Читать книгу Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book - Larry Olmsted - Страница 8

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

- SAMUEL JOHNSON

The original edition has an introduction by the chairman of Arthur Guinness & Co, Ltd, the Earl of Iveagh. What his Lordship wrote in October 1956 is very interesting, more interesting perhaps now than it was then.

Wherever people congregate to talk, they will argue, and sometimes the joy lies in the arguing and would be lost if there were any definite answer. But more often the argument takes place on a dispute of fact, and it can be very exasperating if there is no immediate means of settling the argument. Who was the first to swim the Channel? Where is England’s deepest well, or Scotland’s highest tree, Ireland’s oldest church? How many died in history’s worst rail crash? Who gained the biggest majority in Parliament? What is the greatest weight a man has ever lifted? How much heat these innocent questions can raise!

Guinness hopes that it may assist in resolving many such disputes, and may, we hope, turn heat into light.

- THE INDEPENDENT (LONDON)

Since its inception more than 50 years ago, the Guinness World Records book and its readers have always had an infatuation with animals. The very first edition applauded the exploits of a terrier named Jacko, a canine rodent-killing machine whose prodigious ‘ratting’ skills made him a record holder. Years later, Ashrita got into the book on the back of an elephant, skipping with a tiger, and pogo-stick jumping with a dog in his hand. Jackie ‘the Texas Snakeman’ Bibby became one of the book’s all-time icons by sharing a bathtub with poisonous rattlesnakes and dangling them from his mouth. It is only fitting that animal-related records have been such a mainstay of Guinness, because the book itself is the direct result of the chance interaction between two animal species, bird and man. The birds in this historic case were a grouse and golden plover, and the man Sir Hugh Beaver, a corporate titan whose improbable animal name was a perfect one for the father of the Guinness Book of Records.

The original 1955 edition of the book has a notable entry for another business genius associated with animals, Walt Disney, whose claim to fame was for having won the most Oscars, some two dozen of them. After achieving unparalleled success in creating one of the world’s best-known brands and a diverse entertainment empire worth billions, Walt Disney was famously quoted as saying, “My only hope is that we never lose sight of one thing, that it was all started by a mouse .”

It is easy to forget such humble beginnings when a brand goes global and becomes a household name transcending borders and languages. Walt’s surname, Disney, is just such an iconic name, one instantly recognizable in all corners of the earth. Whether it is employed to refer to a man, a company, a library of cartoons, a film studio or a collection of theme parks, everyone knows Disney. Very few brands have achieved this level of universal pervasiveness and The Guinness Book of Records is one, enjoying Disneyesque global recognition - and for good reason: it is the best-selling copyrighted book in the history of mankind and is available in the native languages of most citizens of the world. Amazingly, it may have even surpassed the brand recognition of the famous brewery and stout for which it was named. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone, anywhere, who does not recognize Guinness records, yet at the same time, the famed collection of superlatives and astonishing feats remains cloaked in mystery and misinformation. Everyone knows what The Book is, but almost no one knows much about it. While Walt Disney’s hope remains fulfilled, and everyone understands that ‘it was all started by a mouse’, who recalls that the Guinness Book of Records was all started by a pair of birds?

The mid-fifties were the dawn of the Golden Age of Trivia on both sides of the Atlantic, represented in the United Kingdom by the explosion of interest in pub trivia, and in the United States by the many ‘quiz shows’, beginning with The $64,000 Question, first aired by CBS in 1955. The show’s popularity has never since been equalled on network television. “It was the first and only pre-Regis Philbin [an American game-show host on US television famous since the 1950s] game show ever to be the nation’s top rated television programme,” according to Ken Jennings, the all-time winningest player in Jeopardy! game show history, and the author of Brainiac, a history of trivia. Jennings goes on to state that “America’s crime rate , telephone usage and theatre and restaurant attendance would all drop measurably on Tuesday nights, as an astounding 82 per cent of viewers were tuned to CBS.”

In 1955, $64,000 was a lot of money by any standards, and especially for answering a question, proving, as Jennings loves to point out, that not all trivia is trivial. In recent years television game shows attempting to re-create the drama of this original hit have had to up the ante considerably, offering million-dollar prizes just to get viewers to tune in. Certainly the chance to answer a question worth this much money does not come along every day. But even these riches pale in comparison to the payoff Sir Hugh Beaver got in 1954, when he innocently enquired of a hunting companion, which was the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover or the grouse? Sir Hugh had no way of knowing that his would be the most significant trivia question ever asked.

