The Search for God and Guinness

by Stephen Mansfield

  No bursts and only the odd blower or two. The few breakages were due to too tight packing with insufficient straw. My experience has been that the straw envelopes are the best form of packing and the boxes should be made so that “spring” is allowed. When a box is packed so tight as to be nearly solid, a sudden jar on an end or corner invariably breaks a bottle or two. Once leakage sets in, the damp starts fermentation in the straw which generates heat and things go from bad to worse.

  What we see from the writings of these men is an example of the kind of devotion to work and craft that was common at Guinness at the time. Men took pride in their skills and felt their area of responsibility nearly a sacred trust. They spoke of the minutest detail of a process related to brewing as though it was of utmost importance, as though each was a critical part of a vitally significant whole. It is inspiring to read of it. Haines and Shand were grand Victorian men who did not see their work as merely a source of income or something aside from the more important matters of life. Instead, they saw their work as an extension of their character, as a statement of what kind of men they were. A man’s profession was where he demonstrated to the world who he was, and why he deserved the things his labors allowed him to possess. It was a far different age from ours and with far different values regarding work, but it is refreshing to read the words of these men, sometimes half a world from home, tending the smallest matter of a label or the design of a bottle or the angle of a sign out of devotion to their bosses in Dublin and, perhaps as important, out of a healthy regard for themselves and their trusted place in the world.

  The reach of Guinness during this period was nearly absurd. When an Antarctic expedition in 1933 returned to the site of an earlier expedition in 1929, a member of the team reported that at the abandoned station “there were also four bottles of Guinness on a shelf, which, although frozen, were put to excellent use.” Ralph Patteson Cobbold, the famed British explorer, even found Guinness on sale in the Hindu Kush range of the Pamir Mountains in Central Asia. In his Innermost Asia: Travel and Sports in the Pamirs, Cobbold wrote, “I directed my attention to a wine and spirit store where I spied, gently to my delight, the magic harp of Guinness inscribed on imperial pints of stout. The price was stiff—eight shillings a bottle—but it didn’t seem exorbitant when one considered the distance it had traveled from its native land. The stout was excellent.”

  Feeling the optimism of the age and of its own success, Guinness began to prepare for even greater growth. The board funded continuous expansion at St. James’s Gate and also decided to purchase a fleet of steamships for conveying its product to strategic ports. In 1913, the W. M. Barkley was built and the Carrowdore was purchased. A year later, in 1914, the Clareisland and Clarecastle were begun with hopes that they could be launched in 1915. At about the same time, Edward Cecil purchased a hundred-acre plot along the Manchester Ship Canal, where he intended to build a second brewery of massive proportions. His plan, as he explained it to the board, was to build a plant so huge that it would be able to produce four times as much brew as the St. James’s Gate plant had in 1912. It was a grand scheme, fit for the promise of the new century and bolstered by the record-breaking pace of Guinness’s explosive growth.

  Yet, as with so many plans and hopes at the time, few of these aims were achieved. War cruelly intervened, with a ferocity that none could ever have imagined. In the fall of 1914, what poets later called the “guns of August” began to spew death, and before they were silenced four years later, more than ten million men had died and more than twice that number had been wounded. It would mean the loss of a generation of European manhood and an equally tragic loss of tradition, hope, and faith for decades after. When it was done, it had solved little but it had confirmed the follies of a dying age to those who came to be known as “the lost generation.”

  Crisis once again forced the Guinness corporate values to the surface. In an astonishingly gracious move, the firm promised to hold the job of any man who enlisted in the armed forces and to pay him half his salary while he served. This kept wives and children at home from suffering financially and allowed men in uniform to focus on their fight rather than suffer distraction from fear for their families’ well-being.

  Some one hundred men volunteered immediately as part of the St. James’s Gate Division of the St. John Ambulance Brigade and more than five hundred enlisted soon afterward. This meant that the brewery lost nearly 20 percent of its workforce, and it anticipated still other declines to come. Though the firm had been experiencing unprecedented growth in the years leading up to the war, sales dropped 10 percent for the first two years of the conflict. By 1917, though, sales were half what they had been before the war. Challenges in production plagued the firm. Raw materials were scarce and the price of barley skyrocketed because war needs converted barley fields to wheat fields instead. It was a horrible time, both because of the war and because of the firm’s decline at home; board members feared that the challenges might set the company back twenty years.

  Still the Guinness spirit prevailed and nothing showed this as much as the story of survivors of a tragedy during the war. In 1917, the W. M. Barkley, the first Guinness steamship that had since been converted to military use, was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Kish Lightship. The boat sank and most of the crew were lost, but the survivors told a tale that lived on in Guinness lore. As crewman Thomas McGlue recalled,

  We rowed away from the Barkley so as not to get dragged under. Then we saw the U-boat lying astern. I thought she was a collier, she looked so big. There were seven Germans in the conning tower, all looking down at us through binoculars. We hailed the captain and asked him to pick us up. He called us alongside and then he asked us the name of our boat, the cargo she was carrying, who the owners were and where she was registered, and where she was bound to. He spoke better English than we did. . . . He said we could go . . . Then he pointed out the shore lights and told us to steer for them. The submarine slipped away and we were left alone, with hogsheads of stout bobbing all around us. The Barkley had broken and gone down very quietly.

