The Search for God and Guinness

by Stephen Mansfield

  4

  THE GOOD THAT WEALTH CAN DO

  It is an old truism that a man is measured by the company he keeps. We believe this because we understand that what surrounds a man, what he keeps near and esteems as of value, is an extension of his inner life. This includes his friends. The kind of people he is drawn to, the brand of character he feels comfortable with, says much about the man he truly is.

  If this is so, then it must also be true that a company should be measured by the culture it creates. Culture. It means “what is encouraged to grow,” the “behavior and ways of thinking that are inspired.” Despite what a company’s advertising may boast, aside from what mascot it adopts or the slogan it uses, it is what is inspired in the life of its people that is the most important indicator of how noble a venture that company may be.

  This brings us to Guinness. In the minds of most of the people in the world, Guinness is beer and that is all there is to the story. But this is far from true. Guinness the beer is magnificent, yes, but it is the Guinness culture that for nearly two centuries changed the lives of Guinness workers, transformed poverty in Dublin, and inspired other companies to understand that care for their employees was their most important work. It was the Guinness culture of faith and kindness and generosity that moved men to seek out ways to serve their fellow men, to mend what the harshness of life had torn.

  There is no better symbol of this culture than the efforts that Guinness inspired in Dublin in 1900, when the horrors of overcrowding, starvation, and disease were decimating thousands. It was then that a young doctor, a board of wise and kindhearted men, a hundred-year-old culture of benevolence, and one of the most searing crises in Ireland’s history converged. And it became, in time, a triumph, a story men told their grandsons and executives repeated in boardrooms around the world. It was the moment when that noble Guinness culture spilled out of the brewery into the streets of a dying city. It was a time when Guinness demonstrated the good that righteous wealth can do.

  A visitor to the Dublin of today finds a city that is a pleasant blend of European bustle, American marketing, and Irish grace. There are the soaring, ancient structures, of course: St. Patrick’s and Christ Church and Dublin Castle, where a modern government serves beneath Norman towers. There is, also, the lapping River Liffey, the winding bloodstream of the city, which speaks of days gone by even as it frames streets adorned by Quicksilver, Donna Karan, and The Gap. And always there is the thrilling, maddening jumble of the people: the Irish natives, the immigrants from Eastern Europe, the expatriates from the States, the eager workers from Africa, and the youth from every European nation who study at Trinity College or who simply want to master English as the language of their future plans.

  All seems vibrant and promising and sweet. So it is hard to imagine that there was a time—and not that long ago— when Dublin was the Calcutta of its day, a city so beset with filth and disease that its reputation tainted the good name of Irishmen wherever they went in the world.

  But so it was. In the late 1800s, Dublin had become a cesspool, a bog of squalor, sickness, and vice. It not only had the highest rate of contagious disease but also the highest death rate of any city in Europe. Its citizens were pummeled with smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, typhus, whooping cough, diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis at a nearly unprecedented rate. While the upper classes fled to safer homes in England, the poor and the working classes were left to fend for themselves in a city the suffering of which reminds us of the most poverty-stricken regions of the Third World today.

  Much of this misery was due to overcrowding. Ever since the famines of the 1840s, pressing hordes of immigrants had swarmed into Dublin in hopes of escaping their troubled lives elsewhere. Many intended to find a boat that could carry them to a more promising life on distant shores. Yet once they arrived in Dublin, they usually found that such a voyage was too expensive or that space on the few ships was limited or even that foreign ports were closed to the Irish for fear of pestilence and disease. Dublin, then, became a dammed-up city of the poor, the weak, and the unwell.

  Conditions were more desperate than most outside of Ireland understood. One survey from the time showed that 33.9 percent of all families in Dublin lived in one-room dwellings. Sometimes, it was even worse. A medical officer in 1900 found that one house at No. 5 South Earle Street, designed as a single-family dwelling, was home instead to eleven families. This meant that as many as three to four dozen people shared a single toilet and a single water tap in the backyard. The potential for infection and even death from such conditions was greater than officials at first understood.

  These agonies fell upon women and children most of all. As an observer from the time reported,

  The city was packed, especially with destitute women and children, widowed, orphaned, abandoned, or left behind as the menfolk sought work in England. The large number of soldiers barracked in Dublin, and the high proportion of Irish soldiers in the British Army, brought its own problems: numbers of women, both married and unmarried, and their children, were left to fend for themselves when the soldiers were moved on, or returned to Dublin on the death or desertion of their soldier husbands.

  Ironically, much of the disease and misery that beset the lower classes was self-induced. Families routinely dumped waste and sewage into the River Liffey and then drew their drinking water from exactly the same place. This spread sickness at an exponential rate. Then there was the bedding. Most Irish families slept on straw that was rarely changed and was often covered only with dirty rags, both of which were nests for dangerous bacteria.

