The Search for God and Guinness

by Stephen Mansfield

  What Guinness did attempt to do, though, was to support its young medical officer, who was now aflame with a passion to transform lives tormented by the cruelties of the industrial age. In this, they may have received the better deal, for once John Lumsden understood that there would be no Guinness model community in the countryside of Ireland, he threw himself into the cause of making the Guinness brewery, at the heart of Dublin’s urban center, a model of the caring, innovative corporate community.

  Between his tour of resorts in 1905 and the onset of World War I, John Lumsden transformed himself into a one-man army of reform. To their credit, the Guinness board stood by him. There was nothing that touched the well-being of Guinness workers that the doctor did not make his concern. He started programs, lobbied for funds, lectured, cajoled, and wrote instructional material by the ream. As a result of his labors, Guinness gained a reputation for care of its employees that rivaled any other company in the world, and did so from the heart of Dublin, notorious as the most unsanitary and deadly city in Europe.

  It is thrilling to look back on Lumsden’s labors those years ago and to consider in how many matters he was ahead of his time. He was an early advocate of breast-feeding, for example, and worked hard, along with his staff, to teach women that breast milk was more nutritious than powdered milk formula and that breast-feeding also served as a natural—and church approved—form of birth control. To win victories for this cause, he lectured, wrote pamphlets, and urged his nurses to gently help new mothers make this practice their own.

  He came to understand that many troubles arose from bad financial management, so in 1903 he convinced a small group of workers’ wives to keep diaries of their income and expenses. From this he learned not only where a typical worker’s money went but also what the average family diet was, how alcohol impacted a husband’s spending, and how the habits of generosity among Guinness workers were more pronounced than he thought.

  All of this data allowed him to improve services to workers. Yet, like a good reformer, he also probed data from past eras at Guinness to understand the trends. One report he read, which dated from 1880, revealed that 44 percent of the deaths at the time were due to tuberculosis. Smallpox, typhus, and typhoid were also leading killers at that time. Dr. Lumsden may not have been surprised—as we certainly are—that the medication prescribed that year included 764 bottles of wine, 535 bottles of whiskey, and 213 bottles of brandy!

  Armed with data from the past and the present, he was able to update Guinness’s medical services. He hired well-trained staff, purchased the best equipment, and expanded the arena of his concerns well beyond tending the sick to assuring the conditions that made for healthy workers, whole families, and thriving, nurturing neighborhoods. In his wake he left athletic unions and playing fields, swimming pools and reading rooms, parks and awards for excellence for nearly every skill related to health, homemaking, and professional development.

  Though nearly all of his efforts have had lasting results, one of his projects in particular has touched many more lives through the years than he could have dreamed. As he began creating a healthier, safer environment at the brewery, he started teaching first-aid classes to Guinness workers. The brewery men loved these classes, as it gave them confidence in dealing with the wounds that routinely arose in their work. These classes were so popular, in fact, that these men later became the first registered division of the St. John Ambulance Brigade in Ireland. This connected Dr. Lumsden and St. James’s Gate, as well as health care in Ireland, to the larger St. John Ambulance Association that had been founded in England in 1877 as a unifying organization for first aid and ambulance services.

  The Irish Division of the St. John Ambulance played a storied role in many of Ireland’s conflicts in the early twentieth century. During the general strike of 1913, the Easter Rising in 1916, and the Irish Civil War—conflicts Americans may know best from the movie Michael Collins starring Liam Neeson—members of Dr. Lumsden’s brigade were a frequent sight, impartially tending the wounded from both sides of each violent episode and often saving lives with techniques that Lumsden had devised during his years at Guinness. In fact, many a soldier remembered that it was Dr. Lumsden himself whom they saw carrying a white flag in one hand and his medical bag in the other as he ran into the middle of a firefight to care for fallen men. Combatants learned to hold their fire as the esteemed doctor bandaged wounds and carried bleeding men from the field. It was an image that they seldom forgot, and made them believe— even in the heat of battle—that a better day might be possible for their troubled land. For this contribution and for his formation of the St. John Ambulance Society of Ireland, Dr. Lumsden was knighted by King George V, and seldom has the honor been as well deserved.

  It is hard to exaggerate the good that John Lumsden accomplished in his life, both for Guinness and for Ireland as a whole. Yet some sense of his impact, both his and the benevolent culture of the Guinness clan, is evident in the life of a Dublin merchant today. His name is Malvin and he is in his sixties, but he remembers the story that has come down through his family line. It seems that his grandfather was working at the Guinness brewery one day in 1926 and happened to get his shoulder caught between two of the famous custom rail cars. The shoulder was horribly crushed and the blood spurting wildly indicated to nearby workers that the artery had been cut, usually an almost certain sign of death. But a few of the men looking on that day had listened closely when young Dr. Lumsden taught them first aid and they knew what to do. Knocking the panicked man to the ground, they stopped the bleeding, worked to prevent shock, and carried the man quickly to the infirmary, having bound the wound as they had been taught. And Malvin’s grandfather lived. And he married. And he was able to tell his grandson this story years later as the two fished together off the pier at Howth.