Born in Johannesburg in 1890, Hugh Beaver moved around quite a bit in the first half of his life, and his professional career began with a 12-year stint in India on the national police force. He then relocated to London, where he joined the engineering firm of Alexander Gibb & Co, becoming a partner in the firm in 1932. Shortly thereafter, Gibb was selected to construct a large new brewery in Park Royal, on the outskirts of London, for Arthur Guinness & Sons, then the world’s largest brewer. Beaver was put in charge of the huge project, and for several years worked closely with C. J. Newbold, Guinness’s managing director. Newbold formed a very favourable impression of his younger colleague, and in 1945, almost certainly at his urging, Rupert Guinness, better known in England as Lord Iveagh, tapped Beaver to become the assistant managing director of the company. Beaver accepted, and when Newbold died suddenly a year later, Beaver succeeded him as managing director, a position he would hold for 14 years, until his retirement in 1960. During and after his stint at Guinness, Beaver assumed many other important positions, including chairman of the British Institute of Management, chairman of the Advisory Council of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, chairman of the Industrial Fund for the Advancement of Scientific Education in Schools and chairman of the Board of Governors of Ashridge Management College. He was also president of the Federation of British Industry and of the Sino-British Trade Council, treasurer of the University of Sussex and served on the board of the Ministry of Works as well as on many other boards and several charities. In his scant spare time, the tireless Hugh Beaver led official trade missions to China and East Germany.

Hugh Beaver was the kind of classical, colonially inspired child of the British Empire, hard to imagine in this day and age, one for whom the world was almost too small a place and whose talents and achievements in so many fields seem more the stuff of novels than reality. He was indisputably the father of the far-reaching Guinness World Records empire, yet this remains just a small entry on his curriculum vitae. In addition to running the world’s largest brewery and chairing or serving on the boards of numerous government and non-profit entities, Sir Hugh was passionate about causes, especially air pollution and social reform. He considered his duty as chair of the Committee on Air Pollution among his most significant roles, and was quite passionate and vocal on the topic, writing letters to the editors and giving speeches as a sort of proto-environmentalist. Likewise, he was a champion of racial equality in the workplace and used his position to advance the cause of minorities both within Guinness and in the greater society. One of his personal files is devoted to clippings about this topic in which he was quoted, alongside his many letters to the editors where he made his position crystal clear. At the time, his brewery did not just supply beer to bars; it was one of the UK’s largest landlords, leasing many pubs to the those who operated them. Sir Hugh was not shy about wielding Guinness’s power for what he considered the greater good, and one of his treasured newspaper clippings is an article about the giant brewery’s revocation of a publican’s London lease for refusing to serve ‘coloured customers’. The same file contains hate mail in the form of numerous bigoted letters attacking him for his progressive positions, some exceptionally vicious, violent, and disturbing.

His accomplishments were certainly impressive, and if anyone deserved a knighthood, it was Sir Hugh Beaver, KBE. Most of his credentials as a business leader, social progressive and man of charitable works are beyond doubt, as was his tireless approach to juggling the many responsibilities he undertook. Perhaps the only remaining unanswered question about the life of Beaver was how good his aim was.

Depending on who tells the almost apocryphal story of Sir Hugh’s ‘Guinness Book hunting moment’, he is either a very good shot or a lousy one, and it remains uncertain whether his question about which bird was faster, the golden plover or grouse (in some accounts it is the closely related teal or snipe), was brought on by his success at bird hunting that day - or his frustrating stream of misses. According to his 1967 obituary in Guinness Time, the brewing company’s in-house newsletter, ‘He was a particularly fine shot’, and this one, like other accounts, has him pondering the speed of flight issue over a collection of downed birds of both types after a day of shooting in County Wexford, Ireland. But the most accurate account seems to come from Norris McWhirter , the editor of the very first edition of The Guinness Book of Records, recalling a conversation at which he was actually present. It is his re-telling of the story in Ross, the biography of his twin brother Ross McWhirter, which rings truest.

[W]hen a golden plover had come high overhead and he had missed it. Later, in the home of his host, conversation turned to whether or not the plover, of which the eight members of the shooting party had bagged 20 that day, was indeed the fastest game bird in Europe as someone there had claimed. When various expensive encyclopedias in the library failed to really settle the point whether or not teal were as fast, an irritated Sir Hugh announced that “books as expensive as these ought to provide the answer to so simple a question.” Another member of the party…remarked that encyclopaedias did not necessarily give that sort of information. Sir Hugh retorted that records were just the things that started pub and bar arguments and it was about time somebody produced a book full of records to settle this kind of dispute.

Not a man to mince words or delay action, Sir Hugh took it upon himself to do just that after returning to England and discussing the matter with his colleagues. At the time, draught Guinness was in some 84,400 pubs throughout the British Isles , and Sir Hugh saw this market alone as big enough for a book of records, one that would also be a branding opportunity, clad in the green of Ireland and sporting the Guinness logo, not much different than the bar mats or signage the brewery supplied to pubs as part of its marketing efforts.