  The revered Irish tradition of waking the dead played a role in spreading disease, as well. Routinely, the body of a deceased loved one would lay in the family home for as many as four nights. Meanwhile, the grieving family was expected to provide food, drink, and tobacco for huge crowds of visitors who milled about the dead body and thus exposed themselves to whatever disease had killed the deceased. Making matters worse, this tradition had the tragic side effect of spreading poverty, a condition in which disease thrives. As Tony Corcoran has written in his tender tribute, The Goodness of Guinness, “even for the poorest Dublin family, a four-horse hearse constituted a show of respectability to the community—despite the fact that the family had to borrow heavily from moneylenders to finance the show.” Often, the grieving family could not repay their debts and so they would slide deeper into poverty and thus more deeply into the conditions in which disease and pestilence spread. Dublin was, as one historian has written, “a city of the damned.” Few outside of Ireland cared about these conditions and those who did seldom had the ability to make any difference.

  It was just as these matters were reaching their worst that an exceptional man became the chief medical officer at the Guinness brewery. His name was Doctor John Lumsden, and it would be his energy, his compassion, and his scientific inquiry that would allow Guinness to change lives by the thousands in Dublin and to break new ground in the growing field of corporate social responsibility.

  John Lumsden was, by all accounts, an extraordinary man. He was born on November 14, 1869, in Drogheda, County Louth, the only son in a family of five daughters. He attended medical school at the University of Dublin (Trinity College) and, after years in private practice and as a hospital physician, he came to Guinness a thirty-year-old doctor with radical ideas about public health care and the duty of corporations to the poor. That Guinness hired him at all shows its willingness to be stretched, to absorb ideas sometimes at odds with those that had guided its decisions in the past.

  Lumsden joined Guinness in 1894 as its assistant chief medical officer and then later, in 1899, was promoted to chief medical officer. It was a role he was eager to assume, for he had been inspired in his vision of what a society could do for its poor by a man he deeply admired, a man who had been contending with poverty in Dublin for more than twenty years.

  Dr. Charles Alexander Cameron was the Medical Officer of Health for the
city of Dublin. Like Lumsden, he, too, was an exceptional man. Born in 1830, Cameron was the son of an army officer who had fought in what Americans call the War of 1812. Cameron’s official biography calls it “the expedition against the United States in 1812.” Although the senior Cameron was wounded eight times in this conflict, he loved the military life and wanted his son to follow him. But the younger Cameron knew early that medicine and public health were his fields, and he chose to attend Dublin School of Medicine for his training.

  He would have a storied career, propelled as much by his groundbreaking articles on medical themes as by his devotion to public health. In 1862, he was elected public analyst for the city of Dublin. He became famous for enforcing a little-known measure, the Adulteration Act, and convicting more than fifty people of selling adulterated food. He was demonstrating what might be done to protect the health of Irishmen if their officials simply exercised the authority they already had.

  In 1874, he became the co-medical officer of health in Dublin and then later held the post alone when his associate retired. Cameron was a whirlwind of reform. His efforts resulted in the closing of nearly two thousand habitations he designated unfit for human beings; he worked to assure drastic improvements to thousands more. He also used his literary skill to draw attention to the social crises of his day and, in particular, to press the matter of adequate housing for the poor into the public mind. For these and many other successes, he was knighted in 1885 for “his services in the cause of public health.”

  Yet what inspired a younger generation of activists like Lumsden was Cameron’s way of first understanding and then articulating the crisis at hand. Though a gentleman, a medical doctor, and, eventually, a knight of the realm, Cameron did not hesitate to actually enter the homes of the poor, to walk the streets of blighted neighborhoods. This gave him the firsthand perspective other health officials lacked. And it also allowed him to speak in tender personal terms about the plight of the poor. “During the 32 years that I have been the Chief Health Officer of Dublin,” he once wrote, “I have seen much of the life amongst the poor and the very poor, and I have many remembrances of painful scenes that I have witnessed in their miserable homes.” This was unusual for an official in the Victorian age, as was Cameron’s respectful attitude toward the poor. Amazing his associates, who often showed a callous intolerance for the poverty-stricken, Cameron proclaimed, “I would like to bear testimony to the wonderful kindness which the poor show to those who are still poorer and more helpless than themselves.” This not only challenged a popular conception of the poor as lazy and indifferent, but it also extolled to the surprised members of his own class the virtue Cameron had found among the poor. This was exactly what Charles Dickens had attempted to do in his novels, but it was an unexpected perspective coming from a man of Cameron’s position.

  As Lumsden devoured Cameron’s writings, he would have read insightful analysis of Dublin’s economy. Of the limited jobs available in the city, Cameron wrote, for example, “Dublin is not much of a manufacturing city. Its importance is due to being the centre of the Local Government of Ireland, the seat of the Superior Courts of Law, the headquarters of the Medical Profession, and the Banking and Insurance business, the seat of two Universities, and its large business as a port. There is comparatively less work for females in Dublin than in most English towns.” Few thinkers in the field of public health had begun to perceive social ills in such a way, strategically linking a city’s economy, employment potential, and demographics into a model for public health. Lumsden listened and learned.

