Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book. Larry Olmsted

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ species, bird and man. The birds in this historic case were a grouse and golden plover, and the man Sir Hugh Beaver, a corporate titan whose improbable animal name was a perfect one for the father of the Guinness Book of Records.

      The original 1955 edition of the book has a notable entry for another business genius associated with animals, Walt Disney, whose claim to fame was for having won the most Oscars, some two dozen of them. After achieving unparalleled success in creating one of the world’s best-known brands and a diverse entertainment empire worth billions, Walt Disney was famously quoted as saying, “My only hope is that we never lose sight of one thing, that it was all started by a mouse .”

      It is easy to forget such humble beginnings when a brand goes global and becomes a household name transcending borders and languages. Walt’s surname, Disney, is just such an iconic name, one instantly recognizable in all corners of the earth. Whether it is employed to refer to a man, a company, a library of cartoons, a film studio or a collection of theme parks, everyone knows Disney. Very few brands have achieved this level of universal pervasiveness and The Guinness Book of Records is one, enjoying Disneyesque global recognition - and for good reason: it is the best-selling copyrighted book in the history of mankind and is available in the native languages of most citizens of the world. Amazingly, it may have even surpassed the brand recognition of the famous brewery and stout for which it was named. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone, anywhere, who does not recognize Guinness records, yet at the same time, the famed collection of superlatives and astonishing feats remains cloaked in mystery and misinformation. Everyone knows what The Book is, but almost no one knows much about it. While Walt Disney’s hope remains fulfilled, and everyone understands that ‘it was all started by a mouse’, who recalls that the Guinness Book of Records was all started by a pair of birds?

      The mid-fifties were the dawn of the Golden Age of Trivia on both sides of the Atlantic, represented in the United Kingdom by the explosion of interest in pub trivia, and in the United States by the many ‘quiz shows’, beginning with The $64,000 Question, first aired by CBS in 1955. The show’s popularity has never since been equalled on network television. “It was the first and only pre-Regis Philbin [an American game-show host on US television famous since the 1950s] game show ever to be the nation’s top rated television programme,” according to Ken Jennings, the all-time winningest player in Jeopardy! game show history, and the author of Brainiac, a history of trivia. Jennings goes on to state that “America’s crime rate , telephone usage and theatre and restaurant attendance would all drop measurably on Tuesday nights, as an astounding 82 per cent of viewers were tuned to CBS.”

      In 1955, $64,000 was a lot of money by any standards, and especially for answering a question, proving, as Jennings loves to point out, that not all trivia is trivial. In recent years television game shows attempting to re-create the drama of this original hit have had to up the ante considerably, offering million-dollar prizes just to get viewers to tune in. Certainly the chance to answer a question worth this much money does not come along every day. But even these riches pale in comparison to the payoff Sir Hugh Beaver got in 1954, when he innocently enquired of a hunting companion, which was the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover or the grouse? Sir Hugh had no way of knowing that his would be the most significant trivia question ever asked.

      Born in Johannesburg in 1890, Hugh Beaver moved around quite a bit in the first half of his life, and his professional career began with a 12-year stint in India on the national police force. He then relocated to London, where he joined the engineering firm of Alexander Gibb & Co, becoming a partner in the firm in 1932. Shortly thereafter, Gibb was selected to construct a large new brewery in Park Royal, on the outskirts of London, for Arthur Guinness & Sons, then the world’s largest brewer. Beaver was put in charge of the huge project, and for several years worked closely with C. J. Newbold, Guinness’s managing director. Newbold formed a very favourable impression of his younger colleague, and in 1945, almost certainly at his urging, Rupert Guinness, better known in England as Lord Iveagh, tapped Beaver to become the assistant managing director of the company. Beaver accepted, and when Newbold died suddenly a year later, Beaver succeeded him as managing director, a position he would hold for 14 years, until his retirement in 1960. During and after his stint at Guinness, Beaver assumed many other important positions, including chairman of the British Institute of Management, chairman of the Advisory Council of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, chairman of the Industrial Fund for the Advancement of Scientific Education in Schools and chairman of the Board of Governors of Ashridge Management College. He was also president of the Federation of British Industry and of the Sino-British Trade Council, treasurer of the University of Sussex and served on the board of the Ministry of Works as well as on many other boards and several charities. In his scant spare time, the tireless Hugh Beaver led official trade missions to China and East Germany.

      Hugh Beaver was the kind of classical, colonially inspired child of the British Empire, hard to imagine in this day and age, one for whom the world was almost too small a place and whose talents and achievements in so many fields seem more the stuff of novels than reality. He was indisputably the father of the far-reaching Guinness World Records empire, yet this remains just a small entry on his curriculum vitae. In addition to running the world’s largest brewery and chairing or serving on the boards of numerous government and non-profit entities, Sir Hugh was passionate about causes, especially air pollution and social reform. He considered his duty as chair of the Committee on Air Pollution among his most significant roles, and was quite passionate and vocal on the topic, writing letters to the editors and giving speeches as a sort of proto-environmentalist. Likewise, he was a champion of racial equality in the workplace and used his position to advance the cause of minorities both within Guinness and in the greater society. One of his personal files is devoted to clippings about this topic in which he was quoted, alongside his many letters to the editors where he made his position crystal clear. At the time, his brewery did not just supply beer to bars; it was one of the UK’s largest landlords, leasing many pubs to the those who operated them. Sir Hugh was not shy about wielding Guinness’s power for what he considered the greater good, and one of his treasured newspaper clippings is an article about the giant brewery’s revocation of a publican’s London lease for refusing to serve ‘coloured customers’. The same file contains hate mail in the form of numerous bigoted letters attacking him for his progressive positions, some exceptionally vicious, violent, and disturbing.

      His accomplishments were certainly impressive, and if anyone deserved a knighthood, it was Sir Hugh Beaver, KBE. Most of his credentials as a business leader, social progressive and man of charitable works are beyond doubt, as was his tireless approach to juggling the many responsibilities he undertook. Perhaps the only remaining unanswered question about the life of Beaver was how good his aim was.

      Depending on who tells the almost apocryphal story of Sir Hugh’s ‘Guinness Book hunting moment’, he is either a very good shot or a lousy one, and it remains uncertain whether his question about which bird was faster, the golden plover or grouse (in some accounts it is the closely related teal or snipe), was brought on by his success at bird hunting that day - or his frustrating stream of misses. According to his 1967 obituary in Guinness Time, the brewing company’s in-house newsletter, ‘He was a particularly fine shot’, and this one, like other accounts, has him pondering the speed of flight issue over a collection of downed birds of both types after a day of shooting in County Wexford, Ireland. But the most accurate account seems to come from Norris McWhirter , the editor of the very first edition of The Guinness Book of Records, recalling a conversation at which he was actually present. It is his re-telling of the story in Ross, the biography of his twin brother Ross McWhirter, which rings truest.

      [W]hen a golden plover had come high overhead and he had missed it. Later, in the home of his host, СКАЧАТЬ