  The Iveagh Play Centre opened in 1915 to provide after-school care and education for Dublin’s poor.

  Approximately 900 children, ages three to fourteen, attended.

  There are thousands of stories like this and from them we get some sense of what Dr. Lumsden did. But we must remember that he could not have done it alone. He needed a culture of generosity and social concern from which to work. He needed wise men to stand with him and to take risks on his innovative ideas. And he needed an arena in which he was trusted, where he could work out the procedures and techniques that would save human lives. This, then, is what Guinness gave him. And this is one small example of the good that wealth can do.

  5

  THE GUINNESSES FOR GOD

  I have to confess that the title of this chapter bothers me and it isn’t because it sounds too pious or because I’m afraid the God theme might turn the nonreligious away. No, it is because of a deeper theological issue, one that I think is critically important to what we believe about our lives in this world.

  Historians of the Guinness saga tend to divide the family into three lines. There are the “brewing Guinnesses,” of course, who are the best known due to their connection to the wildly popular global brand. There are also the “banking Guinnesses,” who descend from Samuel Guinness, brother of the first Arthur, and have grown an empire that began with goldbeating in the 1700s and continues in global high finance today.

  Then there is the line that Guinness historians tend to call the “Guinnesses for God.” These descend from John Grattan Guinness, the youngest son of First Arthur, and continue through the centuries in lives so turned to God and so given to adventures of faith that, as Frederic Mullally has written in his thrilling The Silver Salver: The Story of the Guinness Family, they make the other Guinness lines “seem almost pedestrian.”

  It is true: the story of this deeply Christian line, of its missionaries and ministers who changed entire nations, is as delightful and challenging as any. Yet using the words Guinnesses for God seems to suggest that the other Guinnesses were somehow apart from God, or that perhaps they pursued far different gods from those worshipped by their relations. The banking Guinne
sses are even called “Guinnesses for Gold” by some historians, as though they worshipped filthy lucre while their cousins sat piously in church. This is more than a matter of my preference for certain words: it is a theological matter that touches one of the great themes in the history of Christianity.

  At the heart of the matter is whether work that is not specifically religious can be work done for the glory of God. Another equally important question is whether God calls men to trades and to vocations in this world as part of his unfolding plan or whether these common occupations are too mundane to be included in his will.

  These are questions that theologians have grappled with throughout church history. The matter really comes down to how we determine what is holy: in other words, what in this world is set apart for God. In the early centuries of Christianity, the church was forced to continually define itself as distinct from pagan society and this established a simple line of division: the church, its ministers, and even its physical property were holy and everything else wasn’t. This thinking continued into the late Middle Ages, but by then it became extreme. There was the world and there was the church and the two were seen as completely different and always at odds. So distinct was the church from the world that a man could literally step over a fence or a line drawn on the ground and find himself stepping from the holy to the profane. The problem became, though, that the daily lives of men were not considered part of the holy. They were part of the secular world, separated from the church and sometimes even from God. Daily work and family, laughter with friends, even the wonders of nature were viewed by many church leaders as separate from more lofty “heavenly things.”

  Reformation leaders like Luther and Calvin, writing in the 1500s, knew that this was not what scripture taught. They insisted, instead, that God called men not just to offices in the church but to every kind of labor and trade. So in their thinking, the farmer was no less holy than the priest, the innkeeper no less ordained by God than the bishop. As Luther wrote, “What seem to be secular works are actually the praise of God and represent an obedience which is well-pleasing to him.”

  The Reformers also taught that while God did not want men to be worldly in character, he nevertheless called them to be active in the world in order to fulfill his will. So, rather than teaching, as the Roman Catholic Church did, that the further removed from society a man remained the more holy he was, the Reformers taught that holiness was a matter of conformity to the image of Jesus, which a man ought to exercise as openly in the world as possible. In other words, the Christian shopkeeper or candle maker served his God while he plied his trade as Jesus would—with skill, with excellence, with morality, and with joy. This would do more good in the world than a thousand monks hidden away in monasteries, so the Reformers believed. As Luther expressed in his usual blunt fashion, done to the glory of God, even “household chores are more to be valued than all the works of monks and nuns.”

  The Reformers, then, pulled down the artificial distinction between the sacred and the secular and sent men into the world to serve God by using their skills and trades in his honor. This Protestant ethos of work found its way into the lives of the Guinnesses through the deeply reformed faith of the first Arthur Guinness and certain of his descendants. Many of them understood that brewing could be done as a holy offering, as a craft yielded in the service of God. They did not see themselves as secular, but rather as called. They did not see themselves as apart from Christian ministry, but rather as in the Christian ministry of industry and trade. They did not think of their brewing work as a menial way to pay the bills, hoping that they might compensate for such worldliness by giving occasional service to the church. No, they had absorbed the great Reformation ideal that everything a man did was to be done for God and that his calling and his vocation were usually the same thing. They understood that this transformed workbenches into altars and the labor of a man’s hands into liturgies pleasing to God.

