The Search for God and Guinness

by Stephen Mansfield

  Thus I understood something I could not have before: that a convergence of brewing’s evolution through history, the contributions of a Reformation view of the world, and the culture of the mid-1700s—in which a man could make his fortune but was encouraged to use it for the good of mankind—all of this built the perfect stage for the enterprising young man named Arthur Guinness and his particularly tasty brand of stout porter. For me, then, there was only one thing to do: I closed my books, packed my bags, and made off for the city of Dublin, the city from which young Arthur chose to make his mark upon the world.

  Dublin street scene today

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  THE RISE OF ARTHUR

  I have often thought of that day years ago when I was wandering the glories of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and I came across the tomb of Christopher Wren. It was Wren, of course, who designed that magnificent building, along with fifty-five other London churches, after the Great Fire of 1666 forced the city to almost completely rebuild. Moved as I was by Wren’s obvious genius, I was even more deeply touched by the words of his son, which were etched in a plaque on the wall of the great man’s crypt. The inscription read, Lector, si monumentum requiris circumspice. The words meant, “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”

  The first Arthur Guinness

  Those words have never left me. I have often thought of them as the ideal epitaph over a life well lived. What better tribute to a man, what better measure of a life, than that the good he has done is evident to all and so much so that it is visible from the very spot where he is buried.

  My experience at the tomb of Christopher Wren came to mind when I visited Dublin years later to better understand the legacy of Arthur Guinness. You simply cannot escape the man, the company, and the good done by both in that teeming city on the River Liffey. Naturally, the famous Guinness sign, accompanied by the iconic signature of Arthur, is everywhere. Seemingly ever present, too, is the well-known painting of Arthur, his high forehead, aquiline nose, and powdered wig now embedded in the mind of most every Dubliner.

  Yet it is more than advertising that makes Dublin for Arthur Guinness what St. Paul’s in London is for Christopher Wren. It is also the legacy of good that stands silent testimony on nearly every street and neighborhood square.

  A visitor has only to walk past St. Patrick’s Cathedral to learn that this noble church—built on the site where the great apostle first baptized new Christians in Ireland—was in horrible disrepair until Guinness money made its restoration possible. A bit further down the road is a lovely city park, St. Stephen’s Green—again, a gift of Guinness. There are also the Roman Catholic churches that display plaques in honor of Arthur Guinness, a Protestant, for his outspoken defense of Roman Catholic rights. And then there is the group of homes that Guinness built, known to be of such quality that they will be standing—so I was told by a builder—a hundred years from now. Located in the inner city neighborhood called “the Liberties,” they are so wisely constructed that though they were first used to house Guinness workers, they are now cherished purchases by the Dublin stylish set.

  The Liberties Rowhouses originally built for Guinness workers

  The descriptions of Guinness benevolence—the buildings, institutions, trusts, parks, schools, and services that Guinness has left in its wake—could fill volumes. And we will learn more of these further on. Yet just as important as these monuments of stone and finance are the monuments that live in men’s hearts. A hardened Dublin taxi driver tears up at the mention of the Guinness company. His grandmother, he tells me, might have died in her youth had Guinness doctors not tended her so well. And there is the aging scholar at Trinity College Dublin. He says he offers grateful prayers almost every day that his family went from laborers to educated middle class because brewery managers insisted that his gifted father reach beyond technical training alone and because Guinness money paid the cost. And now this man, this eminent and beloved scholar, tells everyone he can about the heritage of generosity that changed his family’s life.

  There is also the scruffy man outside the Guinness plant who stands beside his horse-drawn cart. He is covered in sawdust and feed and he knows he is an odd sight. He hopes you will want a picture of him, perhaps as a memento of Guinness days gone by. But when you take time to talk to him, you find he is not just a prop. He once worked for Guinness in his youth and he remembers the days well. Given how he looks, you expect complaints, maybe a list of grievances unaddressed. Instead, he tells you how amazing it all was, and how the Guinness years were the best of his life. In fact, he is sad that his years at Guinness are done and he is a bit angry at the tide of change that has carried away the brewery he once knew. He tells you that he is not the only one who feels this way. Still, he insists that Guinness has always been the best place in Ireland to work. He hopes you will come back.

