On November 10, 1951, Hugh Beaver, the managing director of a brewery, was part of an elite shooting party in Wexford County, in southeastern Ireland. Strict gun laws and expensive licensing in Ireland made owning firearms something of a status symbol. Hugh’s target on this hunt was the golden plover. They were not hunting the golden plover for food—it weighs only about seven ounces—they were hunting the birds purely for sport. The birds were about ten inches tall and flew really quickly which made them a difficult target.
As the shooting party walked slowly through the mud flats of the Slaney River, an area known as the North Slob, Hugh flushed out a golden plover. The bird shot into the air. There was no time to take careful aim. Hugh raised his shotgun to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. Blam!!! The bird did not fall but continued to appear as little more than a streak in the sky. Hugh had missed. The others in the shooting party playfully teased him for missing the shot, but Hugh reasoned that he missed the shot because the golden plover was the fastest game bird in Europe. Another member of the shooting party disagreed and said the red grouse was the fastest game bird in Europe. Despite their best arguments, there was no way to settle the good-natured dispute during the hunt.
Later that evening, the shooting party returned to their host’s house in the small town of Castlebridge. Their discussion over which was the fastest game bird in Europe continued. Hugh was certain that they would find some sort of reference book to settle the dispute. He and the other members of the shooting party searched all of the books they could locate but none contained the information they sought. The debate remained unresolved.
Two years later, Hugh was searching for a new way to promote the brewery that he managed when he remembered the unsolved debate from the shooting party. He was sure that there were other people who had similar questions which could be answered if only there was an authoritative reference book. He enlisted the help of twin brothers Norris and Ross McWhirter, who were running a fact-finding agency in London, to compile a reference book to solve such questions. In August 1954, Hugh distributed 1,000 free copies of the reference book to pubs in England and Ireland. The reference book was immensely popular. In 1955, the first commercially available copies of the reference book became available. By Christmas, the reference book topped the bestseller list in Britain. In 1956, the reference book became available in America where it sold approximately 70,000 copies. Since its inception, the reference book has sold more than 150 million copies in 100 countries and in 40 languages.
When Hugh joined that shooting party in the winter of 1951 there was no way he could have known that a good-natured dispute over which was the fastest game bird in Europe would lead to the creation of one of the best-selling books in publishing history. Since Hugh used the reference book as a promotional item for the brewery he managed, he named it after the brewery. He called it Guinness Book of World Records. The question that spawned the reference book, which is the fastest game bird in Europe, has never been included in any edition of the book because it focuses not on regional records, but on world records.