  So while I identify closely with the line of Guinnesses who were missionaries and ministers, I hesitate to think of them as any more connected to God than the other lines. A banker can be as called and as pleasing to God as Billy Graham may be when he preaches. A brewer can serve as valuable a role in the kingdom of God as a missionary, a priest, or a pope. This is the truth of Christianity and this, too, is a core truth of the Guinness story. It explains much of Guinness spirit; much of their success and the good that they have chosen to do in the world.

  I have skipped over the tale of one of the first Arthur’s children and I have done it on purpose so that we could capture the wonder of it here. It is the tale of John Grattan Guinness, the youngest son of First Arthur, the one that he and his wife, Olivia, probably worried about and prayed for the most.

  Children are their own, unique creatures but they carry a piece of their parents with them in their souls. Together, all the children of a family reflect the sum of who their parents are, just as a prism reflects all the tones of the light; but each of them individually reflects only a part of the whole and this is often what makes each individual child such a fascinating extension of his or her parents’ lives.

  If this is so, John Grattan Guinness carried the wilder, more passionate side of First Arthur. Hosea, the oldest son and clergyman, would have reflected his father’s faith. Second Arthur would have evidenced his father’s steady hand, his managerial skill, and the wisdom that allowed him to lift a brewery to success. And so it would have been through the lives of all the children.

  This tenth child, John Grattan, reflected the version of Arthur that we see in the story in which Arthur takes up a pickaxe and “with very much improper language” tells a sheriff he will not shut down his brewery’s water supply. This is Arthur the fighter, Arthur the man fed up with bureaucrats and those who would stand in his way. This is the part of the Arthur spirit that filled John Grattan Guinness.

  He was certainly the most strikingly handsome of Arthur’s sons and this, as we know, often leads to trouble. But he was also reckless and adventurous, sometimes foolishly so. Perhaps he wearied of the staid lifestyle of his upper-class family. Perhaps he simply did not want his daunting father and doting brothers and sisters to tell him what to do. Or perhaps something more eternal struggled in his soul. Whatever the case, he seemed ever willing to crash out of the mold, to defy the family norm.

  Born in 1783, by the age of fifteen he had already nearly been killed. When Catholic workers rose up in 1798 to establish an Irish Republic in imitation of the French revolutionaries, John wanted to join his brothers in putting the rebellion down. Told he was too young, he snuck away to fight anyway and was wounded on an errand to deliver secret dispatches.

  What followed was the kind of clash of wills in which destinies are fashioned. Having tasted adventure, John declared that the brewer’s life was not for him and that he intended to join the army. His father, Arthur, realizing he could not persuade the boy, was probably relieved. The army was a good life and not that unusual for the younger sons of wealthy men. Arthur must have put his hopes in what the army might do for his wildest child. We can almost hear him offering his son to God as the willful young man sailed off to join the English army in India.

  John Grattan Guinness would spend his next years under the command of the legendary Irish soldier Arthur Wellesley, enforcing peace among the warring princely states in that torturously hot land. There were long weeks of pursuing rogue rajas across hundreds of miles of hostile territory. The fiery days and frozen nights wore a man down. As did fear. English soldiers who were caught had nails driven into their skulls or their necks wrung by Hindu strongmen known as Jetties. The British almost always prevailed, but the price to each man’s health and spirit was dear.

  John Grattan garrisoned at Seringapatam for many years and found that his greatest burden was not the enemy but the behavior of his fellow officers. Their drunken, quarreling, bullying ways were offensive to John, raised in refinement and Christian values as he was. He could not stomach the l
ooting and the debauchery that the other officers allowed and this soon sent him into a season of soul-searching that would ultimately refocus his life.

  Before this occurred, though, he was nearly ruined by his naïveté and his trust in his brothers in financial matters. His brother Edward contacted him about this time and told him of his plan to build a large ironworks at Palmerston and Lucan. But Edward did not have enough money and wondered if John might want to invest his inheritance— the £1,500 left to him in their father’s will—in the plan. Edward promised that by the time John was in need of it, his money would have doubled, given the sure success of his plan.

  Home on leave in 1810, John found a reason to claim his share. He had met Susanna Hutton, the daughter of a respected Dublin alderman, and decided to marry her. But he soon learned that Edward was just what his father had suspected: as foolish in matters of business as he was errant in matters of faith. The ironworks had failed and John’s £1,500 were gone. It was a terrible blow. It meant that John had to take his new bride with him back to India and endure many more years of searing duty in that still unbroken land.

  Yet it is often in discomfort that transitions of the soul are made, and this was true of John Grattan Guinness in the years that followed. Though in Ireland the evangelical message and its Wesleyan expressions were opposed and suppressed, in India many a fellow officer had absorbed this new type of faith and taken it to heart. John Grattan heard deep Christian truth from men he admired, men who chased their enemies with ferocity during the day and then prayed for a deeper love of Christ by their bedsides at night. As they shared their spiritual passions with Captain Guinness in the officers’ mess, he was drawn in and soon reported in letters home that he had been “born again.” India gave him time to grow in his new commitment and to deepen in it with his wife, Susanna, who became one with her husband in spiritual matters.