Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book
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, conversation turned to whether or not the plover, 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