What will they think of next? – a Guinness brochure

Here’s a phrase that perfectly encapsulates the exasperation of English conservatism with the onward march of progress. The 16 page illustrated booklet reproduced here was produced in 1954 by Guinness for distribution to the medical profession. Food rationing had finally ended and post-war reconstruction was being followed by ambitious slum clearance projects - the age of the tower block was at hand. Britain’s future was invested in nuclear energy and jet powered flight. Unfortunately this was the year that two Comet airliners crashed into the Mediterranean and with them went Britain’s hopes of becoming a world power in aviation. Easy access to credit in the form of Hire Purchase Agreements helped to boost a sense of prosperity but the age of austerity was giving way to an age of anxiety. The English appetite for verbal and visual whimsy was well catered to in this publication with the addition of a strong flavour of resentment at technological change and a comforting surrender to nostalgia. An unknown scribe at S H Benson (the Guinness advertising agency) wrote the verses and neatly parodied the English instinct to reject innovation in any shape or form – often before adopting it with disproportionate enthusiasm. The illustrations were the work of Antony Groves-Raines – a master of visual charm with a talent for combining his own magic realism and crisp contours with a jaunty amiability certain to please.

Alice Through the Guinness Glass

Classic Guinness advertising took divergent paths. In one direction were the boldly drawn John Gilroy menagerie compositions and feats of prodigious strength with brief snappy slogans. In another was a long series of pretentious, whimsical, text heavy magazine adverts in which the over-educated copywriters at S H Benson indulged their fondness for elaborate demonstrations of literary expertise and witty wordplay. Placing the adverts in such publications as Illustrated London News, The Tatler and Country Life represented a conscious effort to reach a more affluent and socially superior consumer. The hallucinatory fantasies of Lewis Carroll were extensively parodied in sometimes interminable verses, deep in which the merits of a glass of Guinness were archly commended. The saving grace was in the accompanying illustrations, especially those of the under-rated Anthony Groves-Raines who possessed a genuine flair for elegantly deadpan rendition of fantastical subject matter. Groves-Raines had a long association with Guinness and was a regular contributor to the series of illustrated brochures that Guinness dispatched to the nation’s doctors every Christmas. One of these, (My Goodness! My Gilbert and Sullivan) was posted on this blog in 2010. Brian Sibley in The Book of Guinness Advertising (1985 and still the definitive book) has chapter and verse on this topic on page 73, (Guinness in Wonderland).