  This is what you find, in the Dublin that is Arthur Guinness’s monument, in the city that he loved and made his own. It is where the Guinness family chose to leave a legacy of benevolence, and why you find in stone and gratitude the record of a people who served their fellow man as they prospered, who built a cathedral of industry and philanthropy in honor of their God.

  I have a favorite scene from the life of Arthur Guinness. It is likely not the one he would have chosen and it is not like any other that the slim record of his life reveals. Perhaps I like it because I am an American and I am naturally endeared to big personalities and crashing, passionate men. Perhaps, too, I find myself a bit hemmed in by the sketchy details of Arthur’s life as I try to write his story. I’ve probably grown tired of how most of what we know of him comes to us from legal proceedings and government records. I want, as most of my generation do, a full-bodied treatment, a picture of a man who is liberated from the droning documents and the staid painting that I often feel imprison him. I want a man who comes before us red-blooded and bold.

  This is why I’ve chosen this particular scene from his life as my favorite. It comes to us from 1771. Arthur is living in Dublin and has already purchased the run-down brewery with which he will make his name. And there is a conflict. It seems that on his own authority, Mr. Guinness has taken it upon himself to breach the walls of the watercourse and to increase the size of the pipes that carry water from the River Liffey to Arthur’s land. But this is free, fresh city water and he is taking more than the authorities think he should. So when the Dublin Corporation’s officers demand that he stop what amounts to a theft, Arthur fires back a message that says the water is his and he “would defend it by force of arms.”

  We like this man already.

  Tensions mount and finally the city sheriff arrives. He brings with him a work crew whose orders are to fill in the breaches in the watercourse that this man Guinness has illegally made. Arthur is not there at the time but his men stand strong and resist until the sheriff threatens them with prison. Just when they start to relent, the owner arrives in a rage. The accounts we have from the time tell us that Arthur quickly sized up the situation, grabbed a pickaxe from one of his men, and “with very much improper language [declared] that they should not proceed . . . that if they filled [the watercourse] up from end to end, he would immediately re-open it.”

  Frankly, the story gets mundane from there. There is a lawsuit, it takes years to resolve, and by that time Arthur Guinness is one of the lead brewers of Dublin and too respectable for the sheriff to bully. Finally, a deal is made and Guinness receives all the water he needs for the slight sum of £10 a year.

  Still, I like that dramatic moment with the pickaxe and all the more so because it feels to me that most of the rest of Arthur Guinness’s life is concealed behind deeds and lawsuits, behind false legends and Irish myths. Concealing him, too, is that painting, the one that makes him seem to my American sensibilities like one of the duller founding fathers, like the kind of man Thomas Jefferson would have tipped his hat to on the street but never have invited to dinner. Arthur Guinness was a great deal more, though, and
it is important that we try to glimpse of him what we can so that we may better understand who he was in his day and also how he laid a foundation for the family that graced the centuries after.

  Had you listened to the gossips on the Dublin docks sometime in the early 1800s, you would have heard the tales of Arthur Guinness’s father, of how he was the illegitimate son of an English soldier named Gennys and a willing Irish girl. Then, you might also have heard how this son, named Richard, grew up and became the groom of a family named Read. According to the rumors, it seems that one night Richard made off with the Reads’ daughter, the lovely Elizabeth, never to return. And thus, “from the mists of time,” as one historian wrote, came the Guinness family.

  As romantic as all this is, it is very likely untrue. There is no evidence of an English soldier and an Irish girl, nor of Elizabeth Read eloping with the family groom.

