As with most great ventures in history, the times were perfectly prepared. Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey were making a second tour through England—during which they were hosted by the Guinnesses—and religious fervor was higher than it had been at any time since Wesley and Whitefield. Once again, as in the early days of Henry’s ministry, thousands were converted, churches overflowed, and many offered their lives in Christian service. This meant a backlog of students for the Guinnesses’ school, which came to be known as Harley House. In the spiritual zeal of the time, huge contributions flooded in. There was a ship, christened Evangelist, which was donated for ministry to crews on the docks. One wealthy man signed over his Derbyshire mansion and this became a school as well as a base for Barnardo’s thriving work. And before long, land and buildings were donated for a Harley College, which became so successful it served as a model for Moody Bible College in the United States.
Fanny Guinness and children
With men like Barnardo and Guinness living and ministering in the midst of its squalor, London’s East End gained a reputation as a center of radical, nonconformist Christianity. This community of faith has been called an “Empire of Christian social concern in London’s East End” and so vibrant was its flame that it lit still other torches around the world. Visitors to the Guinness home included Aimee Semple McPherson, Dwight Moody, General William Booth (founder of the Salvation Army), and even Lord Shaftesbury himself.
More important were the trained Christian workers dispatched to the unevangelized nations of the world. There were workers for China, of course, but also for Africa, since the adventures of David Livingstone and Henry Stanley along Lake Tanganyika—“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”— had awakened Victorian missionary zeal. Indeed, as the twentieth century dawned, churches and mission stations in a hundred nations of the world bore testimony to the Guinness work at Harley House and College, much as the changed lives of thousands of orphans gave testament to the work of Barnardo, their friend.
As he neared the later years of his life, then, Henry Guinness was regarded as one of the great preachers of his age and as an innovator in Christian education. Yet as the new century drew near, many of his admirers came to know him best as a profound Christian author, one of the most important writers on Christian prophecy in his time. In this, too, he had profound impact, even on some of the most critical events of world history just about to unfold.
Though he had never finished college and once feared the loss of spiritual zeal if he gave himself to too much study, Henry had already begun to be a noted author when he likely deepened his commitment to Christian scholarship during a walk he took in 1886. His daughter, Lucy, later recounted the moment in her book, For Such a Time:
Walking along the dreary street of a Yorkshire town, he paused to read a notice newly posted on the wall of a house. With his hands clasped behind his back, his high-crowned hat pushed to the back of his head, he read the poster with mounting indignation. It announced a series of lectures to be held in the neighborhood when a famous infidel would attack the character of Christ and the authority of the Bible.
The infidel was Charles Darwin, recent author of On the Origin of the Species. Though 50 percent of the population was illiterate and thus immune to the case Darwin would make, Henry feared that the rest of society, the thinkers and the upper classes, would take this man’s ideas as true. He was appalled by the idea of an unplanned, unsustained creation used to imply atheistic conclusions. He altered his preaching schedule, read every book he could find that might answer Darwin’s claims, and began teaching his students how to answer what he considered to be the most insidious lie of his age. Henry believed that while superstition and false religion might be the blinding force to the Christian gospel in China, it was pseudoscience that sought to win the day in England—and the church was largely unequipped to give an answer.
His reading in biblical history led him on to other topics, including biblical prophecy, which fascinated him. He became enthralled with the writing of the Swiss astronomer Jean-Philippe Loys de Chéseaux, who argued that if each day in the prophetic periods described by Daniel and in the book of Revelation were taken as a year, the resulting scheme fit perfectly with the astronomic cycles most astronomers knew to be true. Henry threw himself into further study in the field and reported his ideas to the world in his best-selling book The Approaching End of the Age in Light of History, Prophecy and Science. His work was so impressive—with its six-hundred-page appendix on astronomy—that it went through fourteen editions, earned Henry the Doctor of Divinity, and resulted in his election to the Royal Astronomical Society.
In an already busy life, Henry Guinness would write more than twenty books, but perhaps none had a result equal to Light for the Last Days, published in 1886. As Frederic Mullally has explained, “He pinpointed 604 BC as a principal starting point of ‘The Times of the Gentiles.’ Measuring from that date, and from the starting point of the Mohammedan Calendar in AD 622, he calculated that ‘the year 1917 is consequently doubly indicated as a final crisis date . . . clearly most critical in connection with Israel.’”
It was in 1917, of course, that British general Sir Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem after four hundred years of Ottoman rule. Just months before this historic accomplishment, in June, Allenby was at the Grosvenor Hotel in London when he received a phone call from Sir Henry de Beauvoir de Lisle, a major-general in the British army, to congratulate him on his promotion to commander-in-chief. During the conversation, de Lisle made the point of saying, “Nothing can prevent you being in Jerusalem by 31 December.” Allenby, surprised by the statement, asked, “How do you make that out?” It was then that de Lisle told the new commander of Dr. Henry Grattan Guinness’s predictions in Light for the Last Days.
