Is Guinness really Irish? An Anglo elite once ruled Dublin

I’ll admit to certain expectations on learning that Steven Knight, the brains behind Peaky Blinders, had written an eight-part Netflix drama about the Guinness family. Chief among them were large numbers of scenes in which characters don hats in slow motion (this means they’re angry), followed by a slightly smaller number of scenes in which they remove hats in slow motion (this means they’re sad). Then there’s the anachronistic soundtrack and the cupped cigarettes. House of Guinness meets some of these expectations: hats still play a crucial role, and Kneecap’s “Get Your Brits Out” erupts within the first 15 minutes. But beyond the winking camp, the show is notable for its attempt to grapple with the complexities of 19th-century Ireland, albeit through the lens of outlandish fiction.

The series begins in 1868. Sir Benjamin Guinness is dead, and his two eldest sons inherit what is now Ireland’s largest brewing concern. From small beginnings in 1759, when Arthur Guinness took out a 9,000-year lease on a site at St James’s Gate in Dublin (rent: £45 per annum), the eponymous stout had gained ground year on year. A degree of brand recognition must have been achieved by 1815, when a cavalry officer found himself desperate for a jar of the black stuff after sustaining wounds at Waterloo. “When I was sufficiently recovered to be able to take some nourishment,” he wrote, “I felt the most extraordinary desire for a glass of Guinness.” By 1840, more Guinness was sold in England than Ireland, and when Sir Benjamin died, the brewery was on the cusp of global success.

House of Guinness follows Sir Benjamin’s children as they scheme, slurp and swive their way through Victorian Dublin. Some work hard, others hardly work. This is all a good laugh, but the most interesting thing is not what these baby Guinnesses do, but who they are. In the words of one proto-Republican, the Guinness family are “the Protestant gentry that make us Irish suffer at the hands of the British.” Another character refers dismissively to “dice-rolling Protestants.” And these brewers aren’t just Protestant. They’re English, too. The family feels the weight of this identity, knowing that success in business has brought other, unwanted responsibilities. When a homosexual Guinness is blackmailed, he is warned that “The Fenians would use you as proof of a degenerate English Protestant ruling class.”

All this might come as a surprise to some international viewers. House of Guinness is, in part, the story of how a quintessentially Protestant product became a quintessentially Irish icon. Dramatic licence is used in spades — each episode begins with the legend, “This fiction is inspired by true stories” — but confusion about whether England or Ireland is home surfaces frequently and rings true. Arthur, the eldest Guinness brother, educated at Eton and living in London, is chided for his English accent and rigid Unionism. His younger brother Edward, raised in Dublin, has a more pragmatic view of the Irish question. Taken together, the two young men embody the contradictions of their ethnicity and class. Knight sensibly avoids the term “Anglo-Irish”, but that is what they are, or at least what they had become.

Who were the Anglo-Irish? Mainly the scions of those English colonists granted large estates during the plantations of the early 1600s, and in the wake of Cromwell’s Irish wars. Still, it’s an elastic term, and includes the Gaelic nobility and descendants of Norman invaders who converted to Protestantism to retain land and status, as well as those who had done well enough in business or politics to gain entry to Dublin’s ballrooms.

In Brendan Behan’s 1958 play, The Hostage, an Anglo-Irishman is defined simply: “A Protestant with a horse.” But not just any Protestant. These, after all, are established Church of Ireland types rather than Methodists or Presbyterians. Work is important, too, or rather the lack of it. Their days, Behan wrote, are spent “riding horses, drinking whisky and reading double-meaning books in Irish at Trinity College.” He evokes a leisured people, and by implication a landed people, whose only true passion has four muscular legs and an alluring whicker. Still, he was a clubbable sort. He’d mock the Anglo-Irish on stage and gladly accept their hospitality off it. At the height of his fame he was a regular guest at Luggala, the Guinness family pile in County Wicklow. Some say he was even asked to write a slogan for the brand. I can’t find any evidence for that claim one way or the other. The only certainty is that Behan’s reputed suggestion — “Guinness gets you drunk” — was never used.

