Call it nepomania. Or a dynasty complex. But where we were once content to obsess ourselves merely with the lives of the rich and the powerful, now we find we must obsess over their children (and their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children) too. Now House of Guinness, a glossy new Netflix drama, tells the story of the earliest days of the world’s most enduring brewing dynasty.
In West London, they say, you’re never more than six feet from a family member. Their surname represents not simply a brand of stout but also a certain brand of person—a connected, creative, sometimes wayward spirit; aristocratic-adjacent on the one hand but possessed of a winning Irish charm on the other.
There’s Edward “Ned” Guinness, the fourth Earl of Iveagh, who manages the rolling Elveden Estate, in Suffolk (a relaxed 22,486 acres), which is said to grow a healthy proportion of the nation’s onions. His new book, Guinness: A Family Succession (aha!) explores the history of the fledgling brewing dynasty from the inside, so to speak—including the purchase of the 9,000-year lease on the storied brewery at St. James’s Gate, in Dublin, and the runaway success that made Guinness’s inventor, Arthur, wealthier than the King of England when he died, in 1803. (Similar territory is explored in House of Guinness, in fact, by the actor James Norton in a pair of glued-on muttonchops.)
Today, Ned’s younger brother, Rory, runs the Iveagh Trust, a foundation named after the family’s Georgian manor house. Thought to be the world’s first family office, it is also notable for its provision of social housing across Dublin.
Such largesse is furnished by the deep coffers of the clan. It has certainly swerved the old Buddenbrooks rule (named after the Thomas Mann novel of the same name), which states that most wealthy families reliably squander their fortune within three generations: one gets it, one grows it, one spends it. The Guinness family invested wisely and variously—purchasing, for example, 4,700 acres of land outside Vancouver and building the city’s Lions Gate Bridge in the 1930s.
The trust later diversified into banking (via Guinness Mahon and Guinness Peat Group), and, in 1997, the brewing company was absorbed into pub conglomerate Grand Metropolitan in a $31 billion merger, one of the largest of the 1990s.
This wealth has offered the family a certain public profile. They are, perhaps, a sort of Anglo-Irish equivalent to the Kennedys or the Gettys, with that similar boiling stew of glamour, scandal, and social capital.
There’s Sabrina Guinness, a descendant of the banking branch of the family, who was perhaps the It Girl of the 1970s. At various moments, her name was attached to the then Prince of Wales, Mick Jagger, and Jack Nicholson. A successful television producer, she is now married to the playwright Tom Stoppard.
An equally social fixture is Bunny Guinness, the landscape architect, whose podcast, Bunny in the Garden With…, has gossipy interviews with the Duchess of Rutland and the interior designer Nicky Haslam. One early guest: Lulu Guinness, the designer who married (and later divorced) direct heir Valentine Guinness. Several of the playful handbags she designed are held in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Lulu is sister-in-law to Daphne Guinness, the actress, fashion designer, and musician often described as Karl Lagerfeld’s muse. Daphne’s niece, the model and socialite Lady Mary Charteris, is also a fixture of the fashion world, having modeled for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and L’Officiel. The same goes for Daphne’s half-brother, Tom Guinness, a stylist who is married to Tish Weinstock, a contributing beauty editor at Vogue.
Daphne was married to Greek shipping heir Spyros Niarchos in 1987 at the age of 19 (or “married off,” as she put it in an interview with The Guardian in 2023). They divorced in 1999, and although she was later in a relationship with the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, she has since reunited with Niarchos. The granddaughter of Diana Mitford (later Mosley), Daphne was a bizarre target of QAnon-obsessed conspiracy theorists who, inspired perhaps by her signature shock of hair, claimed she was in league with the devil and had been photographed drinking the blood of children (or a glass of tomato juice, as it turned out).
Daphne spent a great deal of her childhood in a former monastery, with no electricity or running water, that her father had bought in Spain. Salvador Dalí was a neighbor. At age five, she was held at knifepoint outside the family’s Kensington home by Tony Baekeland, a 25-year-old family friend (and heir to the Bakelite fortune), who was in the midst of a schizophrenic episode.
“I remember being marched through this house with a knife at my neck, bleeding and cut,” she says, recalling how Baekeland was shouting, “Death to all women.” After the housekeeper intervened, Baekeland’s mother arrived and assured everyone that the situation was under control. She was killed by her son not long after.
Such incidents inevitably stir up talk of the so-called Black Curse that stalks the family, named for the moody drink that made their early fortunes. “If I had been poor,” Lady Henrietta Guinness said, shortly before she killed herself in 1978, “I would have been happy.” She certainly had a right to question the downside to her inheritance. Across the 20th century and beyond, the Guinness clan has been beset by a showering of cosmic misfortunes and untimely deaths.
Walter Guinness, the first Baron Moyne, was assassinated by militants in Cairo in 1944. According to his old friend Winston Churchill, who had often cavorted on Moyne’s yacht, he was a man of “ripe wisdom and vigorous intellect.” In 1966, Prince Frederick of Prussia, the husband of Lady Brigid Guinness, drowned in the Rhine near his familial pile of Schloss Reinhartshausen. He was not discovered for two weeks.
In December of that year, Oonagh Guinness’s son Patrick “Tara” Browne was driving his Lotus Elan through South Kensington at more than 100 miles per hour when he swerved into a parked truck to avoid an oncoming car. He died of his injuries the next day. He had been a fixture of Swinging Sixties London, whose 21st birthday was attended by the Rolling Stones and who had reportedly given Paul McCartney his first tab of LSD. McCartney and John Lennon wrote the Beatles song “A Day in the Life” in homage to his death: “He blew his mind out in a car / He didn’t notice that the lights had changed.”
More crashes followed. In 1978, the four-year-old Peter Guinness died in a collision in Norfolk, the passenger in a car driven by his father, John Guinness. Lady Henrietta Guinness sustained life-changing injuries when her boyfriend Michael Beeby destroyed his Aston Martin on the French Riviera. The trauma led to her committing suicide by jumping from an aqueduct in Spoleto, Umbria, in 1978.
In 1998, Sheelin Rose Nugent, the 31-year-old niece of the Earl of Iveagh, died in a freak accident while driving a horse-drawn gypsy caravan. In 1988, the banker John Guinness slipped on a snow-covered path and fell to his death as he descended Mount Snowdon in Wales. Two years earlier, his wife had been abducted by kidnappers and held captive for eight days.
There have been entanglements with drugs, too. In 1986, Olivia Channon, the granddaughter of Lady Honor Guinness, died of a heroin overdose in the rooms of German aristocrat Gottfried von Bismarck, following a party at Christ Church, Oxford.
Her third cousin, Sebastian Guinness, was later jailed for four months for possession of the drug. Nearly 20 years later, another relative, Robert Hesketh, husband of heiress Catherine Guinness, was found dead in bed after consuming alcohol, cocaine, and heroin at an 18th-birthday party near Marlborough.
Such tragedies add a layer of stranger-than-fiction intrigue to the latest, Netflix telling of the Guinness story—a family drama that surely has many seasons still to run.
House of Guinness will be released on Netflix on September 25
Joseph Bullmore is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the editor of Gentleman’s Journal in London
