Book Reviews
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Book Reviews Arthur's Round: the Life and Times of subject that is exciting, revelatory and Brewing Legend Arthur Guinness makes everything else filed under by Patrick Guinness ‘Guinness’ immediately redundant, as Pp. 262. Peter Owen Publishers: Patrick Guinness, great-great-great- London, 2008. £13.95. great-great-grandson of the brewery's ISBN 978 0 7206 1296 7 founder, has just proved. Guinness: the 250-year Quest for the Arthur's Round is the first book to con- Perfect Pint centrate on the founder and it uses by Bill Yenne everything from proper, evidence-based Pp. 250. John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, historical research to genetic analysis to 2007. £13.99 destroy more myths about Arthur ISBN: 978-0-470-12052-1 Guinness and the early years of his brewing concern than you could shake a shillelagh at. For a company that produces, effectively, just one product, in a small Western The biggest myth Patrick Guinness pulls European nation, Guinness takes up an down, using modern genetic techniques, astonishing amount of bookshelf space: I is the claim that Arthur Guinness and his have 15 different books about the brew- father Richard were descended from the ery, its beer, the Guinness family, Magennis chieftains, in Irish Mac Guinness advertising and so on, ranging Aonghusa, of Iveagh, in County Down, from serious economic analyses to anec- Ulster. The last-but-one Mac Aonghusa dotage, and there are others I haven't Viscount Iveagh, Bryan Magennis had bought. With the quarter-millennium due fled abroad after James II's defeat at the next year of Arthur Guinness taking out Battle of the Boyne in 1690, about the the lease on the St James's Gate brewery time Arthur Guinness's father was born, in 1759, we are doubtless due for a flood and the Magennis lands in Ulster were of new books on Ireland's best-known confiscated in 1693. product. Arthur certainly seemed to think that However, despite all the millions of words Guinness was a reworking of Magennis, already written about Guinness, it is still since at the time of his marriage in 1761, possible to produce a new book on the two years after he bought the St James's Brewery History Number 127 75 Gate brewery, he had a silver cup he was given as a wedding present engraved with his wife's armorial bearings and those of the Magennises of Iveagh. Later, around 1794, he had a seal made that also bore the Magennis arms. Arthur's eldest son, Hosea, had the family's use of the Magennis arms properly authorised by Ulster Herald in 1814, and when Edward Cecil Guinness, Arthur's great- grandson, was elevated to the peerage in 1890 it was as Baron Iveagh of Iveagh. However, Patrick Guinness blows the ancestral pretensions out of the water in Arthur's Round, quoting a recent study at Trinity College, Dublin, published in 2006, that looked at the Y-chromosomes of more than 300 men with Gaelic East Ulster-origin surnames. Y-chromosomes, like surnames, come down from father to son. The results showed that Arthur McCartan chiefs, is a hilly hamlet called Guinness's descendants do have Y-chro- Guiness (sic) or Ginnies, a name that mosomes that match with those of some comes from the Irish Gion Ais, meaning families with Gaelic-era County Down wedge-shaped ridge. If, as now seems surnames - but not the Magennises. likely, the Guinnesses came from McCartan territory, then there is a good Instead the closest match for the chance their surname is derived from the Guinnesses is with men whose surname hamlet of Guiness. comes from another, lesser County Down clan, the McCartans. Even more disap- There is still no explanation of how a fam- pointingly for Guinness pretensions, the ily from Guiness in County Down came closest genetic link is not with the chiefly south to Dublin. But Patrick Guinness McCartan line, but those who would have succeeds in convincingly pushing back taken the McCartan surname as follow- Arthur's ancestry another generation past ers rather than family. his father for the first time, to his grandfa- ther Owen Guinis, or Guinness, who was To underline the McCartan link, in the for- a tenant farmer in Simmonscourt, County mer barony of Kinelarty, in central County Dublin, and who died around 1726. Down, the land once ruled by the Documents from that time show Richard 76 Journal of the Brewery History Society Guinness was his son, although how to brew good porter, and then Richard's birth was never recorded - worked for the Guinnesses for more than probably because there was a war on in a century. Ireland around the time he was