The Guinness who took out a lease at St James’s Gate in 1759 wouldn’t qualify as Anglo-Irish according to Behan’s definition. This wasn’t just about English heritage, after all, but class. The first Arthur Guinness had little money and no status, and you’d need at least one of those to count. But in the era covered by House of Guinness, things were changing. Sir Benjamin was the first member of the family to receive a knighthood. His son, Edward, was created Baron Iveagh in 1891. The baronetcy was named for a certain Magennis of Iveagh, who was “re-granted” his 22,000 acres of Ulster in 1623, presumably after conversion from Catholicism. This connection is probably hogwash, as nothing is known about the Guinness family before 1690, but the attempt to anchor themselves within the ranks of the old Gaelic nobility is revealing. In part, this was a natural desire to present themselves as being of ancient stock. But searching for a fantastic origin in a long-ago Ireland also betrayed an Anglo-Irish anxiety about where, exactly, home was to be found.

It’s no accident that Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, arguably the first Irish novel, is concerned with precisely these anxieties. Published in 1800, the satire charts the decline of an Anglo-Irish dynasty as seen through the eyes of the family retainer, Thady Quirk. Quirk — who is either loyal to a fault or completely full of shit, depending on your reading — watches four generations of Rackrents succumb to folly and distraction. Each exhibits the traditional, if exaggerated, maladies of their class: profligacy, litigiousness, absenteeism, cruelty, indebtedness. The Rackrents fail their tenants, who are left at the mercy of viperous middle-men, and who are often forced from their tenancies altogether. Yet they also fail their own flesh and blood. Wives are tortured, heirs are few and far between, and no thought is given to the security of the next generation. Edgeworth, herself of Anglo-Irish stock, turns the increasingly decrepit “Big House”, with its broken windows and leaking roof, into a tiny model of Ireland. Her unspoken question is: who would treat their true home in such a way?

In the end, the whole estate passes into the ownership of Thady’s son, Jason. Young Quirk, who works as the family’s land agent, uses his mastery of property law and accountancy to ease house and lands from Rackrent hands. Acre by acre, stable by lodge, he deploys the English weapons of lawbook and ledger to secure his own landowning dynasty. The scholar George Watson has described the novel as “an Anglo-Irish nightmare”, and whether by accident or design, the same dynamic appears in House of Guinness. While the children squabble, Mr Rafferty, their looming foreman, quietly extends his authority throughout the brewery and into the most private reaches of the family itself.

Bad dreams needn’t have worried the Guinnesses. They had a great advantage over older Anglo-Irish families, who by the late 19th century relied on ever-diminishing rents to service ever-growing debts. Unlike the others, though, people always wanted to buy what the Guinnesses were selling, and there was always more to sell. You can’t brew up more land, but stout is a truly renewable resource, and the thirst for it is just as inexhaustible. House of Guinness contains some sharp scenes where the daughters of grand, penniless old dynasties deign to marry “a brewer”. The Guinnesses gain access to aristocratic bloodlines, and the aristocrat gains an orangery overlooking the sixpence-sweep of Dublin Bay.

The pedigree aristos got the best of the deal. The show never openly states that the age of Big Houses and huge estates was coming to an end, but the drama is heavy with the sense that time is being called for all but the wealthiest. The generous terms of the 1903 Land Act saw large numbers of the Anglo-Irish sell their estates, often for more than they were worth. Some downsized to Dublin townhouses; others left Ireland for good. Their last show of strength came in 1914, when Anglo-Irishmen made up a third of the British officer corps.

There are still a few of them about, of course, though they tend to live quietly. If the Anglo-Irish are spoken of at all in Ireland today, it is usually in the wry register that Behan employed. Perhaps their continued relevance to contemporary Irish culture lies, above all, in fiction. The Big House novel is now an established genre, presided over by the ghosts of its three greatest practitioners: Elizabeth Bowen, J. G. Farrell, and Molly Keane.

And then there are the houses themselves. Stripped and lonely, shivering on hills or choked by trees, most have been left to rot away. And while the Irish Georgian Society — founded in 1958 by none other than Sir Desmond Guinness — continues to campaign for the preservation of beautiful buildings, much has been lost forever. Few of the Anglo-Irish learnt the lesson that the brewing Guinnesses knew so well: the best legacies are liquid.

---