  What Arthur Guinness himself came to believe in later years was that his father was descended from Bryan Viscount Magennis of Iveagh, known to be from County Down. This Magennis was apparently a Catholic nobleman who supported James II at the unfortunate battle of the Boyne. Fleeing from Ireland to France in the aftermath of that encounter, Magennis left behind a branch of his clan who probably tried to protect themselves by dropping the prefix “Ma”—which means “the family”—and by converting to Protestantism. Thus, Arthur sprang from a Protestant clan named Gennis who later picked up an extra s in their name.

  Although this is what Arthur believed, it is not a story we can confirm these centuries later. In fact, DNA analysis done at Trinity University in 2007 has suggested that the Guinnesses are descended from a family named McCartan who lived in a village called “Ginnies” in County Down. Historians continue to argue the matters. What we do know with some certainty from the few dusty documents we have is that Richard Guinness, father of Arthur, did marry an Elizabeth Read and then worked for the Reverend Dr. Arthur Price, the affluent Protestant vicar of Celbridge in County Kildare. We also know that in time, Dr. Price became Archbishop of Cashel and that as he rose in the world he took his good man Richard Guinness with him.

  There are some matters we have to imagine, that we have to conjure from the few lines in a document here and the bit of oral tradition there. As the manager of Dr. Price’s estate, Richard would have had many duties. He would have seen to the livestock, supervised the growing of crops, collected the rents from tenants, and assured that the buildings were in good repair. He would also have been responsible for the brewing of beer. It is here, then, on an archbishop’s estate and under the tutelage of his father, that the future founder of the famed Guinness brewery surely first learned his trade.

  We should understand that brewing at this time in Ireland was very much a cottage industry—almost literally. Housewives did it, estate managers did it, brewhouse owners did it and, of course, breweries did it, mostly along the winding waterways of Dublin. Beer was simply a staple of life in those days. In fact, we know that Arthur’s grandfather, William Read, brewed beer. We know that he applied for a license to sell ale in 1690, and that this gives us the sole written link between beer and any of Arthur’s ancestors. Undoubtedly, once William brewed his beer, he would have sold it from an ale tent at a spot along the Dublin-Cork road near where he lived. A single poetic sentence from Patrick Guinness’s masterful Arthur’s Round: The Life and Times of Brewing Legend Arthur Guinness paints the scene for us well: “We can picture a regiment struggling into the foothills several hours march south of Dublin on the rough, rutted, dusty main road and seeing a welcome ale tent with jugs of beer waiting to hit their thirsty palates.” It was a meager beginning but it anticipated much that was to come.

  This beer brewing by Arthur’s grandfather Read was very much in the Irish tradition. We’ve already seen that Dioscorides—that first-century Greek botanist and physician— reported that the Hiberni drank a brewed barley liquid called cuirim. Many of the Irish myths and early documents mention the drink, including Críth Gablach, a law tract of the 700s that affirms a prince’s routine as “Sunday for drinking ale, for he is no rightful prince who does not promise ale for every Sunday.”

  So important were beer and its effects among the Irish that the pagan high kings of the land had to symbolically marry the goddess-queen Medb (Maeve), whose name meant “the drunken” or “she who makes drunk.” By drinking beer to excess at Tara—an ancient seat of the high kings of Ireland—these kings attained their sovereignty. It is no wonder that St. Patrick took his brewmaster, Mescan, with him as he tried to bring such pagan practices to an end. Beer was simply interwoven into all of Irish life; this was no less the case by the time of Richard Guinness. Though the Irish called whiskey uisce beatha—“the water of life”—by the early 1700s they were glad for the traditions that gave them a healthy and tasty drink that was only lightly intoxicating.

  We should understand, then, that when Arthur Guinness came into the world—probably in 1724 at Dr. Price’s Oakley Park estate in Celbridge—that world was often astir about beer. With brewing taking place in nearly every home, estate, and public house, recipes would have been closely guarded, new discoveries rumored and tried. Noble families would have had reputations for finely brewed beer and invitations to their tables would have been eagerly sought.

