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

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СКАЧАТЬ of which the eight members of the shooting party had bagged 20 that day, was indeed the fastest game bird in Europe as someone there had claimed. When various expensive encyclopedias in the library failed to really settle the point whether or not teal were as fast, an irritated Sir Hugh announced that “books as expensive as these ought to provide the answer to so simple a question.” Another member of the party…remarked that encyclopaedias did not necessarily give that sort of information. Sir Hugh retorted that records were just the things that started pub and bar arguments and it was about time somebody produced a book full of records to settle this kind of dispute.

      Not a man to mince words or delay action, Sir Hugh took it upon himself to do just that after returning to England and discussing the matter with his colleagues. At the time, draught Guinness was in some 84,400 pubs throughout the British Isles , and Sir Hugh saw this market alone as big enough for a book of records, one that would also be a branding opportunity, clad in the green of Ireland and sporting the Guinness logo, not much different than the bar mats or signage the brewery supplied to pubs as part of its marketing efforts.

      In addition to the question of Sir Hugh’s shooting aptitude, a further mystery surrounds the date of the shoot itself. It is known that the shoot occurred at Castlebridge House , the country estate of a friend in County Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland, where the issue was passionately discussed over port that evening. Although Guinness began in Dublin, where scion Arthur Guinness had started making stout at the now world famous St James’s Gate brewery in 1759, Sir Hugh lived and worked in London, where Arthur Guinness & Sons was publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. Most histories, including the ‘official’ one listed today on the Guinness World Records website and in promotional materials, date the shoot to 1951, but this makes little sense in light of other evidence. All accounts describe Sir Hugh acting quickly on his intuition, and most versions of the story have the debate continuing into the libraries of London upon Beaver’s return from the shooting excursion, this research unfolding over a period of just weeks or months. The conversations and actions leading to the hasty production of the first Guinness book, which was a rush job (the first edition was written in just 16 weeks), all took place in early 1955, with no justification to explain a four-year hiatus from Beaver’s grouse v plover frustration. For what it’s worth, both the New York Times and the Scotsman attribute the genesis of Sir Hugh’s idea to 1954, which seems much more plausible. In Beaver’s meticulously detailed personal appointment diaries , in which his days were constantly jammed with meetings and business travel, from 1951 to 1953 there is not one mention of shooting. However, on Wednesday 8 September, 1954, Sir Hugh wrote, in his perfect penmanship, the single word SHOOT across two full pages of the diary, representing an entire week. The absence of previous trips and the timing of this one suggest that it was in mid-September 1954 that Sir Hugh’s moment of world record enlightenment struck like a lightning bolt. The diaries also support the contention that he couldn’t have been that fine a shot, unless he made do without practice for years at a time. Given that he had so many business responsibilities, it is hard to imagine him keeping sharp with the shotgun. Leisure in any form was largely unknown to Sir Hugh, and over the first half of the decade his sole shooting trip equals the length of his only other week-long break, a voyage to Italy, the only holiday with Mrs Beaver recorded in his diaries. Aside from these two trips, in five years he seemingly satisfied himself in the way of leisure with a single night at the theatre with his wife, a few games of lawn bowls and a lone round of golf every few years.

      Having conceived the need for such an argument-settling record compendium, Sir Hugh will forever be known as the father of what was originally titled The Guinness Book of Records. But oddly, his interest in the project seems to have ended almost as soon as it started, as if commissioning the creation of a product to fill a void he saw in the market was just another one of the myriad business decisions he faced daily, no more important to him personally than the colour of the cap on a bottle of beer. In the 12 boxes of his personal papers now stored in the archives of the London School of Economics, including an early draft of a life memoir, there are almost no mentions of the book, and it is clear that Sir Hugh was more intent on focussing his energies on his public service than book selling. This is made clear in a letter dated 23 November, 1964, three years before Sir Hugh’s death, handwritten on the personal Park Royal Brewery letterhead of Viscount Boyd, the head of Arthur Guinness & Sons. It reads:

       My dear Hugh

       I am very sorry you cannot come to the dinner on Friday, 13th November to commemorate the millionth copy of the Guinness Book of Records. As you were the prime mover of all this it is very sad not to have you there, but we quite understand as it coincides with the University of Sussex events.

       Everyone will be thinking of you and will certainly drink to your health.

      His preference for attending an event at a university where he served as treasurer - rather than a party for what was already an astonishing feat in publishing - may have shown what Sir Hugh thought about the historic enterprise he had started. Or perhaps it merely reflected his workaholic nature. Maybe he just did not like parties. Whatever the reason, his connection to what would become the best-selling copyrighted book of all time essentially ended with the hiring of editors Ross and Norris McWhirter. Like everything else Sir Hugh undertook, this moment was recorded in precise pencil-written letters , in an understated tone. On 3 May 1955, eight months after his shooting trip, his diary reads simply Mr McWhirter and Mr Horst lunching, amid several other appointments that day. While Sir Hugh fathered ‘The Book’, as its fans would come to call it with near biblical reverence, Ross and especially Norris McWhirter were its nannies, or perhaps even its adoptive parents.

      Ross and Norris Dewar McWhirter were identical twins, born just 20 minutes apart at Winchmore Hill, North London, on 12 August 1925. From that moment they were destined, it seems, to create the Guinness Book of Records. Everything the McWhirters did from their earliest age set them on a path towards The Book from their father’s journalism background to their childhood hobbies to their schooling and athletic pursuits, even their inherited photographic memories. Far more than mere editors, the twins would become television stars, political figures and first-rate promoters. Without a doubt, the odd pair played the largest role in the epic’s history.

      The twins’ father, William McWhirter, was a successful journalist who managed three national Fleet Street newspapers and would become the managing director of Associated Newspapers and the Northcliffe Newspaper Group. Innovation and a thirst for knowledge seemed to run in the family’s DNA, as the twins’ grandfather, also William McWhirter , was the famed inventor of the voltmeter and ammeter. Their father, in turn, was said to bring home some 150 different newspapers a week, which his young sons, who always had a fascination with facts, figures, sports and superlatives, would devour cover to cover, keeping an extensive catalogue of clippings of interest. “From an early age my twin brother, Ross, and I collected facts and figures just as some children collected tram tickets,” Norris later recalled. Likewise, in an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Ross explained that they had been interested in facts from an early age and clipped interesting items from newspapers, which they then committed to what would prove to be an amazingly prodigious pair of memories. “We kept lists of the largest buildings, that sort of thing.” This was no fleeting childhood hobby; it was a passion the inseparable siblings would continue to practice throughout their time together at Marlborough prep school , at Oxford and in the British Royal Navy. Decades later, David Boehm, founder of Sterling Press, the longtime US publisher СКАЧАТЬ