As the old advertising slogan goes, ‘Guinness is good for you.’ It has certainly been good for the Irish economy. From the day at the end of December 1759 when the 34-year-old Arthur Guinness signed a lease on a run-down brewery on James’s Street in Dublin, the firm has grown, until today Guinness is the biggest exporter of stout in the world, and somewhere in the region of 1.8 billion pints are drunk every year. There are Guinness breweries in 49 countries, although Arthur’s James’s Street complex is still the largest producer of what James Joyce in Ulysses so memorably called ‘the foaming ebon ale’.
It has been good for the Guinness family, too. Although their direct connection with the firm that bears their name finally came to an end in 1997 when Guinness plc merged with Grand Metropolitan to form the beverage giant Diageo, for well over 200 years Arthur and his descendants prospered. Politically conservative Church of Ireland Protestants with a strong evangelical streak and an equally strong work ethic (most of them, anyway), they turned stout to liquid gold. When Benjamin Lee Guinness, who ran the business in the mid 19th century, died in 1868 he was Ireland’s first millionaire. Eighteen years later his son, Edward Cecil Guinness, floated the company on the Stock Exchange, while retaining one-third of the stock himself. When he died, in 1927, he was an earl and he left an estate valued at £11 million.
As their fortunes prospered, their ambitions grew, helped along by a strong sense of civic pride and social justice. It was a Guinness who restored Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral. It was a Guinness who gave the 22-acre St Stephen’s Green to the city, a Guinness who built hospitals and replaced slums with decent worker housing in Dublin and London, and donated Kenwood House to the public and filled it with fabulous works of art.
And like any nouveaux riches industrialists seeking to move up the social ladder, they bought, built, or remodelled rural retreats where they could entertain their friends, impress their business acquaintances and enjoy their wealth. These castles and country houses range from the modest Beaumont, a small Georgian villa in fields north of Dublin which was home to Arthur, his wife Olive and their 10 children, to Farmleigh and Elveden Hall and the sadly demolished St Anne’s, monumental examples of late-Victorian opulence, mansions which were fit to receive royalty – and which often did. Later generations might opt for a quieter elegance with exquisite and quintessentially English houses like Biddesden and Kelvedon, or throw caution and their fortunes to the wind with parties that seemed never to end, as Oonagh Guinness and her sister Aileen did at Luggala and Luttrellstown.
But old or new, extravagant or sedate, the houses of Guinness are a testament to the wealth of a single family. More than that: they offer a unique glimpse into a privileged way of life that flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries and then passed away. They have stories to tell about love and loss, about saints and sinners. Their walls remember tales of failure as well as success, bearing witness to lives well lived and opportunities squandered. And the ghosts of the men and women who made them still walk through their marble halls and great glass palm houses and magnificent ballrooms. This is their story, too.
This is an extract from ‘The Houses of Guinness: The Lives, Homes and Fortunes of the Great Brewing Dynasty’ by Adrian Tinniswood, published by Scala.
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