  It is exactly in this way that Reverend Price’s man, Richard, made something of a name for himself. It seems that the archbishop’s estate was known for the dark beer that was brewed there, and many a guest tried to question the reverend’s trusted agent to find out how he produced such a fine-tasting drink. Naturally, Richard, proud of his celebrated dark stout, would never say.

  In the absence of solid information, myth and legend grew. Some said that Richard Guinness once accidentally roasted his barley too long and that the caramelized result was stronger and better than any other brew. Others said that the family had stolen the recipe from some monks whose beer “could make hairs grow on a man’s chest.” But of course, we know the truth now. Dark beer had been brewed before Arthur was even born. It was already a favorite in London before the Guinness name was ever attached to a commercially sold brew, and it was a particular favorite among the city’s porters, who gave this dark beer its name.

  Though we do not know exactly how Richard Guinness came to brew a superior dark beer, we do know that it was the pride of Dr. Price and the envy of the archbishop’s guests. Moreover, we can certainly imagine that Richard would have taught young Arthur the skills of brewing and this would have inaugurated one of the central themes in the Guinness story: mastery of craft passed from father to son.

  For generations after Richard first began teaching young Arthur the brewing trade, Guinness son would work at Guinness father’s side to master the lore and labors that would make for one of the finest beers and the most successful companies in the world. And this would not just be so in the Guinness family. There were also the farmers or seamen or grooms or cask makers who helped make Guinness beer—perhaps for five or six generations in a row—and who looked on the company’s success as their own. Whole families of men would often labor side by side and then discuss the craft of brewing at night around their dinner tables, stirring in younger brothers and grandchildren an eagerness to take their places in the family profession. Skills perfected through decades and unlearn-able from a book were passed from man to man, acquired in each generation by example and patient training, tools in hand. It was a legacy of mastery, a generational gift of experience and art, much of it now lost in our machine-dominated age but all of it honored through the centuries of Guinness men.

  A Guinness historian has written that “infant Arthur would have inhaled the bracing smell of malt before he could walk.” It was true. The boy would have lived in a world of brewers: his grandfather Read, his mother—who would certainly have brewed beer for her family—and, of course, his father, Richard, who brewed to meet the needs of the Price estate. It is not hard for us to imagine how Arthur would have grown into muscled adolescence
shoveling the barley or carrying the water so essential to brewing. He certainly would have tended the fires necessary for boiling wort and for roasting. And he would have carried pails of beer to the thirsty on the estate and perhaps to favored friends of Dr. Price. He would have learned early that brewing is an art, that for many a man beer is an elixir, and that people in his day were willing to pay well those who could keep them in abundant supply.

  Yet Arthur’s education went far beyond the practical matters of estate management and the techniques for brewing beer. We know—again from the meager documents that are available—that by his late teens Arthur served Dr. Price as a registrar, a secretary-copyist of sorts. This tells us that Arthur must have mastered the reading, math, and penmanship that were regarded as essential to a man of affairs in that day. We can see this from Arthur’s famous signature, which is now used in Guinness advertising around the world. Bold, confident, carefully styled, and technically sophisticated, it comes from the lease for St. James’s Gate. Arthur must have learned this manner of writing in his childhood and teens, when a man’s handwriting takes form. He must have mastered penmanship and perhaps other vital fields of knowledge at the Charitable School that was half a mile from his home. Then again, Dr. Price would certainly have had a personal library that he very likely would have allowed Arthur to use. He had agreed to be Arthur’s godfather, after all, and we can see evidence that Dr. Price felt kindly about the boy and helped him advance whenever he could. Arthur may very well have reveled in the glories of Dr. Price’s well-stocked library and may even have benefited from some mentoring by the archbishop as well. By the time Arthur was twenty, he was a smart, capable young man in Dr. Price’s employ. He helped manage the affairs of the estate, witnessed documents, copied and filed, and certainly was involved in every aspect of brewing beer.