By Daniela Elser

Copyright news

On Tuesday this week in London they gathered and posed for the press: The Earl; the socialite reportedly pushed in a pool by Kate Moss; the famed fashion eccentric, muse, and Bowie protege; and the muso who formed a punk rock band with Osama bin Laden’s niece.

These are the Guinnesses, or at least some of them, members of the famed, monied, and eccentric brewing dynasty, whose story has been turned into Netflix’s new House of Guinness. Think Downton Abbey meets a malted Succession in corsets set against the backdrop of the violent political unrest of 1860s Ireland. What could possibly go wrong?

While the clan might be most famous for their patriarch’s famous boozy creation, their true story is far wilder, weirder and more shocking than anything that has ended up on the small screen.

Forget sex, drugs and titles; their story is about LSD, Hitler, diamonds, The Beatles, a terrorist group assassination, Greek shipping billions, James Bond, Prussian royalty and a supposed curse that has seen a series of family members meet terrible, dramatic fates.

In 1930, the editor of Debrett’s peergage guide described them as “The most complicated family in the book.” If only they could see them now.

How it all started

In 1759 founder Arthur had the cracking idea to make a particularly dark stout and such was his belief in his drop that he signed a 9000-year-lease on a brewery in Dublin. His tipple went down a charm and by the time he died in 1803, he was richer than King George III, had had 21 children, only 11 of whom survived him.

(“A friend once told me they were at a party with a host of the twenty-something Guinnesses,” family biographer Emily Hourian recently wrote “and there was a whole lot of ‘so your grandfather is my great-uncle’. Even they struggled to connect the dots.”)

The title came in 1919 when George V made Edward Cecil Guinness the first Earl of Iveagh, thus officially lobbing them into the nobility.

How many are there today?

So sprawling is their family tree that there are so many Guinnesses that, the saying goes, in West London you’re never more than six feet from one of them. In Ireland, the family is reportedly the closest thing the country has to royalty.

In 1997, the Guinness company was one of the two biggest alcohol companies in the world and was worth $20 billion when it was merged with. The family’s current head, Lord Ivan Iveagh is reportedly worth at least $1.8 billion today.

Tell me about Guinnesses on the red carpet

I’m so glad you asked. Prepare yourself, more names are about to be dropped than exist in Tina Brown’s bulging 80s Rolodex.

At the Netflix premiere was Lady Mary Charteris, just the latest in a long line of It Girls the family has been producing for over a century. In 2012, she married Robbie Furze in a cut-out wedding dress, which the British papers got right excited about.

She is the daughter of Catherine Guinness who, in the 70s, was Andy Warhol’s personal assistant, who starred alongside him in the film Cocaine Cowboys, and was the muse of famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Lady Mary’s father James Charteris is the Earl of Wemyss and 9th Earl of March and was a Page of Honour to the Queen Mother.

Lady Mary has found her way into the headlines: In 2015, Kate Moss allegedly pushed her into a swimming pool because the supermodel was “so furious” at seeing Lady Mary talking to her then husband Jamie Hince, the Daily Mail claimed.

The bestseller House of Beckham reported that in 2017, David Beckham didn’t answer his wife Victoria’s calls because he was out until 5am partying with Lady Mary and his friend Dave Gardner at Glastonbury.

Then we get to the most famous modern Guinness, Daphne.

The granddaughter of Diana Mitford (later Mosley), she married into the even richer Niarchos shipping dynasty as a teenager, went on to become a muse to Alexander McQueen and Karl Lagerfeld, turned her hand to music after being mentored by David Bowie who ‘shadow produced’ her first album, and is besties with La Moss.

Daphne spent part of her childhood at a former Spanish monastery bought by her father that had no running water or electricity and with Salvador Dali as a neighbour. When she was five years old, a schizophrenic held her at knifepoint at the family’s Kensington home while he shouted “death to women”. (“I remember being marched through this house with a knife at my neck, bleeding and cut,” she told the Guardian in 2023.)

While Daphne survived, her attacker would kill his mother later that day.

Daphne was close to her beloved maternal grandmother, Lady Diana Mosley, who married her second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, at the house of Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler was a guest.

Daphne married Spyros Niarchos, an heir of the $33 billion Niarchos shipping fortune, when she was 19. (As a teenager she was reportedly courted by David Cholmondeley, the wealthy Earl of Rocksavage, now the Marquess of Cholmondeley, who is part of Prince William and Kate, The Prince and Princess of Wales’ set.)

In 1999 Daphne and Spyros divorced and she began a relationship with famed French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy who remained married throughout their relationship, calling him the love of her life, before, according to one report, her having getting back together with Spyros.

There is eccentricity and then there is Daphne. According to the New Yorker, she wears 17th century Qing dynasty robes day-to-day and pristine white ballet slippers to work out, has a 20 metre entirely mirrored hallway in her New York apartment, and spent five years co-creating a glove made out of five thousand pavé diamonds worth $2.6 million which she debuted at a party where she posed as a sort of corpse bride for the night.

