Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book
of modern athletics writing.”
Research showing that no other fact business of its kind existed did not worry the brothers, who instead found this void encouraging, and on 2 March 1951, McWhirter Twins Ltd was formally registered as a business . They immediately began cold-calling newspapers, trying to sell them their factfinding services. Due to fluke timing, one such sales call quickly led not to the sale of facts but to the offer of a fulltime job for Ross with London’s Star as the lawn tennis and rugby correspondent, as well as part-time seasonal freelance coverage of other sports for Norris. Thinking it over, the McWhirters concluded that Ross’s income would give them some stability, while Norris would still have enough time to run the upstart fact-finding firm. Before long, their rising stars in sports and sportswriting led Norris to begin doing part-time event commentary on radio for the BBC as well. Then, in an eerie Guinness precursor, one of the first substantive pieces of business landed by McWhirter Twins Ltd was a contract to produce ‘interesting information’ to be printed on boxes of Shredded Wheat breakfast cereal. The twins clinched the deal and won the bid only when they suggested using ‘superlative objects and people’ , accompanied by artist’s renderings, for the cereal box factoids.
Things progressed smoothly for the twins for a few years, with Ross covering major events such as Wimbledon and his twin researching quirky cereal box facts and growing his reputation as a sportscaster. Norris also took a position editing Athletics World magazine in 1952, which he would continue to do through the amazingly busy next four years in the twins’ lives. They seemed to be cut from the same cloth as Sir Hugh, keeping their hands in an ever-growing number of enterprises. Norris’s work with BBC radio also took a major step forward s with his broadcasts from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which in turn led to a job on television as part of the BBC’s commentary team for the next four Olympic Games: Rome (1960), Tokyo (1964), Mexico (1968) and Munich (1972). Before long, this on-camera experience would prove instrumental in promoting the Guinness brand.
The McWhirters’ growing success came to a head in 1954, the year Norris dubbed ‘Annus Mirabilis’ in his book Ross, an amalgam autobiography and biography of his brother. The miracles referred to were the breaking of the four-minute mile by their friend Roger Bannister and the grouse v golden plover question by Sir Hugh Beaver. The first occurred on 6 May at the familiar Oxford University track where Norris, Ross and Roger had run for so many years (and where Ashrita Furman would later make a record-breaking pilgrimage, albeit on a pogo stick). Norris was hired to provide the track commentary through the public address system, and knowing how much closer his friend Roger was to the mark than many observers suspected, he took great pains the night before the race to rehearse a ‘spontaneous’ announcement, should Bannister indeed deliver the historic benchmark. By a meagre six-tenths of a second he did just that, and slowly and without emotion Norris announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen. Here is the result of event number nine, the one mile . First, number 41, R. G. Bannister, Amateur Athletic Association, and formerly of Exeter and Merton colleges, with a time that is a new meeting and track record, and which, subject to ratification will be a new English native, British Empire and World’s record: the time three minutes…” The rest of his announcement, “fifty-nine point four seconds,” was forever obscured by the loud and riotous reaction of the crowd, some 1200 strong. So important was this event in sports history that Norris later said, “The total crowd was estimated at 1200 and I have met all 10,000 of them since!”
As the world famous record book by the twins would prove dramatically for the next six decades, records are meant to be broken, but firsts are forever. Bannister’s new mark stood for just 46 days, and it would be the next holder, Australian John Landy, whose 3:57.9 would grace the mile entry in the first edition of The Guinness Book of Records, though Bannister would long secure a place in its pages alongside the likes of Neil Armstrong and Sir Edmund Hillary for historic firsts. The twins were not yet done with mile records: later that year Landy’s success set the stage for a hugely anticipated showdown between the two sprinters at the 1954 Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, where Norris reported that scalpers were getting upward of $100 Canadian, a stunning amount at the time, for the event, dubbed ‘The Miracle Mile’ by the press. The McWhirters were once again on hand to witness track and field history when Bannister won in 3:58.8 with Landy less than a second behind him, making it history’s first double sub-four-minute mile.
Around the time the twins were revelling in Vancouver, Sir Hugh Beaver was bird hunting in Ireland. Connecting these dots was the job of another employee of the famous brewery, outstanding Oxford track and world-record sprinter Chris Chataway, team mate of the McWhirters. Chataway had just given up full-time athletics and taken a position as an underbrewer at Guinness’s Park Royal Brewery in London, the facility Sir Hugh himself had helped build in his previous career in engineering. After returning from his shooting holiday, Sir Hugh immediately began bouncing his idea for a book to settle bar disputes off Guinness executives, and fellow managing director Norman Smiley (who had also been a miler at Oxford) was very enthusiastic. Smiley re-raised the issue with Beaver several times in the ensuing months until one morning, Sir Hugh and Smiley began chatting with Chataway over breakfast about the concept. Eventually, the pair asked Chataway if he knew anyone appropriate for taking on such a project, and without hesitation he recommended the McWhirters. At his bosses’ request, Chataway rang up his old friends and asked them, in a manner Norris recalled as quite mysterious and secretive, if they could come to the brewery for a meeting to discuss ‘a project’. Chataway refused to give any more details and informed them that he would not personally be present at the luncheon meeting. Norris would recall later that “It seemed that Sir Hugh had an instinct for confidentiality which has always been an unfortunate but necessary part of the publishing profession.”
When the twins arrived at the London brewery, they were led to the board’s private dining room, where they found a large group of company directors and no other outside guests. As Norris recalled the fateful meeting :
After the usual conversation, Sir Hugh led round to the subject of records and record breaking. Ross and I were asked the records for a number of what to us were fairly simple categories, such as filibustering (Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, over 22 hours) and pole squatting (a man in Portland also in Oregon called Howard who stayed up for 196 days). Lord Moyne was more interested in how one found out, rather than if we knew the answer, and posed the question how, for instance, would one discover the identity of the widest river that had ever frozen? Ross replied, before I could, that this particular problem was really quite simple because it could only lie between three contenders, namely the three Russian rivers, the Ob’, Yenisey and the Lena which flowed into the Arctic, adding that the Antarctic of course did not have any rivers.
Sir Hugh then began talking about his experiences as a civil engineer in building harbours in Turkey three or four years before the war, and mentioned that the problem was in getting the specifications translated from English into Turkish. I interposed that I could not see why Turkish should be a particular problem since the language had only one irregular verb. Sir Hugh stopped dead and said “Which is the irregular verb?” I replied “imek, to be.” “Do you speak Turkish?” he asked, so I admitted I didn’t. “Then how on earth do you know that?” he queried. “Because records of all kinds interest me and I had learnt that fact in trying to discover which language had fewest irregular verbs, compared with the 180 or so in English.”
Sir Hugh seemed to decide that he had discovered people with the right kind of mind for producing the book, which he now resolved should be published under the Guinness imprint, to settle arguments in the 84,400 pubs in the country. Quite suddenly he said “We are going to set up a publishing subsidiary. Which one of you is to be Managing Director?” Ross explained that he had a staff job in Fleet Street and that I would be better suited to take