During this time, Guinness also acquired a brewery in the United States. In 1934, the E. J. Burke firm, a Guinness distributor, opened Burke Brewery Inc. in New York within view of the Manhattan skyline. This venture was not the success that Park Royal was, though. The brewery opened during the darkest days of the Great Depression, amidst powerful competition and with national brand recognition still recovering from the complete market shutdown of Prohibition. To keep the firm from bankruptcy and to exploit the opportunity of an existing brewery in the exploding United States market, Guinness bought the facility in 1943, though production of stout had to await the end of World War II.
Yet it was World War II that confirmed just how essential to life Guinness had become for many a man in the United Kingdom. When Hitler’s army invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, England and France declared war against Germany. Millions of men marched into battle and Guinness determined to provide what support it could. It was helped by a shift in attitude toward beer on the part of the British government. During World War I, many officials had viewed beer as a hindrance to both soldiers and civilian laborers alike. By World War II, though—thanks in large part to Guinness advertising and the new plant at Park Royal, both of which made Guinness as much English as it was Irish—the government understood the value of Guinness in connecting men to their homeland and in buoying their spirits at war. Guinness was provided free of charge to hospitals, shipped to men at the front, and served at a discount to all men in uniform at home. The official attitude toward beer was so transformed that the British Army asked Guinness to set aside 5 percent of its production for the troops.
Guinness was happy to comply and in December of 1939, in the lull before the expected invasion of France, each man at the front was given a bottle of Guinness with his Christmas dinner. It had not been an easy request to fulfill. With so many Guinness staff at war, the plant required hundreds of additional workers to make sure each soldier got his bottle of brew by December 25. Patriots arose. Volunteers lined up outside the brewery gates, some of them retired Guinness employees and some veterans of World War I. The Red Cross sent workers, and competing breweries even sent skilled men to assure that the all-important order was filled. It was, and soldiers would remember the gift as a kindness before Dunkirk and the Blitz and the meat grinders of bloody battles to come.
During the war years, Guinness sales plummeted and Guinness workers suffered. The Park Royal plant was bombed more than once during the German blitz and in October 1940, the ice plant there was completely destroyed; four workers lost their lives. In time, the deaths reached even into the Guinness family itself. Rupert’s son, Arthur, had begun the war as a major in the Suffolk Yeomanry. His father’s hopes rested upon him: he was the heir apparent to the chairmanship of the family business and the Guinness in line to assume the title of Earl of Iveagh. Arthur certainly proved himself in uniform. He entered Europe behind the initial Allied advance on D-Day and by February of 1945 found himself embroiled in fierce fighting as part of the 218th Battery of the 55th Anti-Tank Regiment. He was killed on February 8 during the battle at Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He was thirty-two and his father grieved him until the end of his days.
Arthur was not the only Guinness to lose his life in the service of country. Rupert’s younger brother was Walter Guinness, who bore the title Baron Moyne. He was an experienced, engaging man, a confidant of many a powerful figure, including Prime Minister Churchill. He had served in the House of Commons and then later in the House of Lords. He had also fought in World War I—ironically in the same unit in which Arthur Guinness, his nephew, died during World War II—and he was Churchill’s minister of state in Egypt during the threatening time when Hitler’s Afrika Korps was but a few desert miles away. In this role, it was Walter’s misfortune to be a symbol of England’s restrictive policy on Jewish immigration to Palestine, which caused many an advocate for the State of Israel to regard him as an enemy. On November 6, 1944, while returning from the British Embassy in Cairo to his residence on Gezira Island, Walter Guinness—now Lord Moyne—was assassinated by members of the Palmach, a Jewish guerrilla organization.
