The famed Irish beer Guinness, which is beloved by people the world over, got its start in 1759 when Arthur Guinness started brewing ales at the St. James’s Gate Brewery, Dublin. Successive heirs to the family business continued to grow the brand to the point that by 1886, it was the largest brewery in the world.
The success of the company’s ‘Extra Superior Porter’ made the Guinness family tremendously wealthy and powerful. Steven Knight, creator of ‘Peaky Blinders’, “was hooked” after speaking to Ivana Lowell who wrote up the idea for ‘House of Guinness’ which will stream on Netflix starting Thursday 25 September.
The true story behind the ‘House of Guinness’
There are few people that could be more ideal for sharing the story of the Guinness clan than Lowell as she is a member of it as well. She told the BBC that she came up with the idea of turning her family’s history into a TV show while at a family gathering inside her cousin’s Palladian mansion watching ‘Downton Abbey’.
She thought to herself watching the fictional Crawleys that her own family’s history was “a lot juicier and more interesting… plus it was all true,” she shared with the BBC. However, there was one problem for her, “How to find the right tone?”
“I didn’t want them to be villains, but any business person has to be ruthless, especially in those times,” she explained.
In the end, the story that she came up with covered six generations of the Guinness family from the beginning of their rise to prominence with the founder of the dynasty, Arthur. It tells the tale of the brewery’s incredible success and the family’s rich philanthropic legacy “along with numerous family rivalries, scandals, secrets and tragedies” as well as political intriguing.
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A degree of creative license was taken
While the story is based on true stories at least one of the main characters is fictional, Sean Rafferty, the brewery foreman and ruthless fixer for the Guinness family. Lowell said that he was added to provide “the conflict and the passion that makes a story interesting.”
Viewers won’t be seeing the story from the very beginning as Knight chose to start the story with the death of Benjamin Guinness, the grandson of the founder, in 1868. His four children must contend with his dying wishes, which none of them are fully content with.
“They were all so young, and their father left them both huge responsibility and a huge legacy,” Lowell shared. “Each was forced to find a path.”
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