In addition to the question of Sir Hugh’s shooting aptitude, a further mystery surrounds the date of the shoot itself. It is known that the shoot occurred at Castlebridge House , the country estate of a friend in County Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland, where the issue was passionately discussed over port that evening. Although Guinness began in Dublin, where scion Arthur Guinness had started making stout at the now world famous St James’s Gate brewery in 1759, Sir Hugh lived and worked in London, where Arthur Guinness & Sons was publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. Most histories, including the ‘official’ one listed today on the Guinness World Records website and in promotional materials, date the shoot to 1951, but this makes little sense in light of other evidence. All accounts describe Sir Hugh acting quickly on his intuition, and most versions of the story have the debate continuing into the libraries of London upon Beaver’s return from the shooting excursion, this research unfolding over a period of just weeks or months. The conversations and actions leading to the hasty production of the first Guinness book, which was a rush job (the first edition was written in just 16 weeks), all took place in early 1955, with no justification to explain a four-year hiatus from Beaver’s grouse v plover frustration. For what it’s worth, both the New York Times and the Scotsman attribute the genesis of Sir Hugh’s idea to 1954, which seems much more plausible. In Beaver’s meticulously detailed personal appointment diaries , in which his days were constantly jammed with meetings and business travel, from 1951 to 1953 there is not one mention of shooting. However, on Wednesday 8 September, 1954, Sir Hugh wrote, in his perfect penmanship, the single word SHOOT across two full pages of the diary, representing an entire week. The absence of previous trips and the timing of this one suggest that it was in mid-September 1954 that Sir Hugh’s moment of world record enlightenment struck like a lightning bolt. The diaries also support the contention that he couldn’t have been that fine a shot, unless he made do without practice for years at a time. Given that he had so many business responsibilities, it is hard to imagine him keeping sharp with the shotgun. Leisure in any form was largely unknown to Sir Hugh, and over the first half of the decade his sole shooting trip equals the length of his only other week-long break, a voyage to Italy, the only holiday with Mrs Beaver recorded in his diaries. Aside from these two trips, in five years he seemingly satisfied himself in the way of leisure with a single night at the theatre with his wife, a few games of lawn bowls and a lone round of golf every few years.

Having conceived the need for such an argument-settling record compendium, Sir Hugh will forever be known as the father of what was originally titled The Guinness Book of Records. But oddly, his interest in the project seems to have ended almost as soon as it started, as if commissioning the creation of a product to fill a void he saw in the market was just another one of the myriad business decisions he faced daily, no more important to him personally than the colour of the cap on a bottle of beer. In the 12 boxes of his personal papers now stored in the archives of the London School of Economics, including an early draft of a life memoir, there are almost no mentions of the book, and it is clear that Sir Hugh was more intent on focussing his energies on his public service than book selling. This is made clear in a letter dated 23 November, 1964, three years before Sir Hugh’s death, handwritten on the personal Park Royal Brewery letterhead of Viscount Boyd, the head of Arthur Guinness & Sons. It reads:

My dear Hugh

I am very sorry you cannot come to the dinner on Friday, 13th November to commemorate the millionth copy of the Guinness Book of Records. As you were the prime mover of all this it is very sad not to have you there, but we quite understand as it coincides with the University of Sussex events.

Everyone will be thinking of you and will certainly drink to your health.

His preference for attending an event at a university where he served as treasurer - rather than a party for what was already an astonishing feat in publishing - may have shown what Sir Hugh thought about the historic enterprise he had started. Or perhaps it merely reflected his workaholic nature. Maybe he just did not like parties. Whatever the reason, his connection to what would become the best-selling copyrighted book of all time essentially ended with the hiring of editors Ross and Norris McWhirter. Like everything else Sir Hugh undertook, this moment was recorded in precise pencil-written letters , in an understated tone. On 3 May 1955, eight months after his shooting trip, his diary reads simply Mr McWhirter and Mr Horst lunching, amid several other appointments that day. While Sir Hugh fathered ‘The Book’, as its fans would come to call it with near biblical reverence, Ross and especially Norris McWhirter were its nannies, or perhaps even its adoptive parents.

Ross and Norris Dewar McWhirter were identical twins, born just 20 minutes apart at Winchmore Hill, North London, on 12 August 1925. From that moment they were destined, it seems, to create the Guinness Book of Records. Everything the McWhirters did from their earliest age set them on a path towards The Book from their father’s journalism background to their childhood hobbies to their schooling and athletic pursuits, even their inherited photographic memories. Far more than mere editors, the twins would become television stars, political figures and first-rate promoters. Without a doubt, the odd pair played the largest role in the epic’s history.

