Richard Guinness

Patrick Guinness when he initiated a DNA test to establish exactly where his forbears came from. For many decades it was believed they descended from the Gaelic sept of Magennis of Co. Down. However, Patrick’s DNA results convincingly showed that they in fact descended from the McCartans who once lived in the barony of Kinelarty in central Down. Indeed, the family took its name from a hilly, gorse-covered townland in this barony called Gion Ais. [For more on the Guinness DNA quest, click here].

The first identifiable member of the Guinness family was Arthur’s grandfather, Eoin (or Owen) ‘Guinneas’, a Protesant who leased a farm near Simmonscourt in Ballsbridge. Born in 1691, Eoin’s son Richard moved west to Co Kildare as a young man and began selling milk from a roadside stall near Celbridge. Richard duly befreinded William Read, a farmer who lived near the Bishopscort estate at Kill, Co. Kildare, and who apparently sold home-brewed ale from a similar stall on the Old Naas Road.[i] In time, Richard married Read’s daughter Catherine.It seems that Richard and Elizabeth eloped, against the better wishes of Read family. he then became agent and reciever to Rev. Dr Price Vicar of Celbridge and later Archbishop of Casel Dr Price was a non conformist., not so much as a theologian but moralist as a writer on financial and political questions

Dr Price hinted that Richard was the illegitimate son of a solder left behind after the Battle of the Boyne and a country girl.The girl, so they said, left her son to be raised at the foundling hospital at Leixlip.

When Archbishop Price died in 1752 he left £100, quite a sum then, to his servant, Richard Guinness and a similar amount to Richard’s son, Arthur, who was then aged 27.

Richard appears to be the oldest known Guinness having being born around 1690 and was living in Leixlip in 1766. He had arrived in Celbridge in 1722 and was employed by Archbishop Price as a land steward. One of his duties was to supervise the brewing of beer for workers on the Price estate.

In the same year, the Archbishop took over James Carberry’s brewery near the bridge in Celbridge, apparently inspired by the ability of Richard “to make a brew of a very palatable nature”, which he was brewing in his brewery in Leixlip, where the Court Yard Hotel now stands. Could this “palatable” brew be either the black stuff or closely related to it?

Arthur was born in Celbridge in 1725, he was 31 when jointly with his brother he established a brewery on Main St. Leixlip - the lease for the property dates from 13th September 1756 and the original lease for the site is displayed beside the main reception in the hotel with Arthur’s signature on it.

Three years later, Arthur then aged 34 left his younger brother, Richard, in charge of that enterprise and moved on and bought an existing, but run down brewery at St. James Gate in Dublin. It was there he established the world famous company.

The start of the Guinness business is always taken as being 1759, the date of this move. He lived on the Gate premises for a while and brewed all types of beer including dark beer known as porters ale or porter. The colour was obtained by including in the mash, with the ordinary pale malt, a proportion of malt that was roasted until virtually black.

There was a problem with the process - brewing was more an art than a science then - but Arthur was among the first Irishmen to become really good at producing black porter. His Guinness porter gained a foothold in the English market despite a tax on Irish beer and when it was removed in 1795 the Guinness brewery gave up ale to concentrated on brewing porter, much of it for the export trade.

In Leixlip, the Guinness family owned the property on which the house owned by Dr. Mary Boyd is built. While Arthur set up the Gate brewery, his brother, Richard, ran the Leixlip brewery from 1759 to 1803 on his own. Wealth flowed for the family. By the end of the 1700s, they owned the coaching yard, on the site of the Court Yard Hotel, Dr. Boyd’s house and twelve smaller houses or shops along the main street which still stand today.

young Arthur, -with remarkable foresight- signed a 9,000 year lease on St James’s Gate, they only drank pints in the cities. Country people stuck to poitin, whiskey and gin. Arthur’s contemporaries were not hopeful for his chances, but like any great visionary, he paid them no mind. Having been blessed with an inheritance of £100, from the Archbishop of Cashel and armed with a secret recipe for porter that was already wowing the clergy, he set to work and transformed drinking habits all over the world.

           Arthur Guinness aspired to great things, morally, economically and socially.  At that time it was unheard of for a tradesman to pass himself off as gentry, there were special entrances in the big houses, for that kind of person.  Brewing was ranked among the less desirable trades, because of the connotations of ribaldry that it suggested.  Arthur needed to do very well indeed, if he was to move up the ladder.  The brewery was leased in 1759 and by 1761 he had married Olivia Whitmore, a well-born young lady with connections to Henry Grattan and an inheritance of £1000.  He was elected Warden of the Corporation of Brewers in 1763 and the following year he was living in Beaumont, his stately home in the suburbs.  How much further the great Guinness could go was as yet unknown, but he was beginning the family tradition of civic-mindedness and good works.  He founded Ireland’s first Sunday school, donated huge sums for the restoration of St Patrick’s cathedral and became the Governor of the Meath Charity Hospital.

           Only ten of Arthur’s twenty one children survived.  Elizabeth, the eldest, married the Lord Mayor.  Hosea, the next, was called to the clergy, a fate which was to befall an inordinate number of Guinnesses, down through the generations.  Captain John, the youngest, was a teetotaller, who founded the missionary line of the family. Edward was to be the black sheep, unsuited to earning a living.  Arthur the second was born at St James’s Gate in 1768 and it was to him that his father’s mantle was to pass.  As like his father in nature, as in name, according to biographer Michele Guinness, Arthur had inherited the family flair for business, already being exhibited by Uncle Samuel, a prosperous goldbeater who was to father the famous Guinness Mahon banking line of the family.

When Arthur died in 1803, aged 78, he was buried at Oughterard Cemetery near Kill, a mere 20 minute drive from the hotel, which is also the resting place of his wife, Olivia, who bore him 21 children following their marriage in 1761. At one stage he lived in the house in Celbridge, now the home of Progressive Democrat Senator, Kathleen Walsh.

If some Guinness’s took to drink, Arthur Guinness’s eldest son, the Rev. Hosea Guinness (1765-1841) took to religion and was rector of St. Werburg’s church in Dublin.

The family link with Leixlip was re-ignited in 1958, when Hon. Desmond Guinness, then aged 27, the same age as Arthur when he got his inheritance, bought Leixlip Castle, where he still resides today with his wife Penny. The Castle can be seen from the bedrooms in the hotel.

Living at Leixlip, co Kildare, 1766