The Search for God and Guinness

by Stephen Mansfield

  Rockefeller was perhaps the most interesting of these because he did not drink alcohol—but he did recognize the failure of Prohibition.

  Failure of the Eighteenth Amendment has demonstrated that the majority of this country are not yet ready for total abstinence, at least when it is attempted through legal coercion. The next best thing—many people think it a better thing—is temperance. Therefore, as I sought to support total abstinence when its achievement seemed possible, so now, and with equal vigor, I would support temperance.

  It fell to the newly elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt to call for an end to the madness. Barely a week after taking office, Roosevelt asked Congress to raise the legal alcohol limit of beer to 3.2 percent. Congress complied, and though the official end of Prohibition would await the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933, the end of this misguided policy had come.

  Prohibition stands as a testimony to the damage that can be done through ignorance of the benefits of beer. Rather than emphasize beer as an antidote to drunkenness, as a healthy alternative to harder drinks that, in excess, ruined men’s lives, Prohibitionists treated all alcohol as the same. This not only meant that consumption of hard liquor rose during Prohibition, but that the idling of breweries removed the societal benefits of beer in the post-Prohibition years. Prior to Prohibition there had been sixteen hundred breweries in America. Only seven hundred reopened when Prohibition was repealed, but more than five hundred of those soon failed, burdened as they were with out-of-date equipment and inadequate financing. This meant, again, during the critical 1930s when beer might have served a Depression-era people well, hard liquor ruled the day. Lives were destroyed; crime and poverty spread as a result. Prohibition had served no better purpose than to ban moderation, both during its reign and in the difficult years afterward.

  For Guinness, Prohibition meant a complete loss of the American market at a time when brewing was taxed and troubled in Ireland and domestic brands were making inroads in places like Australia and South Africa. Still, the Guinness spirit prevailed. With the brewery running at low capacity because of the loss in sales, a brilliant young scientist named Alan McMullen took advantage of the lag to test his new ideas. McMullen was head of the Guinness research department and he was convinced that a more scientific approach to brewing could yield good results. All he needed was access to some usually tightly scheduled equipment to prove his ideas. Gaining permission to take over a portion of the brewery, McMullen developed a process for continuous sterilization and did studies on the nitrogen content in barley, both of which allowed Guinness to improve its product and increase sales.

  McMullen’s scientific approach brought such good results that it infected the Guinness culture. Now, more careful tracking of sales, tighter monitoring of pricing, and an even more studied approach to shipping ensued. Of all the Guinness board members at the time, the man who best understood the demands of the age, the Guinness culture, and modern methods of business was Ben Newbold. In a manner that may have been influenced by the ways of Dr. John Lumsden, Newbold decided in 1926 to travel throughout England to gain firsthand information about the distribution of beer. For two months he interviewed bottlers, retailers, and, more important, consumers in order to understand what was working, what wasn’t, and how Guinness could improve market share. His conclusions were as far-reaching as Lumsden’s had been. His most important recommendations had to do with marketing.

  Apart from the “selling” organization of our customers (the bottlers) we have relied on our stout selling itself. It is obviously financially impossible for us for many years to come to get Guinness back to the position of selling itself (as it did in prewar days) by being apart from its “character” the best value for money to the consumer. Until it sells itself again it would seem that we must take steps to sell it ourselves, either by offering extra inducements to those handling it, or by creating a public demand by gravity or price, or by advertising, or by a much stronger selling organization of our own, or perhaps by a little of all of them.

  This matter of advertising had been a touchy subject at Guinness. In 1909, Edward Cecil had said, “It is our general rule to advertise in no way. We never do so in England or Ireland.” It was a luxury of Guinness at the time, when sales were soaring and the reputation of the product sold itself. Now, though, in the postwar 1920s, the situation was different. Newbold worked hard to convince the board times had changed and that the company should move quickly toward an advertising plan, noting that “it is easier for us (and much less expensive) to retain ground we have captured than to regain ground when it has been lost.” As Guinness archivist Eibhlin Roche recounted to author Bill Yenne, “Lord Iveagh [Edward Cecil] felt that if you needed to advertise a product this meant that you had an inferior product, but Ben Newbold eventually convinced him that Guinness should advertise. Newbold was the first Guinness marketer. I’d definitely consider him as one of the greats.”