Churchill was so moved by the death of his friend that he did not trust himself to speak of it on the floor of Parliament for eleven days. When he did, he said, “If our dreams of Zionism are to end in the smoke of the assassins’ guns and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany,” then England would “have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long.” In Israel, the Jewish community was stunned. The influential Haaretz newspaper said simply, “No more grievous blow has been struck to our cause.” If the hardening of British attitudes toward Israel in the years prior to its independence in 1948 were partially a result of this assassination, as many suspected, then Haaretz was more correct in this assessment than its readers at the time could have known.
Like his father before him, Rupert Guinness led his company through trusted and skilled men. For years, and in particular during the war years, Guinness’s managing director was Ben Newbold, the gifted strategist who had convinced the company to advertise and then had guided this new venture to historic success. Yet in 1946, just after war’s end, Newbold died suddenly. It was a tragic loss, for Newbold had led and counseled Guinness through many prosperous decades. Fortunately, just the year before, Rupert had asked yet another gifted man to assist the aging Newbold. His name was Hugh Beaver, a known administrative genius who had done such a fine job as director general and controller general of the Ministry of Works during the war that he was knighted in 1943. With Newbold’s death, Beaver took the lead as managing director and began to position Guinness for unprecedented expansion. He was the first nonbrewer to fill the role, but he knew the St. James’s Gate and Park Royal facilities well, he respected the family and the heritage, and, as important, he understood the times.
Beaver began to remake the company to accommodate the needs of a new business age. He separated the breweries at St. James’s Gate and Park Royal into two freestanding corporate entities under the broader Arthur Guinness, Son & Co. Ltd. umbrella. He respected the science of brewing and so invested huge sums into the continuous sterilization process that Alan McMullen had developed. He also upgraded the fleet of locomotives serving the St. James’s Gate facility and purchased new ships in anticipation of broader global markets to come.
Sir Hugh had reason to expect rapid growth. In 1945, Guinness topped two million casks of beer for the first time since 1921. The American market was recovering from a three-decade slump—brought on in large part by Prohibition—and though wartime restrictions and shortages still plagued brewers, there was every reason to believe these would clear in time and great opportunities would await those who were prepared. Beaver intended to be one of them.
To make these hopes reality, Guinness again put its faith in the work of John Gilroy. The trademark Guinness advertisements had offered much encouragement to civilians at home and to soldiers abroad during the war years. Now, Gilroy’s seals and toucans, zookeepers, and ostriches returned to peacetime work. By the early 1950s, the famed menagerie leapt from Gilroy’s posters into keepsakes that ranged from ceramic images of Guinness animals to table lamps. The popularity of Gilroy’s work proved that the advertising campaign had lost none of its luster in the years after the war. So beloved were these symbols of both Guinness and British life that on September 22, 1955, Gilroy’s creations starred in the first night of commercial television in British history. Delighted viewers that night watched commercials featuring a live sea lion, a real zookeeper, and other puppets and animated characters depicting the familiar Guinness gang. It was confirmation that Guinness the beer and Guinness the family of symbols meant as much to viewers in the United Kingdom as ever.
Yet Guinness had no intention of resting on its advertising laurels, even if they were the creation of a genius like John Gilroy. Other geniuses shaped the company as well and one of them was Arthur Faw
cett. He had come to Guinness when the company acquired Alexander MacFee bottling company in 1932. Fawcett had headed that company and then, with its acquisition by Guinness, took charge of Guinness Exports Limited. He was known as “an abrasive personality with imaginative promotional ideas.” It was an understatement. Fawcett conceived some of the most brilliant promotional schemes in Guinness history. In the early 1950s, he hit on the idea of distributing thousands of miniature bottles of Guinness stout. These became immensely popular, dramatically increased Guinness brand recognition, and made the three-inch-tall bottles a feature in collections around the world.
In 1954 and 1959, Fawcett executed a scheme that was one of the most unusual and effective in advertising history. He decided Guinness should put messages in thousands of numbered and sealed bottles and drop them in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. The intent was that people would find the bottles and then contact Guinness. “We will most certainly write you back telling you exactly when and where your particular bottle was dropped,” the message in the bottle assured, “sending also a suitable memento of the occasion. But, irrespective of anything else, please don’t forget the important message that has come to you o’er thousands of miles: Guinness is Good for You!” Fawcett had 50,000 bottles dropped in 1954 and then, as the plan met with success, dropped more than 150,000 in 1959 on Guinness’s two-hundredth anniversary.