The twins’ father, William McWhirter, was a successful journalist who managed three national Fleet Street newspapers and would become the managing director of Associated Newspapers and the Northcliffe Newspaper Group. Innovation and a thirst for knowledge seemed to run in the family’s DNA, as the twins’ grandfather, also William McWhirter , was the famed inventor of the voltmeter and ammeter. Their father, in turn, was said to bring home some 150 different newspapers a week, which his young sons, who always had a fascination with facts, figures, sports and superlatives, would devour cover to cover, keeping an extensive catalogue of clippings of interest. “From an early age my twin brother, Ross, and I collected facts and figures just as some children collected tram tickets,” Norris later recalled. Likewise, in an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Ross explained that they had been interested in facts from an early age and clipped interesting items from newspapers, which they then committed to what would prove to be an amazingly prodigious pair of memories. “We kept lists of the largest buildings, that sort of thing.” This was no fleeting childhood hobby; it was a passion the inseparable siblings would continue to practice throughout their time together at Marlborough prep school , at Oxford and in the British Royal Navy. Decades later, David Boehm, founder of Sterling Press, the longtime US publisher of the Guinness books, was still in awe of the twins’ penchant for facts. “They memorized every important date in world history, rivers and mountain ranges, and every world capital - and later every record in the Guinness book.”

The twins’ most emphatic area of passion was sports, and they were no mere armchair enthusiasts. They were outstanding athletes who competed at the national and international level in track, and also excelled at rugby . Both attended Oxford’s Trinity College, where they ran the 100-yard sprint, and Norris was good enough to race against (and lose to) Trinidadian Emmanuel MacDonald Bailey, then the UK record holder in the event. He was selected as a ‘possible’ in the 200 metres for the 1948 British Olympic team but strained a hamstring before securing a spot on the squad. Their success on the track was all the more notable given the stiff competition: Ross and Norris were on the same Oxford team as the legendary Roger Bannister, who became a lifelong friend before he became famous as the first human to run a mile in under four minutes. Also on the track team was Chris Chataway , another friend who would later pace Bannister’s epic mile and become the world record holder at the 5000 metres. Completing their education after an interruption for military service, all four were part of a 20-man team chosen to represent Oxford in its first post-war foreign athletic tour, a group that turned out to be quite a distinguished bunch. As Norris wrote, “It would have taken a clairvoyant rather than an acute observer to predict that among that carefree band there were members who were to become a prime minister [Ratu Kamisese Mara, Fiji], Europe’s fastest sprinter, history’s first four-minute miler, a leading headmaster and [in the case of Ross] the first editor ever to sell 25,000,000 copies of a book in a lifetime.”

Aside from a brief stint serving on separate ships during the war, the twins were rarely far from each other’s side, and as a result, graduation steered them down an unusual path together. “It never occurred to either of us that we would do anything separately or that we would be employees of some great company. It was always tacitly assumed that whatever career we had, it would be together and it would be as private enterprisers,” Norris wrote matter-of-factly. In 1949, drawing on their lifelong passion for sports, facts and statistics, as well as their childhood experience on the periphery of Fleet Street’s journalistic hub, the twins formulated a plan to set up their own business supplying facts and figures to newspapers, yearbooks, encyclopaedias and advertisers. Knowing the speciality business would take time to research, launch and build, they simultaneously began writing their first book, Get to Your Marks, subtitled A Short History of World, Commonwealth, European and British Athletics, to provide some income. That book was published in 1951, and two decades later The Guide to British Track and Field Literature from 1275-1968 would call their debut “a landmark in athletics literature. The text is distinguished by a degree of precision and thoroughness which no athletics historian had achieved before. In Britain the McWhirters spearheaded the emphasis on statistical data which is a feature of modern athletics writing.”

Research showing that no other fact business of its kind existed did not worry the brothers, who instead found this void encouraging, and on 2 March 1951, McWhirter Twins Ltd was formally registered as a business . They immediately began cold-calling newspapers, trying to sell them their factfinding services. Due to fluke timing, one such sales call quickly led not to the sale of facts but to the offer of a fulltime job for Ross with London’s Star as the lawn tennis and rugby correspondent, as well as part-time seasonal freelance coverage of other sports for Norris. Thinking it over, the McWhirters concluded that Ross’s income would give them some stability, while Norris would still have enough time to run the upstart fact-finding firm. Before long, their rising stars in sports and sportswriting led Norris to begin doing part-time event commentary on radio for the BBC as well. Then, in an eerie Guinness precursor, one of the first substantive pieces of business landed by McWhirter Twins Ltd was a contract to produce ‘interesting information’ to be printed on boxes of Shredded Wheat breakfast cereal. The twins clinched the deal and won the bid only when they suggested using ‘superlative objects and people’ , accompanied by artist’s renderings, for the cereal box factoids.