  He would have been moved, as well, by how Cameron could write of poverty in tender terms, of how he focused on the children as the most tortured victims of want:

  Thousands of children go with naked feet even in winter. The want of warm clothing in winter often lays the foundation of future delicacy, and renders them less liable to resist the attacks of disease. The want of good food and warm clothing often causes the fatal sequelae to attacks of measles. Amongst the rich this disease is rarely fatal; but the children of the poor offer up many victims to it—not only so much during the attack, but in bronchial and other infections which supervene as consequences of neglect, insufficient clothing and nourishment. The Police-Aided Society for Providing Clothes for Poor Children performs good work in Dublin, and deserves more support than it receives from the general public.

  This was compassion and scientific analysis blended in a way that was rare and certainly stirring to Lumsden, but it would be Cameron’s conclusions about poverty in Dublin that would ignite the young firebrand most of all.

  It is not in the power of the Sanitary Authorities to remove many of the evils from which the poor suffer. They cannot augment their deficient earnings: they can only employ a very small proportion of them as labourers in the various civic departments. They can, however, soften the hard conditions under which the poor, especially the very poor, exist. How? By providing them with homes superior to those they now have, without increasing their rents. The most urgent want of the labourers and the poorer tradesmen is better dwellings. This is a measure that should be carried out liberally.

  Here, in the kind of tough-minded analysis that the crisis demanded, was the mandate for action men like Lumsden required. He wanted to serve the common good and use his skills to alleviate the suffering in his city. But how could he do it? People around him urged solutions that ranged from the sentimental and ineffective to the radical and impossible to achieve. Lumsden did not want to chase dreams: he wanted to make a difference. And Cameron showed him how. In the crammed slums of Dublin, housing was the key to public health. There was only so much officials could do about employment and pay, but housing and sanitary living? Here was a cause a brilliant young doctor could make his own.

  Lumsden wasted little time once he became the chief medical officer at Guinness in 1899. Within a year, he decided he must do among the workers at Guinness and in the neighborhoods surrounding the brewery exactly what Cameron had done among the larger body of the poor in Dublin: enter their homes and learn of the situation for himself. His speed and intensity must have stunned the Guinness board. Writing them for permission to execute his plan, the young doctor explained, “It is with a deep sense of duty that I venture to bring under your notice the subject of tuberculosis, its prevention and treatment among your employees and their families.” His intention, he told them, was to attempt to visit the home of every Guinness worker as soon as possible. He also wanted to enter as many as possible of the homes that surrounded the brewery grounds. It was a massive proposal—nearly three thousand people were employed by Guinness at the time and these would have represented thousands more family members. This meant hundreds and hundreds of homes had to be visited. And these numbers did not include the hundreds of non-Guinness homes near the brewery.

  The proposal must have given the Guinness board pause. As experienced men in business who were used to thinking in terms of strategy and future planning, they could see what was coming. Dr. Lumsden did not plan this survey of homes simply to gather data. He was sure to return at the conclusion with ideas for change, with plans for ways that Guinness could spend money to alleviate suffering. They knew Dr. Lumsden was going to cost them— and cost them dearly.

  And yet they approved the young doctor’s plan. Perhaps it was because they knew the time for broader reform had come. Or perhaps they had wanted to make a greater difference in the suffering of their time but didn’t know quite how. Then again, it may have simply been the persuasiveness of the young doctor. He had worked for them for more than five years and was beloved throughout the workforce. Since the infirmary he manned was in Thomas Court, right in the heart of the tenement houses, the workers knew him, trusted him, and held the capable young doctor in a regard that must have reached the ears of the board. All of this surely shaped their decision to support Lumsden’s plan.

  Typical of his profession, Lumsden prepared carefully. As he later reported, “a considerable
time was taken up prior to the inspection in obtaining the necessary information from the various departments as to the correct addresses of the employees.” The workers were informed, the staff was prepared, and the plan was launched.

  The visitations began on November 17, 1900, and were concluded on January 17, 1901. Of these approximately 60 days, Lumsden visited homes on 48 of them, often working Saturdays and always forced to work only during daylight hours, since the homes did not have electricity.

  He averaged 36.5 homes a day. By the time he was done, he had visited 1,752 residences, which represented some 2,287 employees. These employees, in turn, represented more than 7,343 dependents.

  Interestingly, only one worker refused to allow Lumsden into his home and, though this was an amazing success rate, the slightly miffed doctor included the almost humorous incident in his final report: “In only one instance did I fail to gain admission to a house, viz., that of a gate porter, who holds strong socialist views—a flat refusal of admission being given to me—not from any personal motive but on the grounds of principle. He held that it was no business of an employer how or where his servant lived. I wasted no words on him, but passed on to the next.”

  Lumsden’s analysis of workers’ houses was less amusing, though. He found that nearly 35 percent of the homes he visited were inadequate for use. His descriptions are wrenching. The houses, he wrote to the board, “are dens of disease . . . so impregnated with filth and so utterly rotten that they should be regarded as unfit for human habitation.” In the depictions of squalor that follow he described solid excrement soiling stairways, sickening stench, the inadequacy of water supply, alcoholism, and rooms so vile he could hardly enter. The phrases that fall from Lumsden’s pen are vivid and laced with anger: “squalid, miserable and unhealthy,” “dirty personal habits,” “bad management,” “unworthy,” “fever nests.”