signature now used in Guinness advertising—was a form of celebration.

  He would certainly have been entitled. Thrilled with the deal he had made, Arthur went to work. He hired men, bought horses, ordered work crews to fix up the grounds and the buildings, and got his brewery brewing. It was, as most new ventures are, slow going at first. We can jump ahead in the story and mention that in 1779 Guinness became the official provider of beer to Dublin Castle, the headquarters of the British government in Ireland. This is a revealing statement of how much Arthur Guinness had risen in the world and how fine his beer had become. But this was twenty years later, after struggles and lean years and haunting doubts about whether the venture would survive. That it did and did gloriously should not blind us to the character required to make it all work, the long hours, and the fortitude of soul that a risky, expensive business launch demands.

  While he fashioned his new brewery to fit his dream, he also made a move that lifted him to new heights in Dublin society. On June 17, 1761, Arthur married Olivia Whitmore. For the young brewer, it was a brilliant decision, love and romance aside. First, she was half his age and known to be a radiant beauty. Second, she was wealthy. Her parents were gentry and her dowry was just over £1000, a huge sum for the day. Perhaps as important, she would bring to Arthur’s life connections and status in Dublin society that he might never have acquired on his own. Olivia was related to the leading families of the city: the Darleys and the LeTouches of banking fame and the Smyths, whose lineage included an archbishop and more than one lord mayor. It was the perfect match for a rising young businessman, measured purely by practical standards.

  Dublin Castle

  Arthur also brought significant weight to the marriage. He was obviously a man looked upon as having great potential or Olivia’s family would never have approved. Also, he had recently claimed the Magennis clan as his own, though historians often grumble that this was a self-aggrandizing choice without any historical merit. Still, the connection was so dear to Arthur and so valued by his new in-laws that they presented him at his wedding with a silver cup bearing the newlywed couple’s names along with the crest of the Magennises—a golden boar beneath the red hand, symbolic of the province of Ulster from which the Magennises arose.

  Two years after the wedding, Olivia gave birth to their first child, Elizabeth, and two years later, Hosea, their first son, was born. All together there would be ten children, four girls and six boys: Elizabeth, Hosea, Arthur, Edward, Olivia, Benjamin, Louisa, John Grattan, William Lunell, and Mary Anne. What this happy list of deeply loved children does not betray is there were actually twenty-one pregnancies but Olivia miscarried eleven times. She must have been a sturdy, courageous woman. Despite her losses, she kept having children until 1781, when she was in her late forties. Her last child was born when her oldest was already married.

  And so the dynasty began. Arthur now rose in Dublin society, joined clubs and organizations, and became a voice for brewing in political life. In time, he bought a Georgian mansion, called Beaumont House, in which he lived nearly until the day he died. He also became the warden of the Dublin Corporation of Brewers. He was, by every measure, a success. Before he died in 1803, he would see his ramshackle little brewery grow into the biggest business enterprise in Ireland.

  Yet what distinguishes the Arthur Guinness story is not just that he brewed good beer and sold great amounts of it. What distinguishes his story is that he understood his success as forming a kind of mandate, a kind of calling to a purpose of God beyond just himself and his family to the broader good he could do in the world. To understand this, though, we must understand the religious influences that shaped Arthur Guinness’s life.

  For thousands of years before St. Patrick introduced Christianity into Ireland, the Gaels—an ancient Celtic people—had lived their bold and pagan ways in that land.

  From the fifth century, these Gaels ruled the island politically until the twelfth century, the few episodes of Viking invasion aside. In 1172, King Henry II of England invaded Ireland and the English thus claimed all of Ireland for the next seven hundred years. In actuality, though, the English only ruled a few coastal cites and the Pale, the area immediately surrounding Dublin. In the sixteenth century, English control expanded until finally the old Gaelic social and political structures collapsed. This was also the time of the Protestant Ascendancy, the rise of a new English ruling class, following the separation of the English church from Rome by Henry VIII in 1534. What resulted was an Ireland ruled by a small minority of English Protestants. Catholics, though they constituted 90 percent of the population, owned less than 10 percent of the land and were barred from the Irish Parliament. We should remember here that had Arthur Guinness been Roman Catholic, he would never have been allowed to buy his brewery.

  The tensions and resentments that this situation produced were seldom quelled. An illustration comes to us from the journals of the evangelist George Whitefield, who tried to speak in Dublin two years before Arthur started his life there. Whitefield had received permission to speak on a green near the Dublin barracks and as he did he felt his message “go forth in power.” There was the usual opposition—a few stones or dirt clods thrown for effect while he spoke—but this was nothing new. Whitefield had learned to preach while people banged drums or drove cattle through his crowds. Once he spoke while a man urinated on him from a tree. He knew what it was to have his message opposed.

  In Dublin, though, the raging torrent against him was worse than any he had known. As he made his way from his pulpit, “vollies of hard stones came from all quarters, and every step I took a fresh stone struck, and made me reel backwards and forwards.” These missiles came from “hundreds and hundreds of papists,” he recalled. Soon he was “almost breathless, and all over a gore of blood . . . I received many blows and wounds; one was particularly large and near my temples . . . for a while I continued speechless, panting for and expecting every breath to be my last.” Finally, Whitefield was rescued by a Methodist preacher and tended by a local surgeon. We should remember that at the time Whitefield was a clergyman in the Church of England and one of the most famous men in the world, and yet he was nearly killed by an anti-Protestant crowd within easy view of British troops.

  By the time Arthur Guinness moved to Dublin, he was a loyal Protestant son of the Church of Ireland who had been well educated in religious matters on the estate of an influential archbishop. As he rose in Dublin society, he evidenced a deeply Christian and nonconformist conscience. He spoke out against anti-Catholic laws and he thought nothing of challenging the traditions of the ruling class when morality was involved. He once argued against the traditional feasting of a new alderman because such occasions most always resulted in drunkenness and carousing. He thought the cit
y fathers should set a moral example.

  Adding to the values he had absorbed from his upbringing, Arthur was also influenced by the great religious innovator, John Wesley. We know that Wesley preached at Arthur’s church while Arthur was in attendance. Wesley seemed to have been unimpressed with the experience. “Oh who has the courage to speak plain to these rich and honorable sinners!” Wesley intoned after speaking to the congregation at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Apparently, Wesley found the fashionable church filled with wealthy, calloused souls.

  Still, some members of the church were deeply stirred by Wesley’s message and his Methodist movement. Among them was William Smyth, who came from a wealthy Dublin family and whose uncle was the archbishop of Dublin. He was also Arthur’s relative, since Olivia Guinness was William’s wife’s cousin. Smyth helped to build Bethesda Chapel—“the great center of Irish evangelicalism”—and traveled with Wesley often, even introducing him to the rich and powerful of Dublin. Certainly, Arthur Guinness would have been among them and it is not assuming too much to believe that Arthur not only met Wesley on several occasions but often heard him speak. Indeed, Wesley’s journal repeatedly mentions meetings at which Arthur was almost certainly present.

  Oddly, though, the great preacher was again less than thrilled with what he saw. One mention of a meeting under Smyth’s direction is typical. “Mr. Smyth read prayers, and gave out the hymns,” Wesley wrote, “which were sung by fifteen or twenty fine singers; the rest of the congregation listening with much attention and as much devotion as they would have done to an opera. But is this Christian worship? Or ought it ever to be suffered in a Christian church?”