born, circa 1690. Patrick Guinness is not above trying to set up myths of his own, however, claim- Richard first pops out of the records in ing in Arthur's Round that the whole 250- 1722, when he was working for Dr Arthur year story of the enterprise is down to a Price in Celbridge, County Kildare. Dr ‘unique’ yeast strain he seems to imply Price, who rose eventually to be Arthur Guinness took with him from his Archbishop of Cashel, features in the stepmother's pub-brewery in Celbridge to Guinness legend because the £100 the Leixlip, and then to St James's Gate. Archbishop left Arthur Guinness in his will However, A Bottle of Guinness Please, when he died in 1752 is frequently said to by David Hughes, published in 2006, and be the leg-up that enabled Arthur to get an excellent study of the history of the started in the brewery business. Patrick company and its products badly marred Guinness demolishes this myth as well, by the complete lack of an index, firmly showing that it was much more the refutes this idea. It appears, Hughes money Richard Guinness had amassed says, in three decades of working for Price that enabled his son Arthur first, to acquire a to have been normal practice [at St James's brewery in Leixlip in 1755 (not 1756, as Gate] until 1854 to use barm yeast from other many sources repeat, copying the error in breweries when the store yeast looked ‘of Lynch and Vaizey's otherwise magisterial poor appearance'. Between 1810-12, 41 book on the first 120 years of Guinness of brews were pitched with yeast from 7 differ- 1960, Guinness's Brewery in the Irish ent breweries. This makes the lineage of the Economy) and then to move in 1759 to later Guinness store yeast very confused and Dublin. it may indeed be related to Burton brewery yeast. Arthur's Round is revelatory on Arthur Guinness's position in the social and Just before Arthur's Round appeared, Bill (often tumultuous) political environment Yenne, a Californian, showed his bravery of 18th century Dublin, and excellent on in taking on the writing of a history of the early years of porter brewing in the Guinness, even though it was inevitable city and how Arthur eventually aban- that as an American he would make doned his original ale brewing to concen- errors of the kind we all would when writ- trate on the black stuff. It also gives far ing about a society and a place that is not more detail than has appeared anywhere our own: believing, for example, that before on the Purser family, who came someone could be given the title ‘Baronet from England to teach Dublin's brewers Ardilaun,’ or saying that Park Royal is Brewery History Number 127 77 ‘about 25 miles northwest of Central Yenne's book also suffers, badly, from London’ - that would put it out around St coming out just before Arthur's Round Albans, instead of the 10 miles or so from was published. Thus The 250-Year Charing Cross it really is. The Park Royal Search for the Perfect Pint repeats all the brewery wasn't a ‘mysterious project … in canards, such as Arthur Guinness's the London Borough of Brent’ in 1934, descent from the Magennis viscounts of either, since the borough was only creat- Iveagh, Arthur's father Richard being the ed in 1965. Nor did Hugh Beaver ‘join the brewer for Dr Price at Celbridge and British Government’ in 1943 when he making a ‘delectable dark beer’ there, the became director-general at the Ministry £100 Dr Price left Arthur Guinness in his of Works: Beaver would have seen him- will being used to take on a small brewery self as joining the Civil Service, not the in Leixlip and so on that Arthur's Round Government. shoots down. There are some other mistakes in Nor is it true to say (p.62) that ‘throughout Guinness: the 250-year search for the the 19th century Guinness advertise- perfect pint that are harder to understand, ments had appeared only rarely.’ like the claim (in an entirely unnecessary Hundreds of 19th century instances can round-up of brewing history before Arthur be found of adverts for Guinness in The Guinness) that ‘Pliny the Younger’ wrote Times alone, for example, both from sup- about ‘nearly 200 types of beer … being brewed in Europe in the first century.’ No he didn't, and neither did his uncle, the elder Pliny, though the older man did mention several types of beer in his lengthy Natural History. Some slackness in the copyediting department is also evident, starting on page one, where the last sentence of the first paragraph reads: ‘A U.S. gallon is equal to hectoliters.’ Did someone take out an incorrect figure and forget to put in the real one? Similarly, on p.66, 1980 is printed where 1908 is meant.