Is House of Guinness a true story? Here’s the real history behind the Netflix drama

Is House of Guinness a true story?

House of Guinness is, as the show’s opening tells us, “inspired by true stories” and features real historical figures from the Guinness dynasty and events that happened in 1860s Ireland. However, much of the action is invented, or elaborates on scant historical evidence.

It opens on 27 May 1868, the day of the funeral of Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness. A foreman inside the St James’s Gate brewery in Dublin warns of trouble ahead. It soon arrives, with bottles of the eponymous stout shattering against the brewery doors and effigies of the deceased Guinness being burned in protest. As the elaborate cortège makes its way past the gates, troops attempt to quell crowds who are protesting “the funeral parade of a rich Unionist”.

What follows is a clash that’s brutal and violent – but there’s no evidence that this unrest ever happened.

Much the same can be said of the action in the following eight episodes, with speculation and invention abound in this dark and fiery romp that bounces from the underbelly of Dublin’s docks to the genteel finery of St Stephen’s Green.

In House of Guinness, drama is often the primary concern, and the series certainly doesn’t take itself too seriously, but there are plenty of nuggets of truth to be found. This is Ireland after a devastating famine, after mass emigration, and riven by deep religious and class divides.

Read on to separate fact from fiction, and find out about the real, fraught history of division and prejudice in 19th-century Ireland – then under British rule – and the east coast of the United States of America, that drives much of the drama.

What’s the real history behind House of Guinness?

Arthur Guinness (the Guinness founder, not the same Arthur as in the show) began brewing his iconic stout in the mid-18th century, securing the site of St James’s Gate in Dublin in 1759 at £45 per year for 9,000 years.

Arthur began with ale but quickly built a reputation for a darker beer called porter, which by the late-18th century was being produced on a scale that made Guinness one of Dublin’s largest breweries.

The mid-19th century saw further leaps in scale, with steam power, industrial efficiency and strict quality control giving Guinness an edge over his competitors. By the 1860s, under the steering hand of Benjamin Lee Guinness (a grandson of the founder), the brewery was employing thousands of Dubliners – many of them Catholic.

The family also embraced civic philanthropy, and Benjamin had used his immense fortune to fund public works such as the restoration of St Patrick’s Cathedral.

By the time of Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness’s death in 1868, Guinness was Ireland’s largest brewery, and the Guinness family was one of the most wealthy and influential in Ireland.

The funeral was widely considered the most elaborate send-off ever held in Ireland to that point, and it’s amid this setting that we meet our protagonists in the show, the four children of the deceased Benjamin.

Who are the Guinness siblings in House of Guinness?

House of Guinness introduces us to four siblings, all children of the late Benjamin Lee Guinness:

• Anne Lee Guinness, Lady Plunket (1839–1889), played by Emily Fairn (who also had a role in Mary & George)
• Arthur Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Ardilaun (1840–1915), played with tortured charisma by Anthony Boyle (sporting a ’tache harking back to another historical drama performance: John Wilkes Booth in Manhunt)
• Captain Benjamin Guinness (1842–1900), played by Fionn O’Shea
• Edward Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (1847–1927), played by Louis Partridge of Enola Holmes fame

Were the real Anne and Benjamin cut out of Benjamin’s will?

The opening episode of the show concerns the reading of the Guinness patriarch’s will, and the stakes are high: Benjamin Lee had left a fortune of £1.1 million – well over £100 million today.

In House of Guinness, Anne and the second son, Benjamin, are passed over and given no inheritance, while the brewery and all his fortune are jointly bequeathed to Arthur and Edward.

There’s no historical evidence to show that any of the children were really denied a portion of wealth from their father’s will – both Benjamin Jr and Anne received estates and money. But Benjamin Sr did stipulate that if either of his sons withdrew from the firm they should be allowed to extract only a negligible amount of capital from it – a decision which, as in the show, may have prevented the two sons with remaining interest from pursuing their own ambitions.

The struggle that follows is ripe for drama, and during in the show’s promotion, creator Steven Knight explained more about centring the drama on this brewing dynasty: “They’re very young, there are four of them, and they are given the task of taking on this incredibly successful brand. The first priority is not to screw it up, and the second priority is to make it even bigger.”