  This shift came at the end of Edward Cecil’s life. He approved the first Guinness steps toward advertising at a board meeting on August 30, 1927. Just weeks later, on October 27, he died. He was eighty years old and had led the company since 1876—through astonishing growth, the transition to a publicly owned company, the expansion before and then the drastic decline after the Great War, and, at the very end of his life, the challenges of business in a new and roiling century. He had given his life to the brewery and it had given him unprecedented wealth: his estate was valued at £13.5 million when he died, the most of any estate to that time in British history. He was part of a rare breed: a Victorian gentleman who had carried his firm successfully into the next century. Though his company was troubled and in desperate need of new methods, it could hope to prosper in the decades to come because Edward Cecil Guinness had so long been at the helm.

  The chairmanship of the Guinness board fell to Edward Cecil’s eldest son, Rupert. Though it was his father’s wish, it could not have been an easy choice. Rupert was fifty-three years old at the time and had almost no previous experience at the brewery. Moreover, he was viewed by many in the family as an odd man, a loner given more to staring at microorganisms through a microscope than to people, more to travel and dreaming than to beer. It was a perception that plagued him as he took the helm of the brewery.

  In his childhood he had shared a nanny with Winston Churchill and the two had played by the hour, as boys will often do. On one occasion of rowdiness, young Winston lashed Rupert across the eye with a whip. The clumsy treatment of the wound by a doctor left permanent scarring. Years later, when both men were in their eighties, Churchill turned to the then second Lord Iveagh and said, “I say, Rupert, do you remember that fight we had in Dublin?” Both men cherished the memory of those more innocent days.

  Rupert would grow into manhood bathed in the disapproving glare of his family. He did not perform well in school and this was unacceptable for a Guinness. He was thought stupid and lazy. He was tested for everything from eye trouble to mental disturbance but no cause for his failures came to light. The truth was that he suffered from dyslexia, but this was an unknown condition in his day and so he endured unending chastisement and ridicule. His parents might have known better. When seven-year-old Rupert got his hands on his father’s new microscope, he became fascinated with the other universe he found, which began a lifelong passion for scientific investigation. It was not the mark of a slow or uninterested boy. It was instead the sign of a boy who could teach himself better than he could be taught in school, but it would not be until adulthood that his gifts were recognized and prized.

  At Eton and later at Cambridge he was a poor student but a beloved friend. Even his headmaster at Eton wrote that Rupert was “a model of good conduct and good temper to all . . . I think that his character is one of the most perfect I have ever met with in a boy here and I can hardly think it possible that he could ever do anything discreditable.” Then, the headmaster added, “I wish his ability approached his character in excellence.”

>   He excelled not only at his scientific pursuits but at rowing. At Cambridge he defeated the champion in Diamond Sculls and became a campus hero. In time, he emerged as the undisputed amateur sculling champion of England and this brought him a kind of social success he had never known before. His athletic career ended, though, when he was diagnosed with a weak heart and forbidden to compete. He turned, again, to his microscope and his quiet hours and looked on as his disappointed father lavished attention on Rupert’s younger brothers, Ernest and Walter.

  He served in the Boer War at the end of the twentieth century as chief of staff to Sir William Thomson and distinguished himself, though he became ill with severe dysentery and enteric fever. He returned home, was decorated for service to his country, and began working as his father’s secretary. He married Lady Gwendolin Onslow sometime after and Edward Cecil blessed the new couple with the generous wedding gift of £5 million.