Fawcett had fulfilled one of the great principles of advertising: don’t just sell your product—sell your product’s culture. The bottle drop scheme tied the Guinness image to excitement, exploration, discovery, and generosity. Letters began to arrive within months of the first drop, first from as far away as the Azores and then from South America, the West Indies, the Philippines, and India. An explorer even found two bottles in the Arctic Ocean along a beach at Coates Island. The attention the bottle drops drew was unparalleled. The scheme has been called “the world’s longest running advertising promotion” and it is likely true. Bottles are still found today at a rate of one or two a year; the fascinating array of letters and responses sent in from all over the world can be seen at the Storehouse at St. James’s Gate.
The bottle drops were indicative of the experimentation and innovation that marked Hugh Beaver’s era at Guinness. So was the book he conceived, which also boasts the Guinness name—the book that has surely launched a billion wagers. It came about on a hunting trip in County Wexford in 1951. Sir Hugh and a friend began a gentle argument about the fastest game bird in England; was it the golden plover or the grouse? But they could find no book that would solve the matter, not at their hunting lodge or at the bookstores in town. Beaver began to see the virtues of a book that would contain every type of statistic that might arise in discussions at pubs and sports clubs.
He mentioned the book at the Guinness offices and an aide suggested the names of two men who ran a fact-checking service in London. They might be just the ones to create such a book, he was told. The two men were Norris and Ross McWhirter, twins in their mid-twenties who worked as sports writers. Beaver met them, hired them, and put them to work. He intended the book only as a promotional gimmick for pubs in Ireland and the United Kingdom. In fact, his plan was to simply give the book away, trusting that Guinness would recoup its costs in sales of beer.
It was called The Guinness Book of Records. Published merely as a handout in 1954, the next year it topped the British best-seller lists. No one was more surprised than Sir Hugh. When it was published in the United States in 1956, it sold more than seventy thousand copies. It has since become one of the best-selling books in history, with hundreds of millions sold in more than one hundred countries. Perhaps as important, it has carried the Guinness name to nations and to generations that did not know that name from the reputation of the legendary beer alone.
If it is the job of a managing director to create an environment in which vision and innovation thrive, then Sir Hugh Beaver was certainly doing his job in the 1950s. In addition to creative advertising campaigns, best-selling books, and administrative reorganizations, Sir Hugh also called for a more inventive approach to serving the beloved black stout. Though Guinness profits rose in this decade, challengers were at the door. Lager intruded into many markets and planners at the company began realizing that they needed some way to make their stout more attractive. They settled on changing how Guinness was served, how its consistency was maintained, and how it was presented to the customer.
Traditionally, a Guinness was poured at a pub from a cask that sat high above the bar and also from one that rested below. This was how the beer and the carbonation needed to give that beer life were merged in the customer’s glass. Too many moving parts, though, allowed opportunity for the system to malfunction. Also, too much was left up to the bartender. The balance of carbonation and beer might not be right. Or, if the beer was too cold, it was flat; if it was too warm, it was too frothy. Guinness wanted to solve these problems to win a broader market share—with a beer that was consistently good wherever it was served.
Sir Hugh put the development of a solution into the hands of a young engineer named Michael Ash. Within the company, Ash’s project, officially named the Draught Project, was snickered at as the “Daft Project.” Few believed it would be a success. Yet in 1958, Ash presented Sir Hugh with a system he had christened “Easy Serve.” It was a system based on a single metal cask that combined two sections—one for the stout and the other containing the right pressurized mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen. It was revolutionary but it wasn’t enough; the Guinness brewers weren’t quite happy with it. Ash sensed that he had taken a step in the right direction but that there was a better invention to come.