*** Warning that the real historical detail below may be spoilers for the plot of House of Guinness ***

What did the Guinness family represent in Ireland?

Beyond the family’s story is an Ireland roiling with social and political turmoil. There is no evidence that the Guinness funeral was disrupted to such a violent degree by nationalist protestors, but the backdrop of tumult caused by longstanding religious and economic tension in 1860s Ireland is a very real story.

The family was, as the show establishes as an important factor, Protestant. During the mid 1800s, Ireland – then under British rule – was still shaped by a ruling class known as the Protestant Ascendancy that had dominated Irish politics and its economy since the 17th century.

This group consisted largely of Anglo-Irish Protestants, such as the real Guinness family, who controlled most of the wealth, land, and influence in the city. They held key positions in government, law and banking, even though they represented only a small minority of the population. Their dominance in many ways stemmed from longstanding restrictions on Catholics, and even though many such restrictions had been dismantled after Catholic Emancipation in 1829, social and economic effects lingered.

The show places the family squarely amid these tensions. As the heirs to the Guinness brewing fortune, Arthur, Edward, Benjamin Jr and Anne represent the wealth, influence, and authority that the Ascendancy class (more on this below) had long exercised in Dublin, a prosperous metropolis that was essentially the second city of the British empire.

Adding further tension to the drama, Arthur has an additional task as the eldest son. Benjamin Sr had served as a Conservative MP for Dublin from 1865 to 1868, and had been politically aligned with unionist and establishment interests rather than supporting an independent Ireland. Upon Benjamin’s death, Arthur is expected to take up the mantle of his seat (more on that later).

Who was the real Sean Rafferty, who worked at Guinness?

The character of Guinness Brewery foreman Sean Rafferty, played by James Norton most recently of King and Conqueror fame, is not a real historical figure.

The rugged, roguish, unfailingly loyal Rafferty is a device to emphasise the tensions of religion and class that dogged the Guinness business, and illustrate the power and pressure it was able to exercise as one of Ireland’s most influential families.

Rafferty is deployed as a legally untouchable enforcer to quash any who threaten the Guinness family – be it through blackmail or physical violence.

Rafferty is also Catholic, a choice that perhaps reflects the additional social capital that working for the Guinnesses could afford workers in a society full of prejudice.

This wasn’t the only benefit of working at the brewery. As shown in the show, the Guinness company led the way in progressive ideas about workers’ rights, introducing pensions under the Guinness Workers’ Health and Benefits Scheme. The brewery also offered paid annual holidays, free meals, annual excursions and a beer allowance.

In the show, these philanthropic gestures are interpreted as a cynical play to get the Guinnesses’s largely Catholic workforce on side to support their future political ambitions. But this progressive attitude towards its workers was real, and led to a saying around Dublin that “a Guinness man meant money, dead or alive”.

How had Ireland been affected by famine?

Starkly juxtaposed with the luxury life of the Guinness protagonists is a rural Ireland barely a decade on from one of the most devastating famines in history, and still suffering its effects.

“From 1845–51, as potato crops failed again and again, at least one million people died, many in lonely, hideous and degrading conditions,” writes historian Padraic X Scanlan in BBC History Magazine. “At least 1.5 million more emigrated.”

Initial reports of a blight in the potato crops of America had appeared in newspapers as early as 1844, and in 1845 the so-called ‘malady’ crossed the Atlantic.

“The people of Ireland had endured periods of starvation before, but they had encountered nothing on the scale of what we remember today as the Great Famine,” says Scanlan.

The situation was made worse by inconsistent intervention by the British government. Though there were some relief attempts under the governments of both Robert Peel and his successor Lord John Russell, the bruising reality was that homegrown corn and other healthy food stocks continued to be transported out of Ireland for English markets, even during the unusually long and harsh winter of 1846/47, when death tolls in Ireland soared.

• Read more | Who was to blame for the Irish famine?