  He might have passed his days as the wealthy young men of his time usually did: at his club and at sport. Rupert was made of better stuff, though, and this seems to have come as a surprise to nearly everyone who knew him. He had absorbed the Guinness concern for the needy, that family sense of obligation to use wealth for the good of mankind. When he received the wedding gift from his father, he did not set himself up in fashion. Instead, he moved his new bride into a home in the slums and launched a crusade to ease the plight of the poor. His social class was scandalized. The common man in Ireland was moved. And the media barely knew what to make of it. As one newspaper reported, “It speaks well for disinterested public service in this country that a man whose recreations are yachting, rowing, shooting and golf, and whose clubs are the Beefsteak, Leander, Carlton, Garrick and Royal Yacht Squadron should be ready to work for the weak and the needy.”

  It was not a gimmick or a short-lived scheme. Rupert and Gwendolin lived in the slums of Shoreditch for seven years. And they knew tragedy. In 1906, a pregnant Gwendolin was involved in a bad car accident and the baby boy she was carrying at the time was born prematurely. He lived only thirty-six hours. In the manner of his forebears, Rupert let tragedy move him to more meaningful service. He served on the London City Council and became a champion of humanitarian reforms, particularly of those reforms pertaining to children. He gained a reputation as a compassionate soul and a fierce fighter. He was elected to Parliament representing Haggerston in 1908 and in 1912 he was elected for Southend-on-Sea. He served in that seat for more than two and a half decades, until 1927, when his father’s death placed him in charge of the Guinness brewery, elevated him to his father’s peerage, and granted him a seat in the House of Lords. His wife, Gwendolin, decided to continue their fight for the impoverished on her own. She stood for her husband’s seat in Parliament and won, becoming one of the early female members of Parliament in British history. The United Kingdom now had both a member of the House of Lords and a female MP who had lived in slums, championed the cause of the poor, and intended to do so until they died. It was part of the Guinness way.

  The brewery Rupert oversaw as of 1927 was a far different place than the one his great ancestor had purchased. From the original four acres leased in 1759, the plant had now grown to more than sixty acres. The brewery included so many buildings spread over such a large space that it required eight miles of train track to connect them all effectively. There were fermenting rooms and vat houses and stables and cooperage shops and cask-washing sheds and train barns and massive storerooms for hop and malt. There were docks and ships and every kind of garage and maintenance building imaginable. Scurrying amongst them all were trucks and rail cars and horse-drawn wagons. The Guinness output was so profuse that the labels it printed in 1930 alone—Guinness did not bottle its own beer but it did print all its own labels—would have nearly stretched around the earth.

  Rupert would become chairman of the Guinness board shortly before the worse economic crisis to befall the Western world. On October 29, 1929, the New York Stock Exchange collapsed, a day that would live in history as Black Tuesday. The British brewing industry declined by more than 20 percent over the next years, but this was little compared to the devastation that wracked the Irish economy. Guinness sales fell to half the company’s 1927 levels by 1932—although wise leadership and some fortunate occurrences would allow the company to double its 1914 revenue by 1939. This came about, in part, because the United States ended Prohibition in 1933, restoring the American market, and because Guinness board member Ben Newbold won his case for advertising.

  After Edward Cecil finally lifted the advertising ban in 1927, Guinness hired the advertising firm of S. H. Benson and began testing marketing campaigns. More than likely, some board members had yet to be convinced. The Benson firm encouraged Guinness to take a test run in Glasgow, where Guinness sales had been in decline since 1914 despite the presence of a sizeable Irish population. The campaign began in the fall of 1927, and by April 1928, sales were up by 7.3 percent. For those who needed further proof, when advertising was employed in England— where Guinness sales had shrunk by some 6.8 percent—sales also rose dramatically.

  Guinness became committed to advertising and the partnership with Benson would produce some of the most famous slogans and campaigns in advertising history. Early on, Benson suggested the slogan, “Guinness is Good for You.” This came from marketing research that showed people actually “felt good” after drinking a Guinness. The slogan stuck and was used for decades to come. It was the perfect sentiment at the perfect time and it anticipated the later research that alcohol in moderation was both healthy and invigorating.

