Books
The speed of a Golden Plover
Christopher Booker
Guinness Book of Records, 1983 Edition Edited by Norris McWhirter (Guinness Superlatives Ltd £5.75)
Sometime in the early Fifties, so the story goes, the managing direct& of Guin- ness, Sir Hugh Beaver, loosed off his gun at a passing Golden Plover and missed. He tried to console himself by wondering whether the Golden Plover was the fastest bird in Europe. When various reference books failed to come up with an answer, the .eventual result was the launching of what has become arguably the most spectacularly successful publishing venture of all time.
The 1983 edition of the Guinness Book of Records is the 29th since Ross and Norris McWhirter produced their first in 1954. Total sales, in 24 languages, have topped 45 million. In Dutch it is published as Het Groot Guinness Record Boek, in Greek as Ta Paraxena kai to Rekor tou Kosmou. There are versions in Hebrew, Serbo-Croat, Icelandic and Chinese. Indeed it is already nearly ten years since the Guinness Book of Records first got into itself for having sold more copies than any commercial book in history ( it is still some way behind the Bible and The Thoughts of Chairman Mao). It can scarcely be disputed, in short, that the Guinness Book of Records is a brilliant achievement, a worthy addition to that long list of more or less eccentric reference books, from Grove to Wisden, for which the British have shown such a peculiar genius. It has become a national institution, a household word, and there can be few to whom its 50,000-odd entries, ranged under such general chapter headings as 'The Human Being', 'The World's Structures', and 'Sports, Games and Pastimes', are wholly unfamiliar. But as the eye wanders across these pages of obsessively documented items covering everything from the 'Tallest Giant' to 'the record time for boardsailing across the English Channel is lhr 4min 33sec by Arnaud de Rosay (France)', from the record distance flown by a chicken (310 ft 6in) to the world's highest filling station (12,001 ft at Leh, Ladakh, India), it is difficult not to be tempted into more general meditation on the curious aspect of human nature which this book both reflects and serves. In the past 30 years since the Guinness Book of Records was launched, in fact, something rather strange has been happen- Mg to the human quest for record-breaking. suppose the urge to make lists of what Guinness call 'world superlatives' goes back at least 2000 years to the coining of 'the Seven Wonders of the World'. For cen- turies fireside tales have been spiced with anecdotes about real-life giants, or ex-
travagant examples of longevity such as `Old Parr', who supposedly lived for 152 years. But clearly the notion of 'records' in the modern sense is a function of the ever- greater exactitude with which we have been able to measure space and time, which means that the systematic documentation of 'superlatives' has been an essentially 20th-century obsession.
By the time the Guinness Book of Records first appeared in the early Fifties, you could say that something of a 'golden age' had been reached. A basic stock of familiar records were among those things every schoolboy was supposed to know, such as that the tallest building in the world was the Empire State Building, or that Lon- don was the world's most populous city. Roger Bannister's first four-minute mile in 1954 seemed a historic landmark com- parable with the climbing of Everest. I can still remember standing on a Mersey ferry in 1956 and reading in the News Chronicle that Peter Twiss had become 'the fastest man in the world' by flying at 1127 mph (of course it helped that so many world-beaters in those days still seemed to be British — Twiss's flight gave Britain for the last time in history the fastest times in the air, on land and water).
But how many schoolboys today could tell you offhand that the tallest structure in the world is the Warszawa Radio Mast at Plock in Poland, 646.38 metres high? How many could instantly distinguish between the claims of Tokyo and Mexico City to be the largest city (according to whether you allow the former to include the entire 'Keihin Metropolitan Area', which puts it first at 28,043,000, or insist that Tokyo should stand on its own, in which case Mex- ico City leads with 13,950,364)? A good many more could probably still name the record-holder for the mile, because he still happens to be an Englishman, Sebastian Coe — although they might have difficulty in giving his time down to the nearest hun- dredth of a second at 3.47.33. As for the fastest man in the world, such claims have been rendered virtually meaningless by space travel: whether one group of astronauts travelling at 24,000 miles an hour marginally exceeded the speed of another no longer seems very important. Obviously technology is foremost among the factors which have helped to empty records of their old immediacy and significance. The doings of obscure fanatics as they drive jet or rocket-propelled cars or boats at • only just subsonic speed's around the deserts and lakes of America have in- finitely less public impact than did the feats of a Malcolm Campbell or Henry Seagrave 50 years ago. Somehow all the fun goes out of knowing the highest buildings .in the world when they are no longer gothic cathedrals or even skyscrapers but just a bunch of television masts. It may theoretically be impressive that an American scientist has managed, with the aid of a 100,000 volt electron beam, to etch the words 'molecular devices' on a sodium chloride crystal in writing no wider than 20 hydrogen atoms, but in practice it was much more so that an old monk should be able to inscribe the Lord's Prayer with a pin on a piece of ivory a million times as big.
