Getting into Guinness Read online

  Having conceived the need for such an argument settling record compendium, Sir Beaver 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 color of the cap on a bottle of beer. In the twelve 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 focusing his energies on his public service than book selling. This is made clear in a letter dated November 23, 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 Beaver 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 Beaver undertook, this moment was recorded in precise pencil-written letters, in an understated tone. On May 3, 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 twenty minutes apart at Winchmore Hill, North London, on August 12, 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 toward 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 catalog 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, Oxford, and in the British Royal Navy. Decades later, David Boehm, founder of Sterling Press, the longtime U.S. 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 quarterbacks. They were standout 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 dash, and Norris was good enough to race against (and lose to) Trinidadian Emmanuel MacDonald Bailey, then the U.K. record holder in the event. He was selected as a “possible” in the 200 meters 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 5,000 meters. Completing their education after an interruption for military service, all four were part of a twenty-man team chosen to represent Oxford in its first postwar 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, encyclopedias, and advertisers. Knowing the specialty 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 March 2, 1951, McWhirter Twins Ltd. was formally registered as a business. They immediately began cold-calling newspapers, trying to sell them their fact-finding services. Due to fluke timing, one such sales call quickly led not to the sale of facts but to the offer of a full-time 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 busine
ss 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 Beaver, keeping their hands in an ever-growing number of enterprises. Norris’s work with BBC radio also took a major step forward 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 vs. golden plover question by Sir Hugh Beaver. The first occurred on May 6 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 meager 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 1,200 strong. So important was this event in sports history that Norris later said, “The total crowd was estimated at 1,200 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 forty-six 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 reveling in Vancouver, Sir Hugh Beaver was bird hunting in Ireland. Connecting these dots was the job of another employee of the famous brewery, Oxford track standout and world record sprinter Chris Chataway, teammate 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 Beaver himself had helped build in his previous career in engineering. After returning from his shooting vacation, Sir Beaver 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 Beaver 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 harbors 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 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 sixteen weeks—until July 1955—to complete the first edition of The Guinness Book of Records, and to do so, the pair worked ninety-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, paleontologists, 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 acknowledgments page thanked ninety-five different entities, ranging from major Detroit automobile manufacturers to the German Diplomatic Mission and Japanese Embassy, the U.S. Coast Guard and the BBC, and such specialty groups as the British Mycological Society and British Speleological Association.

  In the course of letter writing, the twins quickly learned 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 inquiries 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.”