A Wexford argument

In the early 1950s, Guinness managing director Sir Hugh Beaver attended a shooting party in Co. Wexford. An argument began over the fastest game bird in Europe. Nobody could settle it because no reference book had the answer.

Beaver remembered the argument. In 1954 he hired the Fleet Street researchers Norris and Ross McWhirter to compile a book that could settle similar disputes in pubs. The first Guinness Book of Records followed. The original bird question never appeared in it: the book dealt in world records, not European ones.