In more recent years, QAnon came for Daphne when the conspiracy loons claimed she was in league with the devil and drank the blood of children, the Guardian has reported, after she was photographed holding a glass of what was actually tomato juice.

The Earl, the model, and the author

Bloody hell. That’s just two of them. What about the rest?

The only chap on The House of Guinness red carpet was Arthur Edward Rory Guinness, the 4th Earl of Iveagh, who became the one of the youngest hereditary peers in the House of Lords when he inherited the title aged 23. He also got the 22,500-acre Elveden Hall estate which is reportedly the largest farm in Britain.

His ex-wife, the interior designer Clare Hazell flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane the Lolita Express 32 times between 1998 and 2000.

Also on the red carpet was another Guinness “It” girl, Jasmine who in the 90s was a fashion darling in the UK and US and beloved by Mario Testino. Her 2006 wedding at her family’s 12th century Irish castle Leixlip was the wedding of the aughties.

Standing next to him was descendant Ivana Lowell, who we have to thank for the Netflix series.

Years ago she was staying with cousin Desmond Guinness, who was once married to Princess Henriette Marie-Gabrielle von Urach and is Jasmine’s grandfather, at his Palladian Irish mansion watching Downton Abbey. She realised, “Our family history was a lot juicier and more interesting than this – plus it was all true,” she recently told the BBC.

Lowell wrote a treatment of her family’s story and Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight came on board; The House of Guinness focuses on their fortunes in the 19th century.

Lowell’s personal story is dramatic. Six-years-old, she received third degree burns to 70 per cent of her body after an accident with a kettle, she was sexually abused by her nanny’s husband, her mother the famed novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood was alcoholic and her sister Natalya died of a heroin overdose aged 18. Lowell’s therapist said to her, per The Times, “Oh my God, that’s one of the worst stories I’ve ever heard.”

(Blackwood was introduced to her first husband, artist Lucian Freud, by Ian Fleming’s wife.)

In the 90s Lowell reportedly briefly tried acting, getting a cameo in Goldeneye, before writing a memoir. “We had this family expression ‘this is too bad even for us’ — like when my mum got cancer,” Lowell told The Times recently.

And last but by no means least, Celeste Guinness who formed an all-female post-punk band, Deep Tan, which included Osama bin Laden’s niece Wafah Dufour. (Dufour has denounced her uncle.)

At The House of Guinness’ premiere she wore a black satin suit adorned with Guinness-themed patches which she then opened to reveal she was wearing nothing underneath.

The Black Curse

The family is said to suffer from something dubbed ‘Black Curse’, starting with conservative politician Walter Guinness, the first Baron Moyne, who was assassinated by members of a militant Zionist group in Cairo in 1944.

In the 60s, Patrick “Tara” Browne, son of Oonagh Guinness, was a fixture in Swinging Sixties London, partying with the Rolling Stones, and it was at his 21st birthday party, reportedly, that Paul McCartney tried his first tab of acid. He died after driving Lotus in central London at 160km/hour; McCartney and John Lennon wrote The Beatles song A Day in the Life about him.

In 1966, Prince Frederick of Prussia, the husband of Lady Brigid Guinness, drowned in the Rhine.

Lady Henrietta Guinness, who died by suicide in 1978 reportedly said, “If I had been poor, I would have been happy.”

John Guinness, former bank chairman, died in 1998 after falling 500ft down a mountain in Wales.

In 1998 Lady Henrietta’s niece, Rose Nugent, 31, was killed when she was thrown from her Romany caravan near after her horse bolted.

Also in the 90s, descendant Olivia Channon died of drug overdose while a student at Oxford University. In 2021 the ‘Black Curse’ was back in the news after her brother Henry Channon died aged 51.

The new Crown?

If The House of Guinness is a success, there is no end of real life material to keep mining for series after series.

A very small taster.

By the 30s, the family had spread into politics, banking, and society, dominating the London smart set with novelist Evelyn Waugh immortalising them as his Bright Young Things.

In 1929, Bryan Guinness and his then wife the Hon. Diana Mitford were part of an elaborate art world spoof putting on an exhibition of faked modernist paintings for small fortunes. In 1936 Diana married Sir Oswald while Adolf looked on.

(Diana’s sister Unity Mitford moved to Berlin and joined Hitler’s inner circle, killing herself after Britain declared war on Germany.)

In the 70s Sabrina Guinness, from the banking side, dated Prince Charles and Mick Jagger before marrying the world’s most famous playwright, Tom Stoppard.

There’s more – so much more.

And unlike other famous dynasties, there is a certain degree of openness. As Ivana Lowell recently told the BBC, “We are not high and mighty about our reputation, we have a very good sense of humour about ourselves”. They’d need to.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.