Beer and banks
Jonathan Guinness
The Silver Salver: The Story of the Guinness Family Frederick Mullally (Granada pp. 255, £9.95) The Guinness family really is a family. Everyone called Guinness, unless the name has been assumed, is at least remotely related; sometimes several times, for cousin marriages have been common. There is public interest in the family because its businesses of brewing and banking have notoriously prospered over the years. The branches of the family concerned in them, and other branches too, have thrown up some remarkable individuals. There have been politicians, in the Dominions as well as in these islands; there have been evangelical missionaries and other clerics, writers and lawyers and military men; there has been at least one clever mechanical inventor. Even some of the black sheep have been fun. It has been a bit like an untidy Irish version of the Forsyte Saga.
The living Guinnesses are descended from Richard Guinness, born about 1680, who was bailiff to the Protestant Archbishop of Cashel and himself of that religion. Mr Mullally, in this book, is weak on Richard, mentioning him only as perhaps having been an ostler and perhaps having eloped with his first wife. Well, perhaps, but the importance of his job with the Archbishop is that His Grace left £100 to each of Richard's sons, of whom Arthur set up in business as a brewer, with results which we know, while Samuel became a goldsmith and his descendants took to banking. From them, most of the family became what is known as 'upwardly mobile' at varying rates and with varying destinations.
The name Guinness is a mystery. Nobody knows who was Richard's father; the spelling became stabilised during the 18th century among his descendants and those of his brother William, who seem to have died out. The most likely possibility is that it is a variant of the Irish name Mac Aonghusa, son of Angus; anglicised as McGuinness, Magennis, Maginnis, and so on. Protestant converts often dropped the `Mac'. At one time, we claimed relationship to the noble family of Magennis, Lords of Iveagh, who had fled with other `wild geese' to the Continent. The brewing branch took the coat of arms of this family, and later adopted their title. This was wrong. We are probably indeed sons of Angus, but humbler ones. There is, however, an alternative theory which links us with a Cornishman called Gennys.
A number of us did not exactly welcome the idea of the present book and Mr Mullal
ly failed, in many quarters, to get cooperation. He thinks this is 'an expression of [the] family's distaste for personal publicity', but I am afraid it was more specific. For Mr Mullally is not an unknown figure. His writing career falls into two halves, and neither half was calculated to reassure us. He began as a very left-wing political journalist, co-editing Tribune just after the war, and conducting a column in the Labour-supporting Sunday Pictorial. He then took to writing thrillers for the airport waiting-room trade, such as are not frequently reviewed in the Spectator. The thrillers seemed to indicate that the book would be trivial and sensational; the left-wing politics that it might even be aimed at deliberately damaging us.
It was the first and less important of these fears that was the more completely realised. Mr Mullally's style is deadened with cliche and solecism. He also goes in a good deal for the tired adjectives journalists encourage each other to use as 'colour'. Sometimes this 'colour' entraps him into an obsequiousness which he can hardly intend. 'The brilliant young marquess and his immensely popular marchioness played host to the social and intellectual elite of Britain and Ireland in their London home or at Clandboye in Co. Down, the beautiful 3,000 acre ancestral estate of the TempleBlackwood family'. Note the acres. Mr Mullally cannot keep off the subject of possessions, especially money, which he calls 'wealth'. He always gives the figure left in everyone's will. Houses are usually referred to as 'mansions' and valued. Titles also obsess Mr Mullally. Licking his lips, he counts 41 members of the family who 'boast (sic) titles ranging from Honourable to Earl and Marquess.' It is like ploughing through a book-length gossip column, and an inaccurate one at that. He can't even get his press-cuttings right; one among numerous examples of his carelessness is his attribution to my father of a traffic accident that in fact happened to my mother.
The other fear, that the book would be deliberately hostile, is only partly justified. It may be, of course, that the vulgarity is designed to smear us, rather as Tom Driberg used the William Hickey column between the wars to discredit the social elite, but it is not necessary to suppose more than that it is simply natural to the man. When it comes to politics, there is a left slant all right, but it is not vicious or belowthe-belt; it simply springs from his sincere beliefs. These are stuck somewhere around 1945 and are evident in the page or two he devotes to me. To him, Stalin's Soviet Union is still our gallant ally. Elsewhere, he calls the dog-collared supporters of LatinAmerican terrorism 'socially conscious clergymen' and speculates that the Rev. Henry Grattan Guinness, a worthy and erudite evangelist who flourished at the turn of the century, might well join them if he were alive. He means this as a compliment; whether the good Rev. Henry would agree we do not know, for he is no longer alive. (Mr Mullally informs us that he left £4,600).
However, if somewhat haphazardly, he does distribute bouquets. He admits that the Victorian brewing Guinnesses, notably Sir Benjamin and his sons, Lords Ardilaun and Iveagh, gave valuable benefactions to good causes both in Dublin and London, though he spoils this by making out that they did it entirely in pursuit of titles. When the second Lord Iveagh gave his house in St. Stephen's Green to the Irish Government, Mr Mullally could scarcely say that this was to gain a title, since Iveagh was already an Earl, so the purpose of the gift is said to be to get rid of an encumbrance. On the whole, though, the second Iveagh is a favourite of his, especially for his pioneering work in agriculture. Two major family benefactions since the First World War are not mentioned; the Moyne Institute at Trinity College, Dublin, and the chandeliers in Westminster Abbey. Thoroughness is not a characteristic of this author.
Mr Mullally ends his book with the hope that Guinnesses born today will read his chronicle of the family 'with pride'. I hope they will do nothing of the sort. If they are capable of taking pride in this particular chronicle, their values will have to be those of Mr Mullally; which would be sad.
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