Every so often a surprising or interesting fact or piece of trivia arises about Crowborough that we didn’t previously know. When we pick these up we will share them under the “Crowborough – did you know?” banner. Last month we learnt that the world famous music band, Genesis, wrote one of their albums here. This month we discover Crowborough’s link with the Guinness Book of Records…
The Guinness Book of World Records, which inspires tens of thousands of people annually to attempt record-breaking feats, began as an idea conceived by British engineer and industrialist Sir Hugh Beaver – who lived in Crowborough.
The story goes that during the early 1950s Beaver, who was Director-General of the Ministry of Works and managing director at Guinness Brewery, was involved in a dispute during a shooting party about the fastest game bird in Europe; however, the answer could not be found in any bird reference book.
He sought the help of sports journalists Norris and Ross McWhirter, and Guinness Superlatives Ltd., was founded in November 1954 to handle the book’s publication.
A year later the McWhirter brothers published the 198-page first edition of roughly 4,000 entries, which were separated into several chapters (e.g., “The Universe,” “The Human Being,” “The Natural World,” “The World’s Structures,” and others).
The first edition, called The Guinness Book of Records, became a best seller in England in only four months’ time, and three more editions were released over the following year. The McWhirter brothers were renowned for their painstaking fact-checking work, often traveling personally to far corners of the world to observe attempts at record-breaking or to determine whether new and different activities and curiosities were worthy of inclusion in the book. More than 60,000 Guinness world records had been catalogued in the publication’s database by 2022.