Things progressed smoothly for the twins for a few years, with Ross covering major events such as Wimbledon and his twin researching quirky cereal box facts and growing his reputation as a sportscaster. Norris also took a position editing Athletics World magazine in 1952, which he would continue to do through the amazingly busy next four years in the twins’ lives. They seemed to be cut from the same cloth as Sir Hugh, keeping their hands in an ever-growing number of enterprises. Norris’s work with BBC radio also took a major step forward s with his broadcasts from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which in turn led to a job on television as part of the BBC’s commentary team for the next four Olympic Games: Rome (1960), Tokyo (1964), Mexico (1968) and Munich (1972). Before long, this on-camera experience would prove instrumental in promoting the Guinness brand.

The McWhirters’ growing success came to a head in 1954, the year Norris dubbed ‘Annus Mirabilis’ in his book Ross, an amalgam autobiography and biography of his brother. The miracles referred to were the breaking of the four-minute mile by their friend Roger Bannister and the grouse v golden plover question by Sir Hugh Beaver. The first occurred on 6 May at the familiar Oxford University track where Norris, Ross and Roger had run for so many years (and where Ashrita Furman would later make a record-breaking pilgrimage, albeit on a pogo stick). Norris was hired to provide the track commentary through the public address system, and knowing how much closer his friend Roger was to the mark than many observers suspected, he took great pains the night before the race to rehearse a ‘spontaneous’ announcement, should Bannister indeed deliver the historic benchmark. By a meagre six-tenths of a second he did just that, and slowly and without emotion Norris announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen. Here is the result of event number nine, the one mile . First, number 41, R. G. Bannister, Amateur Athletic Association, and formerly of Exeter and Merton colleges, with a time that is a new meeting and track record, and which, subject to ratification will be a new English native, British Empire and World’s record: the time three minutes…” The rest of his announcement, “fifty-nine point four seconds,” was forever obscured by the loud and riotous reaction of the crowd, some 1200 strong. So important was this event in sports history that Norris later said, “The total crowd was estimated at 1200 and I have met all 10,000 of them since!”

As the world famous record book by the twins would prove dramatically for the next six decades, records are meant to be broken, but firsts are forever. Bannister’s new mark stood for just 46 days, and it would be the next holder, Australian John Landy, whose 3:57.9 would grace the mile entry in the first edition of The Guinness Book of Records, though Bannister would long secure a place in its pages alongside the likes of Neil Armstrong and Sir Edmund Hillary for historic firsts. The twins were not yet done with mile records: later that year Landy’s success set the stage for a hugely anticipated showdown between the two sprinters at the 1954 Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, where Norris reported that scalpers were getting upward of $100 Canadian, a stunning amount at the time, for the event, dubbed ‘The Miracle Mile’ by the press. The McWhirters were once again on hand to witness track and field history when Bannister won in 3:58.8 with Landy less than a second behind him, making it history’s first double sub-four-minute mile.

Around the time the twins were revelling in Vancouver, Sir Hugh Beaver was bird hunting in Ireland. Connecting these dots was the job of another employee of the famous brewery, outstanding Oxford track and world-record sprinter Chris Chataway, team mate of the McWhirters. Chataway had just given up full-time athletics and taken a position as an underbrewer at Guinness’s Park Royal Brewery in London, the facility Sir Hugh himself had helped build in his previous career in engineering. After returning from his shooting holiday, Sir Hugh immediately began bouncing his idea for a book to settle bar disputes off Guinness executives, and fellow managing director Norman Smiley (who had also been a miler at Oxford) was very enthusiastic. Smiley re-raised the issue with Beaver several times in the ensuing months until one morning, Sir Hugh and Smiley began chatting with Chataway over breakfast about the concept. Eventually, the pair asked Chataway if he knew anyone appropriate for taking on such a project, and without hesitation he recommended the McWhirters. At his bosses’ request, Chataway rang up his old friends and asked them, in a manner Norris recalled as quite mysterious and secretive, if they could come to the brewery for a meeting to discuss ‘a project’. Chataway refused to give any more details and informed them that he would not personally be present at the luncheon meeting. Norris would recall later that “It seemed that Sir Hugh had an instinct for confidentiality which has always been an unfortunate but necessary part of the publishing profession.”