Meanwhile, as Scanlan writes: “People ate seaweed, grass, roots, carrion, dirt and the eggs of wild birds. As much as three per cent of the Irish population emigrated. Some ship captains offered free passage for the poor, as living ballast, as they were ‘cheaper to ship and unship… than… lime or shingle’.”

These ships were dubbed ‘coffin ships’.

A narrative soon emerged of the heartless British government turning its back on the Irish population and simply letting them die.

In House of Guinness, the Galway village of Cloonboo, on the road between Dublin and the Guinness country estate of Ashford Castle, is used to represent the many communities that were wracked by death and mass emigration. In the show, some members of the Guinness family are moved by the rural plight and turn to paternalistic philanthropy to ease both the suffering of the poor – and their own conscience.

Benjamin Lee’s daughter, Lady Anne Plunket (nee Guinness), is particularly shown to empathise with the rural poor, and the real Lady Anne did champion a number of causes, including founding the St Patrick’s Nursing Home in 1876 as a training ground for Church of Ireland nurses. The show also draws a direct line between her unnamed degenerative illness (in reality, she suffered throughout her life and died at the age of 50) and the sympathy she has for the community of Cloonboo.

Back in the city, Dublin’s population wasn’t as reliant on potatoes and didn’t see the same devastation in terms of disease and fatalities. But enormous numbers of people flocked into the capital – all looking for housing, food and jobs that were in short supply even in a prosperous city. By the end of the 19th century, a single Georgian house in the city would regularly have been crammed with more than 100 people, with no running water or bathroom – and, as shown in House of Guinness, such tenements regularly became sites of organisation, insurrection and rebellion.

“It was perhaps inevitable,” writes Neil Hegarty, “that the collective trauma brought about by the years of hunger would be distilled and heaped, in rage and grief, onto the heads of the British government.

For Irish nationalists, says Hegarty, it became a truism that “the Almighty sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine”.

What were the Fenian Brotherhood and Irish Republican Brotherhood?

The Fenian Brotherhood and its counterpart, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, were part of a real movement that campaigned for an Irish independent republic.

We are introduced to Fenians and their cause in the opening scenes of House of Guinness as they protest at Benjamin Lee Guinness’s funeral. Their campaign for an independent Ireland, in the wake of the famine and other unequal treatment of the largely Catholic working classes, is central to much of the series’ action.

When constitutional efforts to achieve independence failed, such organisations turned to further violence. Isolated acts of sabotage and bombing in Britain in the 1860s and 1880s (sometimes called the ‘dynamite campaign’) mean that the Fenians were alive in the public imagination – a historical reality brought to stark life in House of Guinness’s series finale as Arthur is targeted by a Fenian assassination plot (though there’s no evidence that any of the Guinnesses were directly targeted by Fenian violence in the 19th century).

The series chooses not to feature real figures involved in the Fenian movement, but the characters of Ellen Cochrane and her brother Patrick seem to take inspiration from some real figures within the cause.

The real Byron Hedges and the Guinnesses in America

Byron Hedges (played by Jack Gleeson of Game of Thrones renown) is a cousin of Arthur and Edward Guinness, who – through means fair and (mainly) foul – is entrusted as the Guinnesses’s agent in north America. He’s yet another character who’s invented to fit the story.

In reality, Guinness expansion into the US had begun already, with the first shipments arriving in South Carolina from 1817. But it was under the auspices of Arthur and Edward in the 1870s that the expansion flourished.

The character of Byron Hedges is used as a plot device to follow the Guinness story across the Atlantic. In the show, Hedges’s job (while facing very real prejudice against Irish Catholics in America) is to smooth the importation of Guinness into the New York ports, and stop any Fenian interference with the beer’s arrival or its promotion, Hedges makes contact with a man called Eamon Dodd, who fought for the Union army during the American Civil War and is the head of the Fenian Brotherhood in New York. He recklessly promises that 15 per cent of every Guinness bottle sold will go (clandestinely) to fund the Brotherhood’s armed struggle – causing Edward Guinness to go into a fit of panic, should this agreement become public.

There is no such agreement known between the Guinness family and the Fenian Brotherhood.