  We tried to row for the Kish, but it might have been America for all the way we made. We put out the sea anchor and sat there shouting all night . . . At last, we saw a black shape coming up. She was the Donnet Head, a collier bound for Dublin. She took us aboard and tied the lifeboat alongside. We got into Dublin at 5 a.m. and an official put us in the Custom House at the point of the Wall, where there was a big fire. That was welcome, because we were wet through and I’d spend the night in my shirtsleeves. But we weren’t very pleased to be kept there three hours. Then a man came in and asked “Are you aliens?” I said, “Yes, we’re aliens from Dublin.” He seemed to lose interest then, so we walked out and got back in the lifeboat and rowed it up to Custom House Quay. The Guinness superintendent produced a bottle of brandy and some dry clothes.

  It was a tale that Guinness men passed from generation to generation and it buoyed spirits during the dark years of the war. And spirits needed strengthening, for the blows to Guinness did not seem to end. Some of these blows came from the government in London. During the war, the British parliament decided to raise taxes on beer and foolishly mandated a reduction in the gravity of beer, meaning that the alcohol content was lower. This only made the beer less attractive to consumers and more likely to spoil. Then, in another folly, Parliament required pubs to close at eleven p.m., which reduced Guinness sales even further. All of this combined to make the war years among the most disastrous of all for the Guinness firm.

  When the war was ended, British losses amounted to more than 700,000 with more than 1.6 million wounded returning home in search of jobs and some sense of normality. It was a difficult promise to fulfill, particularly given the events unfolding in Ireland.

  Guinness’s homeland was just then in the birth pangs of independence. There had been home rule (self-government) advocates in Ireland for generations. This had stirred tensions throughout the land, where disagreements persisted a
s to whether Ireland should accept a measure of independence within the United Kingdom or whether she should hold out for complete autonomy. Cooler heads wanted home rule. More radical groups like Sinn Féin wanted nothing less than a nation equal to and separate from England. The British parliament finally passed a Third Home Rule Act, which included a plan for the partition of Ireland into a Protestant piece of Ulster in the north, and a Dublin-based, more Roman Catholic league of counties in the south. The implementation of the plan was interrupted by the onset of World War I, though, and all action was postponed.

  Still, the dream of Irish independence lived. In 1916, a relatively small group of revolutionaries incited what came to be known as the Easter Rising. It lasted less than a week and never grew beyond Dublin, because it didn’t have nationwide support. But the British decision to callously execute the leaders of the insurrection achieved what the rising itself had not: it stirred popular animosity against the British government throughout Ireland. Violent years followed, with bombings and assassinations and misery throughout the land. Finally, in 1919, Ireland declared her independence, which led to still more bloodshed with England. It was not until 1922 that British and Irish negotiators agreed to a self-governing Irish Free State—a dominion within the British Empire equal to Australia or Canada. Six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties formed themselves into a separate Northern Ireland and remained part of the United Kingdom. It would not be until two and a half decades later, in 1949, that the lower twenty-six counties formed the Republic of Ireland and left the British Commonwealth completely.

  These upheavals plagued Guinness—the company and the family—much as it did the whole of the Irish people. Guinness family members split over the political issues and argued heatedly at family dinners—and even on the floor of Parliament. Workers broke out into fistfights on the brewery floor and arguments robbed the peace of mealtimes and the fellowship of a pint after work. More threatening still were the sounds of explosions and the great billows of smoke that reached to the brewery and made men look up from their labors in fear.

  Still, even in these times, the Guinness men were agents of good. The revered Dr. Lumsden was a cherished figure in these years, darting among the wounded during a battle or training first aid workers in makeshift classes at the Guinness plant. Guinness family members, even while disagreeing among themselves, urged moderation and humanity among all factions and modeled a devotion to Ireland that rose above party strife. They also remained an image of refinement and style that made many believe a better day might return. During the worst of some of the conflicts, the chairman of the Guinness board routinely gave brewery staff short trips on his magnificent boat, the Fantome. A guest on one of these trips recalled a Sunday morning sail down the Liffey: “he sat in a deck chair, being offered drinks . . . when shouting broke out between the buildings on the bank and he could see men firing at each other with great danger to life and limb, which did not affect the life on board though there was a separation of no more than 400 yards.”

  It was easy to feel aloof from the street battles on an expensive sailboat, but Guinness was unable to float above the inevitable economic disruptions of the postwar years. The company had experienced dramatic growth prior to the war and then had dropped production by nearly half during the dark days from 1914 to 1918. A recovery seemed near in 1920, when Guinness sales returned to prewar levels and then rose 10 percent in 1921. In 1922, though, sales began falling, and they would not recover for quite some time. This was due to a number of factors. The lower gravity mandated by the government during the war made the beer less desirable. In addition, the Irish government maintained a tax on beer that was equal to that imposed by the United Kingdom during the war. To all of this was added the complete loss of the Guinness market in the United States because of the advent of Prohibition. We should take time to understand this moment in U.S. history, not only to better comprehend Guinness’s challenges at the time but also to grasp attitudes toward beer and alcohol that exist in America to this day.