When the twins arrived at the London brewery, they were led to the board’s private dining room, where they found a large group of company directors and no other outside guests. As Norris recalled the fateful meeting :

After the usual conversation, Sir Hugh led round to the subject of records and record breaking. Ross and I were asked the records for a number of what to us were fairly simple categories, such as filibustering (Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, over 22 hours) and pole squatting (a man in Portland also in Oregon called Howard who stayed up for 196 days). Lord Moyne was more interested in how one found out, rather than if we knew the answer, and posed the question how, for instance, would one discover the identity of the widest river that had ever frozen? Ross replied, before I could, that this particular problem was really quite simple because it could only lie between three contenders, namely the three Russian rivers, the Ob’, Yenisey and the Lena which flowed into the Arctic, adding that the Antarctic of course did not have any rivers.

Sir Hugh then began talking about his experiences as a civil engineer in building harbours in Turkey three or four years before the war, and mentioned that the problem was in getting the specifications translated from English into Turkish. I interposed that I could not see why Turkish should be a particular problem since the language had only one irregular verb. Sir Hugh stopped dead and said “Which is the irregular verb?” I replied “imek, to be.” “Do you speak Turkish?” he asked, so I admitted I didn’t. “Then how on earth do you know that?” he queried. “Because records of all kinds interest me and I had learnt that fact in trying to discover which language had fewest irregular verbs, compared with the 180 or so in English.”

Sir Hugh seemed to decide that he had discovered people with the right kind of mind for producing the book, which he now resolved should be published under the Guinness imprint, to settle arguments in the 84,400 pubs in the country. Quite suddenly he said “We are going to set up a publishing subsidiary. Which one of you is to be Managing Director?” Ross explained that he had a staff job in Fleet Street and that I would be better suited to take on the assignment. Sir Hugh, who was now anxious to get off to another appointment, merely added: “Before you leave go up and see the accountant and tell them [sic] how much money you need.”

The twins soon formed Superlatives Limited, a subsidiary of and financed by Arthur Guinness & Sons, with offices in the fifth floor of Ludgate House in Fleet Street, just blocks from where their father had first introduced them to journalism. They had only 16 weeks - until July 1955 - to complete the first edition of The Guinness Book of Records, and to do so, the pair worked 90-hour weeks, long into the early morning hours nearly every night. According to Norris, “The work on the book could be summed up as extracting ‘-ests’ (i.e., highests, oldests, richests, heaviests, fastests, etc.) from ‘ists’ (dendrochronologists, helminthologists, palaeontologists and volcanologists, etc).” To get these -ests from the - ists they fired off hundreds of letters to experts around the globe. When the first edition came out, the acknowledgements page thanked 95 different entities, ranging from major Detroit automobile manufacturers to the German Diplomatic Mission and Japanese Embassy, the US Coast Guard and the BBC, and such specialist groups as the British Mycological Society and British Speleological Association.

In the course of letter writing, the twins quickly learnt the ground rules of the record-research business. They discovered that they consistently had more success when they found what they thought was the right answer through their own research and then asked experts for verification, rather than if they simply asked for the answer straight out. “People who have a total resistance to giving information often have an irresistible desire to correct other people’s impressions,” Norris wryly commented. Likewise, they found that enthusiastic amateurs were more forthcoming than jaded professionals, and that foreigners would answer enquiries from abroad when they wouldn’t give the time of day to their fellow countrymen. French experts would not respond to letters in English, while German experts became irate if the Brits translated letters into German. At the end of this frantic search for superlatives, Norris concluded that “Compiling a reference book thus is something which we discovered entails not only an expenditure of energy far beyond that called for by any fiction writer, but also the deployment of some measure of psychology.”

On 27 August 1955, the McWhirter’s office manager walked into the Superlatives Limited headquarters with the very first bound copy of the book, bearing a plain green linen cover and the words The Guinness Book of Records, along with the brewery’s trademark harp logo, all embossed in gold. (The harp is a popular image in Ireland, appearing in the Republic’s coat of arms, on coins, and as the symbol of Trinity College, Dublin. The image appears on the Guinness label, and in addition to its namesake stout, the company also brews one of the world’s great lagers, fittingly named Harp.) It also included a moving foreword by the Earl of Iveagh, the Guinness chairman, implying that more than mere ink and paper, the book was something that could turn the heat of an argument into the light of knowledge. For those familiar with editions printed in the last 40 years, the dignified original bears only a vague resemblance to what The Guinness Book of Records has evolved into. It was, after all, inspired by encyclopedias, and it is very much a research book, conservative in appearance and something to be put on the bookshelf alongside the World Almanac and dictionary. Amazingly, despite its tiny editorial and research staff, and the incredible time pressure to produce it, the original book contained some 8000 records , far more than today’s volume, reaching a level of comprehensiveness that would consistently decline over time even as the book got thicker and larger. The decision was made to price the 198-page book, complete with illustrations and a full-colour frontispiece (a luxury at the time), at just five shillings (£0.25). Opening the cover today, the original book remains as dramatic as it must have been to the first readers more than half a century ago, who were confronted with two almost totally blank white pages, bearing just a few words on the lower right-hand corner:

MOUNT EVEREST (29,160 FEET)

The highest mountain in the world

Wonderfully bereft of punctuation, it summed up so much of what the book would become known for, including an ‘-est’, in this case highest, and an ‘in the world’, representative of the name by which the book would later become known, one of not just records but world records. Readers flipping this page were then greeted by a rarity in 1955, a full-colour picture of the mountain itself, wrapped in clouds, a suitably massive image for the collection of superlatives they held in their hands.

The first copy was sent to the man who had commissioned the work. Sir Hugh promptly wrote back to the twins :

On arrival home last Sunday I found your letter of 27th August and the first bound copy of The Guinness Book of Records. I did greatly appreciate your sending me this. I have read through the greater part of it and am amazed at the skill with which you have put it together. As value for the money I think there is not likely to be anything like it on the book market this year.

The first print run was 50,000 copies, which would have been quite optimistic were it not for the huge base of pubs already affiliated with Guinness. Commercial sales started quite slowly, and the Superlatives team was crestfallen when WH Smith, the nation’s leading book retailer, ordered a scant six copies - and insisted on the option to return them. Ross, Norris and their small staff tried to reason this unexpected resistance out in their offices, but within two hours of having returned from their personal call on Smith, the bookseller, presumably after having begun to actually read the fascinating work, rang back and increased the quantity to 100. Later that afternoon Smith again changed its tune, ordering 1000 copies. By the week’s end this one account had ordered a full fifth of the entire print run. “The realization dawned on us quite quickly that the book which had been produced to settle arguments in pubs…was about to become a best seller. Ross and I had long had the suspicion that our own fascination for records and superlatives might not have been as quirkish as some of our closer friends had thought, but until now there had been no confirmation that it would arouse such a widespread enthusiasm among others.”

According to Ken Jennings in Brainiac, the McWhirters had a ripe market for their project because the English had long been enthusiasts of odd facts. “The earliest roots of trivia, in the sense of miscellaneous-and-not-entirely-useful-facts, date back to the ‘commonplace book’ of ye olde England…at the dawn of the Victorian age, a commonplace book was becoming something a little less commonplace: a miscellany of random facts the writer happened to find interesting. A book like Sir Richard Phillips’s 1830 A Million of Facts is half almanac (listing eclipses, weights and measures and so on) but half trivia book as well. Tradesmen and farmers of the time had no practical need to know that ‘The oldest known painting in England is a portrait of Chaucer, painted in panel in 1390.’” Phillips’s language from over a century earlier is quite similar to entries in the early Guinness books, as Stephen Moss, a reporter for the Guardian newspaper confirms. “It is also historically misleading to think of the GBR as a pioneer. The late nineteenth century was awash with almanacs and annuals - a reflection of the Victorian age’s fetish for collection and its faith in fact.” Regardless, there was nothing on the market like The Guinness Book of Records when it debuted in 1955, and whether it broke new ground or rekindled old desires, everyone wanted one. Its timing may well have contributed to yet another UK trivia outbreak that Jennings describes: “Pub trivia, like 1960s rock and roll, is a British invasion, and just like the Beatles, it can be traced to Liverpool, circa 1959.”

“It makes sense that it started in the pubs, because we have such a unique pub culture in this country,” Mark Frary, author and correspondent for The Times, told me. “People think nothing of spending a few hours every night in their pub; it is a very social aspect of life, and that was where people gathered and the book gained an audience. It was just the British eccentricity of it all that fascinated people, and people loved it.”

Norris was right about the realization inspired by WH Smith’s huge order. By December the book had become a best seller, beginning a tradition that would continue every single year in which a new volume was released. It had never been envisioned as an annual, and it would be more than a decade before dates began appearing on the cover of the book. The first edition simply became known as the ‘green’ one, and it had to be reprinted three times to meet demand. The holiday season came and went, but the book’s popularity showed no signs of waning. When the fourth printing of January 1956 was exhausted and sales of the bargain-priced volume had reached 187,000, the brewery decided to call a halt and regroup. The decision was made that an updated and more realistically (higher) priced edition would be published later that year. The McWhirters went back to work, and released the fifth edition (known in the US as the second edition) in October 1956. This book, known as ‘the blue’, was only the second version, meaning the first with any changes to the original contents; it was virtually identical in appearance except for a blue linen cover. Enjoying similar success, the blue became a best seller and was reprinted just two months later. There was no 1957 edition, as the management at Superlatives would spend much of the year trying to break the Guinness book into the larger American market. In 1958 there was a red version, followed by two more biannual editions. In 1964 the book became a recurring annual fixture, and a new version has been released every year since. The editions changed colour annually and remained dateless through 1969, after which the book would undergo its first radical transformation in 1970 - still under the guidance of Ross and Norris McWhirter.