Jerusalem fell on December 9 of that year. Two days later, General Allenby entered Jerusalem, the first Christian commander to control the city in centuries. Though he was an excellent horseman, Allenby chose to dismount as he passed through the ancient city gates, in honor of Jesus Christ, whom Allenby believed was the only ruler with the right to ride into the city. Clearly, he had the predictions of Reverend Henry Guinness in mind as he did.
As astute as Henry Guinness’s predictions about 1917 were, his writings about the restoration of the Jews were even more startling. Few living in his day would have expected that there might ever be a restoration of the Jews to their homeland in 1948. True, there were those who thought it the best policy for England (Lord Shaftesbury was one of the most vocal among these), but it was nearly inconceivable for most men at the time. Yet Henry Grattan Guinness, writing nearly sixty years before the event, predicted the miraculous event of 1948 when Israel again became a nation. This remains one of the most prescient works of an author in history.
It would have pleased Henry very much to know the role his writings played in the liberation of Jerusalem and then, later, in the restoration of the Jews to Israel, but if he heard of it at all it was in another life. He had died in 1910, one of the most revered men of his age.
His last decades had been as tumultuous as his early ones. His beloved Fanny, often in ill health, had suffered a stroke in 1892 that left her disabled until her death in 1898. Henry was still a vigorous man, then—trim, energetic, and lion-like with his great head of brilliant white hair. He clearly had no intentions of slowing down. He eventually married the twenty-six-year-old Grace Hurditch, daughter of a lifelong friend, and then set out with her on a five-year preaching tour around the world. Armed with letters of introduction, Henry preached in England and then visited the United States before ministering at length in Asia. In Australia, his first son with Grace, John Christopher, was born, and shortly after returning to England his second son, Paul Grattan, came into the world in 1908. Henry was already in his seventies at the time. Of his children with Fanny, three had died in infancy and one was stillborn. Of those that survived—Harry, Geraldine, Lucy, and Whitfield—all were now in their thirties and forties and deepl
y committed to missionary work.
If a man can be measured by his children and his grandchildren, then Henry Grattan Guinness did indeed lead a life of worth and honor. His oldest son, Harry, was a missionary/ statesman who worked against cruel European exploitation in the Belgian Congo. His efforts led to audiences with King Leopold and President Theodore Roosevelt and changed that region of Africa forever. Henry’s daughter, Lucy, proved to be a brilliant writer and eager adventurer. Though she died early of septicemia, she left two sons who extended her legacy. Henry, the older, was a Rockefeller Foundation research doctor and later a president of the Polio Foundation of America. Karl was an ordained American Episcopal priest who served as a chaplain in the U.S. armed forces.
Geraldine, Henry’s older daughter, married J. Hudson Taylor’s son and spent her life working for China Inland Mission, influencing an entire generation of female missionaries. She was joined in her service in China by her brother, Dr. Whitfield Guinness. Geraldine would write the seminal biography of her father-in-law, The Life of Hudson Taylor, among other highly praised books, and she and her brother would serve the cause of their God in China in the face of persecution, war, disease, and death for decades to come.
The line of the faithful would continue. Among Henry Grattan Guinness’s grandchildren would be Christian ministers and missionary medical doctors and Christian schoolmasters and Royal Air Force chaplains and missionaries to Asia, to name but a few of the careers in which these latter-day Guinnesses honored God. And the faith would live on in the great-grandchildren’s time, as well, in champions of faith who reflect their great-grandfather’s fire to this day.
But where, we should ask, did it all begin? How did it come to pass that one in ten of Arthur Guinness’s children would give birth to a line of devoted Christians that would change the history of nations with their faith?
It is, unfortunately, impossible to say. But perhaps it came from something kindled in the first Arthur’s heart. Perhaps as he listened to Wesley or worked to start Sunday schools in Ireland or fought for Catholic equality—perhaps during one of these moments something ignited in his soul. And perhaps, in a way we cannot know with certainty, that flame burned first in the heart of his soldier son and then came to full blaze in the life of his famed preacher grandson. Then, it is not hard to imagine, Guinnesses for a century after might well have lit their generational torches with the help of this flame. And so it continues through our time.
Again, we cannot know for sure. But we can know that this line of Guinnesses was the most distinct of all, as the tribute offered them by one historian makes clear.
Henry Grattan Guinness and Grace
As the 19th century drew to a close, the disparate branches of the Guinness family—brewers, bankers, and missionaries— were vigorously pursuing their varied interests in virtually every corner of the globe. A triple-stout Guinness beer, “West Indies Porter,” had long since been lightening the white man’s burden in the Caribbean and in a dozen other colonies of the far-flung British Empire. Banker Richard Seymour and his son Benjamin were in correspondence or personal contact with a network of overseas financial institutions, wherever an honest buck was to be made. But neither of these branches could match, in adventurousness and energy, the deeds of the “Grattan” Guinnesses, spurred as they were not by materialistic ambition but by a deeply felt, inherited faith in what they believe to be the civilizing power of the Bible.
