The Missed Shot That Accidentally Created Guinness World Records

Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of the Irish brewery Guinness, was on a shooting trip in County Wexford, Ireland, on November 10, 1951. His company brewed Guinness beer, a dark stout. On the marshland, he shot at a flock of golden plovers (small, fast-flying wading birds). He missed. In an attempt to avoid embarrassment in front of his hunting partners, Beaver stated that golden plovers were the fastest game birds in Europe. No one knew whether or not this was true.

That night, Beaver’s shooting party quarreled again, this time over the relative speed of flight of the golden plover and the red grouse. The house they were occupying was Castlebridge House, a private residence in County Wexford that had an excellent library of encyclopedias and natural history manuals. Beaver went to the bookshelves to find out which of them could fly faster, but the books were not built to handle questions so simple as which one is fastest, and the matter remained open.

In the months after, Beaver continued to mull over his Wexford spat and was convinced that it wasn’t unusual. According to Guinness’s own tally, there were some 81,400 pubs throughout Great Britain and Ireland, so in all likelihood many other customers had similar spats on almost any given night. He felt a handbook given to the landlords would help put a stop to these arguments and create more goodwill toward the Guinness brand.

Christopher Chataway was a junior executive with Guinness’s Park Royal brewery, the company’s London operation, but he was also an elite runner. On May 6, 1954, he had paced Roger Bannister through the historic first sub-four-minute mile. When Beaver floated his pub-book idea to him in mid-1954, Chataway recommended a pair of former Oxford University teammates of his: identical twin brothers who ran a fact-checking business in London.

Norris and Ross McWhirter, the identical twin brothers and former Oxford University athletes, had been running a London-based company that provided accurate facts and figures to newspapers and television stations by 1954. Chataway suggested them to Beaver because of their reputation for obsessive accuracy. They were both 29 when they were hired by Guinness. Verifying information was, as it turned out, the perfect job.

The McWhirters went to Guinness’s Park Royal brewery in London on September 12, 1954, to see Beaver. According to Guinness lore, he fired off some obscure trivia to test them, including a question about which language has the fewest irregular verbs, and the twins answered that Turkish was said to have only one. Impressed, Beaver reportedly hired them on the spot.

On November 30, 1954, Guinness created Guinness Superlatives Limited as a publishing company to make a record book. The book had its own separate corporate structure from the stout-making side of the business at Guinness, but Guinness still didn’t see it as anything more than a promotional gimmick.

The editorial team set up shop on the top floor of Ludgate House at 107 Fleet Street, London, in two rooms that were formerly a women’s gymnasium. Fleet Street was located at the center of Britain’s newspaper industry, allowing for rapid access to journalists, archives, and printers. The book that would eventually appear on bar counters around the world began in two converted gym rooms above a bustling newspaper street.

From November 1954 to the beginning of 1955, Norris and Ross McWhirter labored away at the Fleet Street offices for 13.5 weeks non-stop. They put in about 90 hours a week, seven days a week, including public holidays. So the first edition of the book wasn’t years in the making. It was created over the course of one intensive sprint.

Every item was backed up by thousands of letters and telegrams from the twins, sent all over the world to astrophysicists, zoologists, meteorologists, government offices, and sports authorities to verify the records. The book was divided into 12 chapters about humans, animals, nature, buildings, and feats, filling a mere 198 pages.

Guinness wanted the book to remain on pub bars, so the original editions were published with heavy laminated plastic covers. That way, it could withstand the demands of a real working bar.

On August 27, 1955, the London printers finished binding the first full 198-page copy. But that didn’t mean anyone could actually get their hands on it. It went to pubs for free first, and only made it to bookshops a month or so later.

In August and September of 1955, the Guinness Superlatives department distributed about 1,000 free, laminated copies of the book to pub landlords around Great Britain and Ireland. There was no expectation of selling any copies at all. This was simply an experiment designed to generate goodwill for Guinness stout.

Soon after the giveaway began, pubs began phoning Guinness for more copies because people were taking them out of the pubs. This was happening to such an extent that it was hard to distinguish between theft and true demand. Beaver thought he might have something special.

Seeing the thefts as evidence that there really was a market for this book, Guinness began selling the book directly to the public rather than giving it away for free to pubs. On October 3, 1955, Guinness Superlatives issued a trade edition of the book to British bookstores at 5 shillings per copy, their first serious effort to market the record book for direct sale.

When the book was released, W.H. Smith, one of Britain’s biggest book and newspaper sellers, initially ordered just six copies. The demand from customers was so strong that they quickly increased their order to 1,000 copies. But even among the booksellers, the book was hugely underestimated.

People kept repeating the same things from the 1955 first edition. Robert Wadlow, the tallest person ever recorded at 8 feet 11.1 inches according to medical records of the time, suffered an early death. The Pentagon was listed as the largest office building in the world. White Christmas, written by Irving Berlin, was listed as the best-selling single. Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, an 18th-century Russian peasant woman, was noted for having 69 children, recorded in a parish record from her village. These were the facts that they carried home and used to win arguments.

As demand still exceeded supply, Guinness arranged for four separate printings of the first edition during the closing months of 1955, with a combined total of 187,000 copies sold. It went out of stock by Christmas 1955 and was the UK’s No. 1 nonfiction bestseller. What started as a free pub pamphlet had turned into the book everyone wanted to own.

When a revised version was published in the United Kingdom in January 1956, Guinness licensed the rights to an independent American publisher, David Boehm’s Sterling Publishing in New York. The first American edition, called “The Guinness Book of Superlatives,” was published in September 1956 with 50,000 copies geared toward Americans, and after additional printings, sold about 70,000 copies that first year. The concept had long since outgrown Britain.

Throughout the late 1950s, Norris and Ross McWhirter, the twins who wrote the book, promoted the publication on live radio and television by reciting obscure records from memory. The company even sold branded versions of the book to outside companies; one was printed in 1956 for a motor dealer. As Beaver’s work at Guinness came to a close in the late 1950s, the Guinness Book had sold half a million copies across the globe. That missed shot by Sir Hugh Beaver had spawned a publishing phenomenon.

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