Another such factor is inflation which, as a by-product of rendering money increas- ingly meaningless, has obviously done the same to records measured financially. Who any longer knows or cares which old master painting has fetched the highest price in some disgusting auction room, let alone which golfer or tennis player has won the most prize money in a year?
But undoubtedly a third factor in diminishing the significance of records in recent decades has simply been the much greater consciousness of (and therefore pro- liferation of) record-breaking as some kind of end in itself — and here of course the most prominent culprit has been the Guin- ness Book of Records itself. Easily the most depressing sections of the book are those which can only be described as 'self- referential', listing such things as the longest continuous apple-paring in the world, or the longest time someone has spent balancing on one foot, or the measurements of the largest banana-split ever made, or the record for pushing a bed, or the fastest times for eating kippers or spaghetti or baked beans (although it is marginally interesting that in 1977 a French- man called 'Monsieur Mangetout' claim- ed a record of 15 days for eating a whole bicycle). Not only does no one (except the record holders themselves) give a damn who has the world's largest collection of tea- towels, or the fastest time for smashing a piano, or the longest time for playing the violin under water — no one would dream of doing these pointless things at all if it were not for the chance of a mention in the Guinness Book of Records.
At times indeed it is hard not to become distinctly impatient at this aspect of the Guinness Book, at the way the medium has over the past 29 years increasingly become its own message (as when the world's `largest alpenhorn' is described as having been 'demonstrated to David Frost on 28 June 1981' only, one knows, because it was on a television programme mounted in con- junction with the Guinness Book of Records). It is hard not to be infuriated by the self-importantly pedantic way in which such a mountain of incredible trivia (the world records for bubble-gum blowing, for kissing, for bouncing on a pogo stick) has been compiled — hard not to exclaim with Gulliver-like misanthropy 'what an odious race of little vermin' at the picture of human nature which this pursuit of mindless nonsense conjures bp.
But what ultimately saves the Guinness Book of Records (other than its straight- forward virtues as a book of reference) is that in an important respect it is not really a book of 'records' at all. Peeking out from behind the dismal recital of trivial facts and late 20th-century statistics, measured in `milliseconds' and `manometers', is something much more ancient and engag- ing. It is really at heart the last of those homely books of 'curiosities', such as were popular in the 19th century before our 20th- century obsession with 'records' ever emerged.
I do not just mean by this the more ob- vious 'freaks' and curiosities — 'the world's fattest woman', 'the world's richest man' — but the wealth of even more eccentric in- formation contained in these pages, much of which can only be looked on as having only the remotest connection with 'records' of any kind. Where else since the demise of Ripley's Believe It Or Not, for instance, could one find between the same two covers not only the fact that the language of the Tierra del Fuegans (now spoken by only one survivor) contains a single word which means 'looking at each other hoping that either will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do' (listed under 'Most Succinct Word'); but also that the youngest recorded undergraduate was the physicist William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, who entered Glasgow University at the age of 10 years, 4 months? Where else might one read (under 'World's Slowest Seller') that the Oxford University Press in 1716 printed 500 copies of a translation of the New Testament from Coptic into Latin, and did not sell the last one until 1907? One can learn here, if one did not know it already, that the proper name for China under Pinying spelling is Zhogguo. One can read about the time a Prussian band on the platform of Rathenau railway station in 1909 had to play 'God Save The King' non- stop '16 or 17 times' — the reason being that 'King Edward VII was struggling inside the train with the uniform of a German field-marshal before he could emerge'. Even the section on human longevity con- tains a fascinating aside suggesting that one reason for the widely held misconception that people live to an unusual age in the Caucasus may have been that Stalin fiddled the figures in an effort to kid himself that Georgians like him had the highest life- expectancy in the world.
The truth is, of course, that most of the really important things which human beings have ever achieved or been preoccupied by cannot be measured in mere facts and figures — as the Guinness Book of Records acknowledges in its entry under 'Feminine Beauty' when it says 'female pulchritude, being qualitative rather than quantitative, does not lend itself to records' (even though it then tries to circumvent its own wisdom by retailing a quantity of such deeply in- significant information as the height of the tallest girl to be chosen 'Miss United Kingdom'). The longest symphony is not the best. You cannot reduce Shakespeare to statistics, or for that matter the Sermon on
the Mount. That recognised, it is the real strength of the way Norris McWhirter and his brother, the late Ross, approached their task that they allowed simple curiosity and their sheer love of useless information to play such a large part in eking out the more straightforward and recognisable 'records'. It is for this that they created such a supremely idiosyncratic book, one which could in no sense have been compiled by a computer. And it is for this (and the sort of humour which permits them to include an entry on White's Club under the section headed 'Labour') that one can ultimately forgive almost any amount of rubbish about the record number of fish fingers consumed in 2.7 million nana-seconds by a 41-year-old unemployed spool-girdler from Clitheroe, Lancs. But these pages still will not tell you the speed of a Golden Plover.
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