  There had long been efforts for prohibition of alcohol sales in the United States and it is not hard to understand why. From the earliest days of the colonial era, alcohol had played a vast role in nearly every part of life. Men paid for goods with whiskey, doctors treated wounds with wine, and political events were awash with strong drink cynically provided by the politicians themselves. Inebriated men made easy political targets. Whiskey was so prized that when the new federal government decided to tax alcohol sales in 1791, a revolt ensued known to history as the Whiskey Rebellion.

  The popular attitude toward drink was that of earlier generations of Christians: alcohol in moderation is a grace of life but drunkenness is both sin and a plague upon society. As pioneers moved westward and small towns began to dot the plains, the negative effects of alcohol became more pronounced. It would take only a few hard drinking men to terrorize a small community, and only one drunken father and husband to leave a family destitute on the dangerous frontier. Naturally, antidrink societies formed—understandably led by women—and many a tension arose between the “dry” and “wet” factions of the American west.

  As antialcohol sentiments increased, entire states banned alcohol sales. Maine was first in 1851, with Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Vermont following in 1852. A year later, Michigan followed suit, as did Connecticut in 1854. These laws were loosely and incompetently enforced, though, and this only led to increased frustration on the part of temperance groups. Finally, antialcohol sentiments merged with religious beliefs and led to the formation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874. This body thrived in the rural sections of the country and led, in time, to the rise of the legendary Carrie Nation—the woman who, in reaction to her first husband’s alcoholism, took axe in hand and destroyed saloons all over the Midwest. Her exploits captured the imagination of many Americans and, in an age of anticorruption reform, the war on alcohol gathered strength.

  In retrospect, brewers seemed unaware of these currents of change. Believing rightly that beer and alcohol had always been a valued part of American life, brewers throughout the United States saw little threat in the gathering antialcohol storm. They continued to cite the American heritage of moderate alcohol use and even proclaimed a favorite truism from the era of the founding fathers: “The brewery is the best pharmacy.” They were tragically unaware of their times. They were unable to see what would come of women gaining political power, many of these women armed with tales of the devastation excessive drink had meant for their families. They could not have understood how World War I would lead to fiery anti-German sentiment and how this in turn would focus rage on the largely German trade of brewing beer. And they could not have foreseen how many a politician, riding an anticorruption wave, would blame alcohol for most of the country’s woes and thus come to proclaim prohibition of alcohol as a national panacea. When brewers in America did wake up to the prevailing trends, there was little they could do.

  The legislation that would lead to the Prohibition began in 1917 with the passage of the Food Control Act, which gave Woodrow Wilson the authority to regulate the manufacture of beer and wine. Prohibitionists had worked behind the scenes for the passage of the bill, knowing that it was a first step toward outlawing alcohol sales, and Wilson complied. He required a reduction in beer sales of 30 percent and dramatically limited the amount of alcohol a beer could contain. It was only a beginning. Immediately, a constitutional amendment was proposed for prohibiting intoxicating drink entirely. This amendment passed in January of 1919 but it needed accompanying legislation to assure enforcement. In the famous Volstead Act that ensued, an intoxicating beverage was defined as anything containing more than 5 percent alcohol. Oddly, President Wilson vetoed the act, Congress overrode, and the Supreme Court upheld the act when brewers filed a desperate suit to bring the prohibition mania to an end. On January 17, 1920, the United States became a dry nation.

  It would prove to be one of the most foolish governmental a
cts in American history, a point of discussion on morality and law for generations to come. It had little popular support. A poll taken in 1926 revealed that only 19 percent of Americans favored Prohibition and the Eighteenth Amendment that made it law. Prohibition was thus a blow to democracy. It was also a blow to law and order. The more than 177,000 saloons in America prior to Prohibition merely went private, so that in New York alone some 32,000 speakeasies thrived, many eventually providing still other illegal activities, such as prostitution, among their benefits of membership. These establishments were often serviced by thousands of smugglers who focused their efforts on whiskey, gin, and rum. Prohibition, then, not only led to illegal trade in alcohol, but it also meant that increasing numbers of Americans were drinking hard liquor rather than the more moderate and healthy beer. In short, Prohibition increased the consumption of hard liquor in America.

  It also increased home-brewing. As H. L. Mencken wrote at the time, “Every second household has become a home-brewer . . . In one American city of 750,000 inhabitants there are now 100 shops devoted exclusively to the sale of beer-making supplies, and lately the proprietor of one of them, by no means the largest, told me that he sold 2,000 pounds of malt-syrup a day.”

  The miseries, mysteries, and manipulations of Prohibition would last nearly a decade before the Roman Catholic presidential candidate, Al Smith of New York, made repeal a major theme of his campaign. Though Smith lost his race for the White House, he made repeal acceptable and soon such luminaries as General “Black Jack” Pershing, Walter Chrysler, Harvey Firestone, and John Rockefeller were echoing Smith’s cry for change.