In time, Ash’s innovation would lead to a single-part keg in which the carbon dioxide and nitrogen were already infused into the stout. It would change beer delivery forever, but not so much as a later development that would spring from it. It’s worth jumping ahead in our story to see how Michael Ash’s half step led to one of the great innovations in the delivery of beer.
In the early 1980s, when canning beer had become popular, the challenge for Guinness was to make sure its beer was delivered with consistent taste—yet also with its famed creamy head. Guinness engineers were set to the task and a variety of solutions were offered. All were found wanting. Finally, in 1985, engineers developed the In-Can System (ICS). This was an ingenious plastic disk that was inserted at the bottom of a 500-milliliter can. To state it simply, the disk, which was later called a widget (and is, in its current incarnation, a floating sphere), would release nitrogen when the can was opened, thus allowing the creamy head characteristic of Guinness to emerge.
The widget was so advanced and inspired that in 1991 it won the Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement. In 2003, the British people voted it the greatest invention in forty years. Now, many brewers have copied the technology and use some form of the widget, but it all began with young Michael Ash in the 1950s—and with the culture of innovation that Sir Hugh Beaver encouraged at St. James’s Gate.
There was more to come. It had not escaped the Guinness board’s notice that lager beer was becoming the most popular type of beer in the world. It was perceived as a threat, for lager is far different from stout. Lager, which comes from a German word meaning “to store,” is brewed with a different type of yeast than stout—a “bottom-fermenting” Saccharomyces carlsbergensis rather than a “top-fermenting” Saccharomyces cerevisiae—and it is kept dramatically colder than stout. The result is a golden-colored beer that is lighter and less bitter and allows for greater variety of flavors than stout. This likely explains its great popularity everywhere but in England and Ireland during the twentieth century.
Fermentation chambers at the Guinness Storehouse
To answer this rising market for lager, Guinness decided during 1959 to create its own lager. For at least a few older heads at Guinness, the move must have reminded them of a lesson from an earlier day. Just after World War II, Guinness had tried to mak
e the former Burke Brewery in Long Island a profitable venture. After heavy investment, an American-made Guinness Extra Stout was released in March 1948. Sadly, the Long Island venture would last barely six years. Heavy competition and Guinness’s inexperience in the American market took their toll. Many concluded, as one American commentator put it, “You can’t sell black beer in a blond market.” Now, in 1960, Guinness would sell blond beer, reversing the decision of its founder, Arthur Guinness, to sell only stout. Called Harp Lager, after the famous Brian Boru harp that had for so long been the Guinness symbol, the Guinness lager would prove a major success and continue as a treasured product for decades to come.
Harp was perhaps the last of many innovations during Rupert Guinness’s chairmanship of the company. By 1962, he was eighty-eight years old and it was time, so family members said, to pass control to a new generation. It is a moment we should mark carefully. The heir apparent was Arthur Francis Benjamin, known simply as Benjamin, who was only twenty-five. He had no brewery experience and he had not chosen a brewer’s life as his own. It is perhaps best to cite Michele Guinness’s insightful description of this historic change.
Shy and retiring, finding public occasions something of a strain, Benjamin was the epitome of a man who had greatness thrust upon him. When the first Arthur Guinness’ eldest son decided to become a clergyman, the second Arthur had taken his place. When the second Arthur’s eldest son became a clergyman and the second son a poet, Benjamin Lee stepped into the gap. When Benjamin Lee’s eldest son, Lord Ardilaun, resigned from the partnership, Edward Cecil was more than able to take over. Edward Cecil had three sons, two of whom made exceptional contributions to the firm. He also drew in his wife’s family. So the descent from father to son had been preserved for five generations and two hundred years. Benjamin Iveagh had no say in his destiny. He could not choose to be a clergyman or a poet, a doctor or a postman for that matter. The buck stopped with him.
The Search for God and Guinness Page 19
