Eldest son Arthur expected that the role to be given to him, and that he’d enjoy a free hand with his controlling interest in the brewery, only to learn at the reading of his father’s will that he would be compelled to share ownership with his clever but dour brother Edward. The complicated partnership of these two brothers – opposites, yoked together and frequently resentful of one another – forms the dramatic heart of House of Guinness.
Just as Steven Knight had been inspired to make Peaky Blinders by his parents’ stories of their childhoods in gang-ridden Birmingham, Knight discovered the creative wellspring required to undertake House of Guinness after speaking with Lowell. “Ivana is an absolute mine of information and untold stories about the family going back years,” he says in the press notes for the show. “Meeting her was the best bit of research imaginable because you didn’t just get the stories, you got the [family] confidence, and the spirit and the slight madness… I was hooked.”
How to find the right tone? I didn’t want them to be villains, but any business person has to be ruthless, especially in those times – Ivana Lowell
House of Guinness concerns a family in trade – successful yes, but determined to use whatever means necessary to further expand their enterprise and harness a large workforce. Most of the action takes place in Ireland (the Liverpool docks acting as stand-in for the St James Gate brewery) with a handful of scenes in New York, where a Guinness cousin is sent to pursue international growth. The Fenians, Irish revolutionaries bent on armed struggle to free Ireland from Britain, are seen targeting Guinness interests, as they did in real life, although the company was known for treating workers well, providing higher than average wages and old-age pensions. Edward Guinness, later Earl of Iveagh, once remarked: “You cannot make money from people unless you are willing for people to make money from you.”
The action unfurls in the giant brewery’s grimy precincts, the ballrooms and mansions of Dublin, and the depopulated Irish countryside, where, two decades after the famine, anyone who hasn’t already “left for Boston”, as one character reports, lives in a sod-roofed hovel. A love of Ireland and the Irish is part of the privileged family’s legacy, but Lowell’s story focuses on how they walked a tightrope at a fraught moment in history, and connived to flourish both commercially and personally. She explains to the BBC: “How to find the right tone? I didn’t want them to be villains, but any business person has to be ruthless, especially in those times.”
