Was it pure genius?
Jonathan Guinness
DARK AND LIGHT: THE STORY OF THE GUINNESS FAMILY by Derek Wilson Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 302 If anyone is qualified to write a book about the Guinness family it is Derek Wilson. His book about the Rothschilds was sound, and he has done the Astors as well. He is also a competent historian. If he lacks the light touch — well, one can't have everything. There is, however, a difficulty to writing about the Guinnesses. Over the two and a half centuries since Arthur Guin- ness set up in business the family has dis- persed. During the latter half of this period there have been at least four noteworthy sections of the family, each of whom deserves a book, but they have been sepa- rate; namely the bankers, the brewers, the missionaries and the New Zealand politi- cians. There has been interaction, mostly between the first two, but not enough to make a single story of it.
The book succeeds best in its early part, when the family was still a unit. The two founding fathers were Arthur the brewer and his brother Samuel who was a fashion- able goldsmith. The family soon estab- lished itself as an important part of the network and mating group which ran Dublin and helped man the Church of Ireland. Samuel's two sons became lawyers, and one of his grandsons, Robert Rundell Guinness, founded the bank Guinness Mahon. Robert Rundell was also the 'They say on a clear day you can see Geoffrey Robinson's bank account.' lawyer of his cousin Arthur, son of the Arthur who started the brewery. At that stage all the Guinnesses knew each other well, and interacted.
All was not plain sailing. There were two spectacular bankruptcies which lost a good deal of family money. Edward, brother of the second Arthur, went broke as an iron- founder, and Richard, younger brother of the banker Robert Rundell, started a bank which failed. Robert Rundell had been a partner, but pulled out in time, cherry- picking John Ross Mahon who was the ablest employee. Daughters of these bankrupts married successive heads of the brewery and so recovered their old pros- perity, and more. Richard's wife was Katherine Jenkinson, who was not just the daughter of a Gloucestershire baronet but a cousin of Lord Liverpool, the dim but durable prime minister under whom Napoleon was defeated. Katherine is thought to have given her husband tastes he could not support. He became MP for Barnstaple amid accusations of sleaze, and died poor.
In the meantime, the second Arthur's nephew, Henry Grattan, had a celestial vision which turned him into a clergyman and a famous preacher, a Victorian Billy Graham well known throughout the English-speaking world. Later in his long life he devised astronomical tables which I believe are still used, though he compiled them not for the sake of science but as an aid to prophecy. An early Zionist, he was pleased to find that the stars predicted the state of Israel. He had many children, some of whom became intrepid missionaries — Harry, in particular, was one of the first to blow the whistle on the atrocities in the Bel- gian Congo; and Gershom, with his sister Geraldine, who only just escaped slaughter at the hands of the Boxer rebels in China. (There is a fuller and livelier account of these Guinnesses in Michele Guinness's The Guinness Legend.) Another nephew of the second Arthur, Francis Hart Vicesimus, went to New Zealand where his son became a radical Speaker of Parliament.
There are many good things in the first half of the book. I think Wilson gets the politics about right. The first Arthur sup- ported Henry Grattan, the Protestant radi- cal — they were cousins. The second Arthur supported Daniel O'Connell's suc- cessful campaign for Catholics to get the vote and full civil rights, but broke with O'Connell when he campaigned against the Act of Union. Later Guinnesses all opposed Gladstone's Home Rule plans, though some more vehemently than others.
Wilson does not quite understand that Unionism of the type prevalent in the Guinness family at the beginning of this century was very proudly Irish. Edward Guinness, first Lard Iveagh, called his sons (born between 1874 and 1880) Rupert, Ernest and Walter: typical Victorian names with a solid Germanic flavour. These three between them had ten surviving children, one of whom was naturally called Arthur. All the other nine had Irish names: Honor, Patricia, Brigid, Aileen, Maureen, Oonagh, Bryan, Murtogh and Grania. The Celtic Twilight was not confined to nationalists.
As the 20th century advances, Derek Wilson's touch becomes less sure. He gives an excellent account of my grandfather Walter, Conservative MP, much-decorated soldier, amateur anthropologist and government minister who was shot by Jewish terrorists in Cairo in 1944. Walter was a very considerable figure in his day, and Wilson does him full justice, except in describing his brother Ernest, an innovative engineer but little else, as the intellectual of the three brothers.
For the rest, there is at times more than a whiff of the gossip column. A foretaste of this is the offensive implication that the first Lord Iveagh built houses for the poor in London rather than in Dublin because this was a 'much better personal advertise- ment than similar structures across the water'. Iveagh built in Dublin too, on a smaller scale, but Dublin was smaller. It is often said or implied that the benefactions of Edward Iveagh and his brother were motivated by social ambition, but the tim- ing makes nonsense of this, and I should have hoped that Wilson was above repeat- ing this slur.
This gets worse later. On my cousin Henrietta, Wilson relies entirely on the gossip columns, presenting her as a poor little rich girl prevented by her family from meeting 'real people' and implying that her suicide was a mystery. It was not a mystery at all. Henrietta was a clinical manic depressive who spent time in hospital. The illness was brought on by a car accident in which she was severely injured, but her psy- chiatrist told me that it would inevitably have shown itself later. Her loving Italian husband and his kind close family seemed for a time to stabilise her, but the illness was too strong for them.
Perhaps one should not blame Wilson for this; Henrietta's family, wrongly in my view, never wanted it made clear. What is more surprising is the hash he makes of the Guinness scandal around Ernest Saunders and the Distillers takeover, which is most certainly in the public domain. Media coverage, it is said, was greater than that of the Falklands war. His grossest error is to make the date of the bid'19 July 1986 when it was exactly six months earlier. He gives the impression that Guinness bid for Dis- tillers before Argyll did. He also makes out . that Saunders disliked the Guinness family from the start. On the contrary, he regard- ed us at first as a help in creating an image that would combine tradition with dynamism. Over time, it is true, the rela- tionship deteriorated. Nor does Wilson adequately explain why Saunders lost his City reputation after the bid but before the revelations which caused him to be convict- ed. One scans the index in vain for Sir Thomas Risk. Nor does he explain the con- fusion over the status of evidence given before the inspectors which induced the European court to rule his trial unfair. I could go on.
I also smell the gossip column in Wil- son's decision to mention poor Tara Browne's fatal car accident rather than the achievements of his elder brother Garech in preserving Irish folk music and starting the Chieftains. A flawed work, then, espe- cially in the last chapters. But what is good in it is excellent.
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