Netflix have introduced their latest drama series House of Guinness, a historical show based on the real-life struggle within the Guinness family that lend their name to the beer.
Hailed by many as the ‘next Peaky Blinders’, the show released yesterday to much acclaim and shot straight to number one on the Netflix charts.
With the Netflix story announcing off the bat that it is fiction based on real people, many will be watching wondering how closely things line up to real life and what happened to the real-life siblings.
The show centres around the four children of Benjamin Guinness, the patriarch of the Guinness family who died in 1868.
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After he dies in the TV show, his eldest and youngest sons, Arthur Guinness and Edward Guinness take over, with middle brother Benjamin Junior and their sole sister Anne receiving money and estates but no business power.
This is how it went down in real life but a lot of the other details in the TV show do not quite fit in with the true story.
What happened to Arthur Guinness and what the show changed
The eldest son Arthur inherits half the running of the Guinness brewery alongside his brother, but his main character arc in the season is moreso about the attempts to blackmail him over his homosexuality.
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This plotline is not particularly founded, in fact, and are instead taking small parts of the truth and exaggerating for drama.
Whilst the family’s historian Joe Joyce concluded that Arthur was ‘probably’ gay, this was largely due to his marriage being arranged in advanced to be sexless.
It is unclear if Arthur was actually gay, asexual, or simply didn’t fancy sex with his wife, but this has been drawn out to the extremes for House of Guinness.
Arthur sold his half of Guinness shares to his brother Edward for £700,000, making him a very rich man.
This was just a year prior to Edward floating the business on the stock exchange however, and Arthur died in 1915.
What happened to Edward Guinness and what the show changed
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Edward Guinness is played by the most well known actor in the Netflix show, Louis Partridge, best known perhaps for – well - being Olivia Rodrigo’s boyfriend.
He is a standout in the show however, though the Netflix series features a couple of inaccuracies about him.
Presented as the more business-savvy dedicated brother, his main goal throughout the season centres around breaking Guinness into America.
As part of this though, there are two major aspects that creator Steven Knight has taken a bit of creative license with.
Jack Gleeson, the Game of Thrones star who has made his return to acting after a decade of ‘retirement’, stars as Byron Hedges, a man who promises to bridge the gap between the Protestant Guinness’ and Catholic Fenians.
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With New York’s Irish being majority Catholic, Edward Guinness ends up agreeing a deal by which the Catholic Fenians get 15 per cent of the American profits.
There is no proof this happened and Guinness began their American distribution about 10 years before the Fenians were created in earnest.
In addition to this, the Netflix show adds the idea the Irish Harp was added to the label by Edward (he didn’t).
Edward was a philanthropist throughout his life and worked at Guinness until his death in 1927, becoming the richest man in Ireland in the process.
What happened to Benjamin Guinness Jr and Anne Lee Guinness and what the show changed
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Benjamin Guinness, the middle brother, is arguably the most faithfully portrayed of the Guinness’.
Part of that though is simply that little exists of him in the history books.
As in the show, he was a drunk who, as such, was not considered for inheritance of the responsibilities of the brewery.
In real life, he became captain of the horse guard in England and died in 1900.
Anne Lee Guinness, known as Anne Plunkett during the show, was the only daughter and eldest child of the four.
As in the show, she was not left much stake in Guinness and so focused her efforts on helping the poor and sick of Dublin.
Her affair with James Norton’s Sean Rafferty is fictional (Rafferty was created for the show) as was her subsequent miscarriage with a child she worried was his.
Anne suffered most of her life with debilitating neurodegenerative disease, and died at the age of just 50.
Her romantic storyline was one of the many criticised by Molly Guinness, a direct descendant, who said in article for The Times: “All the characters come straight from a bingo card of modern clichés around rich people.”
House of Guinness is available to stream on Netflix now.
Michael Slavin