St. Stephen’s Green, a private park, was relandscaped and gifted to the public by Arthur Edward Guinness in 1880.
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TWENTIETH-CENTURY GUINNESS
It is difficult for our present, fast-paced age to understand how disorienting the speed of change must have been for that nineteenth-century generation that was forced to finish their lives in the twentieth century. Perhaps the life of one man tells the tale.
Consider the life of Winston Churchill. He was born in 1874. Men still lived who had fought Napoleon. Ulysses S. Grant was in his second term as the American president and Karl Marx was just then in the British Library writing the Communist Manifesto. Mark Twain had written none of the books for which he had become famous. Electricity, radio, television, and telephones were still unknown and only the year before Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Rutgers universities had met to draw up the first rules for a new game. It was called “football.”
When Churchill died ninety years later in 1965, men had orbited the earth, walked in space, and sent a probe to the surface of Venus. An automobile had already driven over six hundred miles per hour and sex-change operations had been successfully performed. Nuclear power had already come of age. Lyndon Johnson was the American president at that time and though he was considered an elderly man, he had been born when Churchill was already thirty-four. The year Churchill died, the Queen of England gave the Order of the British Empire to the Beatles. It was an honor Churchill had also received, yet for a far different contribution in a far different age.
How does one life absorb such change? What must it do to one’s moorings, to that sense of connection to the flow of time and how a man experiences the rhythms of the world? Clearly, this was an ever-present challenge in Churchill’s life and it frequently filled his thoughts: “I wonder often whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.”
Churchill’s words force us to ponder Guinness and what it must have been like for this thriving global firm to be suddenly caught up in the raging currents of change just as the twentieth century dawned. The Guinness family and the workers at the plant could have anticipated none of it, of course—not the wars or the technological leaps or the moral revolutions that would challenge everything they had known. Yet it seems that one of the great arts of living is to approach the onrushing future with such courage and flexibility that the power of change elevates, emboldens, and enlightens. Guinness modeled this art and it provides an example for our own age, when the pace of change more often seems poised to crush us than to lift us to greater heights.
As Guinness stepped into what appeared to be a promising new century, it had risen above all others to become the largest brewing company in the world. It employed more than 3,000 workers, with another 10,000 indirectly dependent on her production. The company’s growth in the first years of the 1900s was beyond all expectation. In 1888, it had produced some 1.58 million barrels of beer; in 1899, this rose to 2.08 million. Yet in 1909, volume reached 2.77 million, and in 1914, just as the darks clouds of war were gathering in Europe, Guinness produced 3.54 million barrels. It was, simply put, the largest, the most productive, and the most prosperous producer of beer in human history.
Much of the company’s success was due to the unique relationship of Guinness to the pubs that sold its product. Most of the pubs in Britain were brewery-owned establishments. These were called “tied” pubs, meaning they only sold the beer brewed by the firm that owned them. But Guinness was a “guest” beer, which meant that it could be sold both at the tied houses and at free pubs, which were unaffiliated with any brewery and could sell whatever beer the proprietor chose. Guinness, then, had access to the entire pub market without being burdened by owning and operating pubs itself. It was a gift of the regard in which it was held by the beer-drinking public, and the fruit of a wise choice to stay focused on what the company did best: brew beer.
As Guinness underwent this dramatic expansion, the board—chaired by Edward Cecil—became concerned about the quality of their exports and by how local agents were handling their product. In an age before rapid electronic communications, the best solution seemed to be to send men abroad to follow up on everything from shipping to sales throughout the world. Thus arose the season of the “Guinness World Traveller.” Beginning in the early 1890s and continuing until World War I m
ade such travel impossible, Guinness sent trusted men wherever its beer was sold to report back on any fact that might help the company improve on procedures and sales. Two men became legends in this role. J. C. Haines, a former brewer himself, became the World Traveller to Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. Arthur T. Shand traveled throughout the United States, Canada, Latin America, South Africa, and helped Haines with Australia.
It was an odd life. The two were away from home for months, even years at a time. They had to be meticulous, record-keeping men who were intensely loyal to the firm, while able to spend weeks at a time traveling alone. Their assignment was to record everything they could about how Guinness was shipped, how it was affected by climate, how it was sold at shops and pubs around the world, and what might be improved in bottling, labeling, marketing, and, of course, local brewing. The board also requested that the two men send home bottles of Guinness as they traveled so that they could see for themselves what agents abroad did to the Guinness product.
The journals and reports of Haines and Shand provide a window into both the turn-of-the-century beer trade and into the wider world at the time. There are detailed reports of “beer blowage,” meaning the common experience of bottles exploding during shipping, and nearly poetic descriptions of Guinness casks strapped to loping camels and colorful accounts of turbaned Arabs drinking stout. What arise from nearly each page are the professionalism and great care these men poured into their work. Nothing was beyond their observation and reflection, as evidenced from this portion of Haines’s report from Australia.
The Search for God and Guinness Page 16