Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book
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 of the Guinness books, was still in awe of the twins’ penchant for facts. “They memorized every important date in world history, rivers and mountain ranges, and every world capital - and later every record in the Guinness book.”
The twins’ most emphatic area of passion was sports, and they were no mere armchair enthusiasts. They were outstanding athletes who competed at the national and international level in track, and also excelled at rugby . Both attended Oxford’s Trinity College, where they ran the 100-yard sprint, and Norris was good enough to race against (and lose to) Trinidadian Emmanuel MacDonald Bailey, then the UK record holder in the event. He was selected as a ‘possible’ in the 200 metres for the 1948 British Olympic team but strained a hamstring before securing a spot on the squad. Their success on the track was all the more notable given the stiff competition: Ross and Norris were on the same Oxford team as the legendary Roger Bannister, who became a lifelong friend before he became famous as the first human to run a mile in under four minutes. Also on the track team was Chris Chataway , another friend who would later pace Bannister’s epic mile and become the world record holder at the 5000 metres. Completing their education after an interruption for military service, all four were part of a 20-man team chosen to represent Oxford in its first post-war foreign athletic tour, a group that turned out to be quite a distinguished bunch. As Norris wrote, “It would have taken a clairvoyant rather than an acute observer to predict that among that carefree band there were members who were to become a prime minister [Ratu Kamisese Mara, Fiji], Europe’s fastest sprinter, history’s first four-minute miler, a leading headmaster and [in the case of Ross] the first editor ever to sell 25,000,000 copies of a book in a lifetime.”
Aside from a brief stint serving on separate ships during the war, the twins were rarely far from each other’s side, and as a result, graduation steered them down an unusual path together. “It never occurred to either of us that we would do anything separately or that we would be employees of some great company. It was always tacitly assumed that whatever career we had, it would be together and it would be as private enterprisers,” Norris wrote matter-of-factly. In 1949, drawing on their lifelong passion for sports, facts and statistics, as well as their childhood experience on the periphery of Fleet Street’s journalistic hub, the twins formulated a plan to set up their own business supplying facts and figures to newspapers, yearbooks, encyclopaedias and advertisers. Knowing the speciality business would take time to research, launch and build, they simultaneously began writing their first book, Get to Your Marks, subtitled A Short History of World, Commonwealth, European and British Athletics, to provide some income. That book was published in 1951, and two decades later The Guide to British Track and Field Literature from 1275-1968 would call their debut “a landmark in athletics literature. The text is distinguished by a degree of precision and thoroughness which no athletics historian had achieved