  Creating this slogan was the first step, but when S. H. Benson paired Guinness with John Gilroy, one if its illustrators, the Guinness campaigns began capturing global attention. Gilroy was a balding, bespectacled man who understood the whimsy needed to win a weary public to the Guinness brand. He was an Englishman who had attended Durham University before World War I interrupted his studies. He’d served in the Royal Field Artillery until war’s end and then resumed his studies at the Royal College of Art in London. After graduation, Gilroy went to work for the Benson firm. He was a gifted artist who would later paint portraits of Winston Churchill, Sir John Gielgud, Edward Heath, Pope John XXIII, and many members of the royal family. Queen Elizabeth II would sit for a Gilroy portrait when the artist was eighty-two.

  He joined Benson in 1925 and not long after worked on the first Guinness campaign, which centered on the slogan, “Guinness for Strength.” This included famous images of a man—the same man who was featured in much of Gilroy’s Guinness art and was actually a self-portrait—carrying a girder. By 1935, Gilroy was producing advertisements involving myriad animals, which some began to call the “Guinness Zoo.” It was a novel approach. “I have always been a jolly man,” Gilroy later said, “and I thought the Guinness campaign needed a touch of humor.” While attending the Bertram Mills Circus one day, Gilroy had the idea for a menagerie of animals that would, over time, balance Guinness on their snouts or steal Guinness from zoo-keepers or, during the war, even fly in formation delivering Guinness.

  The advertisements met with joyous popular appeal. The intense interest the public gave to each new ad was confirmed in 1936 when a popular Guinness poster showed an ostrich swallowing a zookeeper’s pint glass of Guinness. The pint in the ostrich’s long neck was right side up, though, and letters flooded the Benson and Guinness offices. Thousands of Guinness drinkers were apparently concerned that this fictional ostrich could not drink his Guinness if the pint glass stuck in his long neck was not turned downward. When the same ad was reissued in 1952, it was accompanied by a poem that read:

  The ostrich, travelers recall,

  Enjoys his Guinness, glass and all

  How sad the Guinness takes so long

  To get where it makes him strong!

  Over the following years, Gilroy would fashion campaigns around slogans like “It’s a Lovely Day for a Guinness,” “Guinness as Usual,” and “My Goodness! My Guinness!�
�� Always there was the cartoon self-portrait of Gilroy, running frantically after a beer-stealing seal or marveling at a toucan balancing two pints of brew on his beak. This toucan was perhaps the most famous of Gilroy’s Guinness symbols and was often accompanied by verse.

  If he can say as you can

  Guinness is good for you.

  How grand to be a Toucan

  Just think what Toucan do.

  Or,

  Toucans in the nests agree

  Guinness is good for you.

  Open some today and see

  What one or Toucan do.

  Gilroy’s work for Guinness would become legendary and would extend well into the 1960s, leaving a legacy of more than a hundred posters over thirty-five years. His skill was such that Walt Disney offered him a lucrative job in Hollywood. Gilroy turned him down. David Ogilvy, the father of British advertising, has said that Gilroy’s posters “made Guinness part of the warp and woof of English life and have never been excelled—anywhere.”

  The strength of Guinness’s advertising is revealed, in part, by some of the luminaries who were inspired by it. James Joyce, among Ireland’s greatest writers, not only mentioned Guinness dozens of times in his works, but once suggested his own idea for a Guinness slogan: “The free, the flow, the frothy freshener.” (Clearly, Guinness was less than impressed, because it stayed with “Guinness Is Good for You.”) Dorothy Sayers, who became famous for her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery stories, worked for Benson from 1922 to 1931 and partnered with Gilroy on a number of his campaigns. The first toucan jingle mentioned above is hers.

  Throughout the 1930s, Guinness increased its sales largely on the strength of its advertising. This inspired the board to begin preparing for further expansion. In 1936, the company opened a new brewery about twenty-five miles north of central London at Park Royal. The plant became essential to Guinness’s future success, producing nearly a third of the total company output by 1939. Shortly after World War II, the plant exceeded the production at St. James’s Gate.