The twins were apparently tireless; they continued to update the book, fulfill their other writing and editing assignments, travel extensively and broadcast. Yet somehow they found time for annual holidays. Shortly after the breakout success of the original Guinness Book of Records, both McWhirters married women they met on ski trips, first Ross in 1956 to Rosemary Grice, and then Norris in 1957 to Carole Eckert. Still, from the reader’s perspective, they remained far more anonymous than the characters they immortalized. The green, blue and red editions all were authorless except for the mysterious ‘compilers’, as the McWhirters were called. Always ones to give credit to others, the twins began to pepper the acknowledgements page with names of their office staff and secretaries as early as 1958, but it was not until the black volume in 1960 that the twins themselves got their due, when the facsimile signatures of Ross and Norris began to appear regularly. It became the twins’ practice to thank every single person in the Superlatives office who had assisted in the book’s frenetic production.

Within a few months, what had begun as a bird-hunting lark and pub-marketing scheme had turned into a serious business, and the unexpected success quickly led the Guinness executives to expand into the larger and more lucrative US market. Norris was dispatched to the States to do what he did best - conduct a fact-finding mission and research an expansion strategy. The pressure from above to rush out a US version quickly proved troublesome: 50,000 (green) copies (titled The Guinness Book of Superlatives) were published speculatively for American readers, the name changed out of misguided concerns that Americans would confuse ‘records’ of the sporting type with phonograph records. Working out of cramped quarters in the brewery giant’s New York sales office, Norris managed to hawk a mere 29,000 copies. While not a bad showing for the average new book, it paled before the runaway success at home. The United States had no pub culture of the type Mark Frary described, and on top of that, the twins’ very limited book publishing and marketing experience was with their home market, where advertising was not only unnecessary but somewhat frowned upon. Norris concluded that on the other side of the Atlantic quite the opposite was true, and that “In the United States people will not buy anything unless it is advertised because they think that the manufacturer cannot really believe in the product unless he spends a lot of money pushing it. In New York we were not prepared to advertise our pioneer edition which was unwisely entitled The Guinness Book of Superlatives, and in addition, we had no distribution set-up.” A presumably disappointed Norris McWhirter left the US operations of Superlatives Limited in the sole hands of Miss Dorothy Nelson, an office manager charged with marketing, selling, shipping, billing and handling returns for the company and its book. Little did Norris know that while it would take a few tough years and the fortuitous intervention of American book publisher David Boehm, his record book would soon become even more popular in the United States than at home - and something fans were obsessed with getting themselves into, not merely reading.

The sixties and early seventies were golden years for the McWhirters and the Guinness records franchise. Having already become a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic by the early 1960s, the world was at their feet, and record mania quickly spawned editions in French, Le Livre des Extremes, and German, Rekorde Rekorde Rekorde. By 1966 a million and half copies had sold, and Japanese and Danish editions were added. By the following year, consumers had snapped up another million copies, and the book was translated into Spanish and Norwegian. Another year and another million and a half copies later, The Guinness Book of Records was translated into Finnish, Italian, Danish and Swedish, and the book began running full-colour photos throughout its pages, not just as the frontispiece. The sixties closed in dramatic fashion, not just with the addition of Czech and Dutch versions but with one of the greatest Guinness records of all time when Neil Armstrong helped to create an important new category - Lunar Conquest.

By the time the 1970s dawned, the McWhirters had become celebrities at home, but their book needed a bigger venue. Television came knocking, the McWhirters answered, and pop culture would never be the same.

OBITUARY OF SIR HUGH BEAVER, K.B.E (1890-1967) (EXCERPTED FROM GUINNESS TIME, THE NEWSLETTER OF ARTHUR GUINNESS & SON)

…the slender leisure which he had for hobbies of archaeology, local and natural history, poetry and that omnivorous appetite for reading. He was a particularly fine shot. It was after a shoot by the estuary of the River Slaney in County Wexford, that he was frustrated in an attempt to find out whether the snipe [grouse] or golden plover, which he had shot, was the faster game bird. He had at that moment the inspiration which determined him to commission the Guinness Book of Records. This title has ever since remained a source of irritation to professional publishers who have watched its number of foreign editions grow to the point where it is now available in the first language of 790 million people.

(The same edition of Guinness Time contains a detailed story about and recipe for the world’s largest cake.)