Another set of real events mentioned in passing in the show is a campaign of raids and plots called the ‘Fenian raids’, which pushed into British Canada from the United States (1866–1871). These really happened, and were aimed at pressuring Britain by striking its North American colonies – the most significant of which was the battle of Ridgeway in June 1866, when 850 Fenians led by John O’Neill crossed the Niagara River – though all fizzled out or were quashed by British forces in Canada.

Did Arthur Guinness commit election fraud?

By the mid 19th century, nearly a third of the population of the UK lived in Ireland, and at the time of the events of House of Guinness, they were represented by more than 100 MPs in Westminster, elected across 66 constituencies.

Though the case of Home Rule had gained great traction in Irish politics by the latter decades of the century, Arthur Guinness was a staunch Unionist. When he secured a Dublin City seat for the Conservatives in the 1868 general election, it looked like another success for a family already synonymous with wealth and influence.

• Read more | Resolving the 'Irish Question': 5 key moments on the path to partition

But Dublin elections in the mid-19th century were rarely straightforward. Politics at the time was steeped in patronage, drink and favours – a reality deftly explored in a colourful montage in House of Guinness, that features hidden windows and coded train tickets. In reality, candidates (or more often, their agents) would ‘treat’ supporters in public houses, slipping coins into the hands of the undecided, or promising jobs in exchange for loyalty at the ballot box – both of which the Guinnesses had in spades.

It was these practices that landed Arthur Guinness in trouble. His election was challenged and an investigation revealed that his election agent had indeed resorted to bribery and inducements. As is truly shown in the drama, Guinness himself was cleared of any personal wrongdoing – the judges accepted that he had not sanctioned the misconduct – but under the law, candidates were responsible for their agents’ behaviour. In 1870, his victory was declared void, and a by-election followed, which Guinness declined to fight.

Though an embarrassment, it did little lasting harm. Guinness returned to Parliament in 1874, this time without controversy, and went on to build a reputation as a philanthropist and civic leader.

Was Arthur Guinness gay?

According to Joe Joyce, author of 2009 The Guinnesses: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Most Successful Family, Arthur was “probably gay”, a slender claim that the show has used as a jumping-off point to the explore what life as a queer aristocratic man might have looked like in 19th-century Ireland, and the relationships available in the city’s underground spaces.

There’s no detailed historical evidence that underpins the extent of Arthur’s relationships portrayed in the show.

It's known that Arthur Guinness married Lady Olivia Charlotte Hedges-White, daughter of the Earl of Bantry in 1871, and the marriage was reported to be happy, although childless.

Why did Guinness choose the harp of Brian Boru?

Today, Guinness is one of the most recognisable brand names around the world – and a large part of their recognisability is the harp emblem.

The logo is a silhouette of a real harp named for Brian Boru, a former high king of Ireland in the 10th or 11th century, though the artefact preserved today at Trinity College Dublin, dates from the 14th or 15th century.

Boru’s legend in Ireland is a powerful one; regularly cited as the king responsible for ending Viking invasions of Ireland, he consequently became a symbol of an Ireland that took responsibility for its own destiny.

Since the 19th century, the harp that bears his name has been intrinsically linked to the Guinness story. As the show has it, the harp was chosen by Edward Guinness in 1868 as a way for Guinness to harness the power of an Irish legend and both appease and appeal to a Catholic audience.

In reality, the harp was used on the stout’s labels as early as 1862. It was selected by Benjamin Lee, who introduced the trademarks still used today, a savvy move that rooted the business in its Irish identity. Though it wasn’t without its problems.

When Ireland gained independence from England in the 20th century, the Irish Free State decided to use the same Celtic harp as its official state emblem. Guinness already owned the trademark, and in a power move that’s evidence to the brewery’s standing, the state had to reverse the direction of the harp in order to avoid infringing on the brewery’s ownership of the symbol.

Today, the harp is the national symbol of Ireland, depicted on national heraldry and currency – but look at a Euro coin and see which way the harp is facing, and remember that Guinness – as part of a series of smart moves in the 19th century that secured its crown as a global brewer – was there first.