Roamer: Brewery dynasty also involved in global missionary work
Following its release this week we’re by now well acquainted with Netflix’s new series - House of Guinness - with actor Anthony Boyle garnishing the legendary Dublin dynasty with some Belfast charm.
Much of the action is set in 19th-century Dublin and New York, beginning immediately after Sir Benjamin Guinness’s death - the man behind the Guinness brewery’s remarkable success - and the far-reaching impact of his will on the fate of his four adult children, Arthur (heir to the Guinness empire, played by Anthony Boyle) Edward, Anne, and Ben.
Before continuing, it’s essential to emphasise “the three F’s” - famous families fascinate - because everyone prefers strong, clear, vertical lines of descent. Sadly, the vertical lines in family trees - particularly the Guinness’s - are interwoven with horizontals. Most accounts of the brewery start with Arthur Guinness, born in 1725 in Co Kildare, though they could equally start with his parents, or his parents’ parents. A book entitled ‘Drumbeats that Changed the World’ by historian Joseph F Conley throws an alternative light on this extraordinary Guinness family tree, showing some branches far removed from brewing
Conley’s introduction to Arthur Guinness’s emerging brand highlights other family traits which include “several generations of brilliant clergymen and missionaries, perhaps the greatest of whom was Henry Grattan Guinness, the Billy Graham of his day.”
Describing Henry Grattan as an “Irish orator with a silver voice” Conley rates him as “one of the outstanding preachers of the nineteenth century, on a par with Spurgeon and Moody.”
Conley continues: “More remarkably, Grattan Guinness and his illustrious family became primary catalysts of an astonishing worldwide missionary effort.”
Ubiquitous author, journalist and broadcaster Michele Guinness’s clergyman (now retired) husband Peter Grattan Guinness is Arthur’s great-great-grandson. Soon after they married, Michelle - from a Jewish background - became more acquainted with his family.
“I discovered they had hair-raising adventures,” she recounted “there was an aunt who travelled the length of China in a wheelbarrow and a brother who lived through the Boxer uprising, hiding for two months in an attic with a six-week-old baby.”
Her book about her husband’s family has seven pages of Guinness family trees, including numerous church ministers and missionaries and “his grandfather who preached teetotalism outside the brewery in Dublin!”
Born in Dublin in 1835 to Arthur Guinness’s son - former East India Company officer Captain John Grattan Guinness and his wife Jane Lucretia - Henry Grattan Guinness went to sea when he left school. Then he became preacher and travelling evangelist. His wife Fanny was also an accomplished speaker and writer.
After helping to set up the historic and ongoing North Africa Mission, Henry and Fanny started the East London Missionary Training Institute in 1872, also called Harley College.
Henry later recalled establishing the college - “little did I imagine that we would train more than a thousand evangelists for the foreign field…many of our students have become missionaries in China, some of them being numbered among the martyrs of the Boxer Outbreak.”
The renowned Dr. Thomas Barnardo, founder of Barnardo's Homes, was co-director of Harley College. The Regions Beyond Missionary Union would also be founded here, and the Livingstone Inland Mission in 1877.
As Harley College grew and expanded, satellite mission halls were opened across the East End of London, reaching 12,000 local folk every week.
A mission yacht - The Evangelist - ferried staff and students to ships moored on the River Thames. Then came a medical department and a publishing division!
In 1879, Henry travelled to Algeria and helped begin The Mission to the Kabyles with he and Fanny both serving on the council of the mission in its early years. Fanny died in 1893 and Henry would go on to remarry in 1903.
He and his second wife Grace embarked on global missionary projects till 1908, when Henry returned to the UK.
He died in Bath in 1910, leaving behind a family with remarkable devotion to their Christian faith. Henry and Fanny’s daughter Mary married into Hudson Taylor’s family, the founder of the China Inland Mission. Another daughter Lucy married Karl Kumm, founder of the Sudan United Mission, known today as Pioneers UK with over 3,000 international missionary groups still working in over 100 countries. Guinness has travelled the world - so has the Guinness family!