Guinness · 1759
The nine-thousand-year lease at St James's Gate
On the afternoon of Monday the thirty-first of December 1759, in the small office of the Earl of Meath's land-agent in Dublin Castle Yard, Arthur Guinness, thirty-four years old, the Celbridge-born small-brewer of Leixlip in County Kildare, signed the lease that has been universally remembered ever since as the longest single commercial lease in the history of Irish-and-British property law: nine thousand years at forty-five pounds the year, for a small, derelict, four-acre brewery and yard at St James's Gate on the western edge of Dublin. The St James's Gate brewery had been disused for almost a decade; the previous brewer, William Rainsford of the Meath estate, had gone bankrupt in 1750. Guinness took the lease on the strength of a hundred-pound legacy from his godfather Archbishop Arthur Price of Cashel and a small loan from his elder brother Richard. He brewed his first cask of ale at St James's Gate the following spring. He committed in 1799, after forty years of brewing-and-export experiment, to the dark porter beer that would carry his name and would become, within a single generation, the standard against which every stout in the British Isles was measured. The brewery has been in continuous Guinness-and-Diageo operation since the first cask of 1760 and is by every modern measure the oldest single continuously-operating brewing site in the world. The original 1759 nine-thousand-year lease is preserved at the brewery; the harp of Brian Boru that Arthur's grandson Benjamin put on the bottle label in 1862 is on the coinage of the Irish Republic.
A business is rarely founded on a lease of nine thousand years. The standard commercial lease of the eighteenth-century Dublin property market ran to ninety-nine years and was renewable at the landlord's option at the end of the term. Arthur Guinness signed nine thousand years on the afternoon of the thirty-first of December 1759, paid forty-five pounds for the first year's rent, and walked across the Liffey from Dublin Castle Yard to the small four-acre yard at St James's Gate to inspect the premises he had committed his godfather's legacy and the next nine millennia of the family's payment of forty-five pounds per year to.
THE CELBRIDGE INHERITANCE
Arthur Guinness was born at Celbridge in County Kildare on the twenty-eighth of September 1725, eldest of six surviving children of Richard Guinness, the land-steward to Dr Arthur Price the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Cashel, and Elizabeth Read. The father was the brewer at the Archbishop's house and at the family's small Celbridge inn (the Archbishop's brewing was a sideline-business of the Celbridge ecclesiastical estate); the son was raised in the brewhouse and was christened by the Archbishop himself. He was schooled at the Celbridge parish school under the Reverend Edward Bayley, was apprenticed to his father at the family brewing operation at twelve, and on Archbishop Price's death at Cashel on the seventeenth of July 1752 received from the will the legacy of one hundred pounds that put him in a position, at the age of twenty-six, to set up on his own account.
He took the lease of a small brewery at Leixlip on the upper Liffey three miles downstream from Celbridge in 1755 with his elder brother Richard as junior partner. The Leixlip brewery brewed Dublin-pattern ale for the local Kildare market through the late 1750s. It was profitable; the Dublin export trade out of which the family's later fortune would come was geographically inaccessible from Leixlip. By 1759 Arthur had decided that the future of the family business lay in the city.
THE FOUR-ACRE YARD
The St James's Gate brewery had been built in 1670 on the small four-acre plot on the western edge of medieval Dublin where the St James's Gate of the old city walls had stood. The plot ran along the south bank of the Liffey at the small Camac tributary, was bounded north by the river and south by the Old Kilmainham Road, and contained the brewhouse, the malthouse, the cooperage, two small storehouses, the brewer's residence, a working cattle-yard and the small private mill-pond on the Camac that drove the brewery's grinding mill. The brewery had passed through six tenants since 1670; the most recent, William Rainsford of the Meath estate (the Earl of Meath was the freeholder), had gone bankrupt in 1750 and the premises had been disused for nine years. The yard was overgrown with bramble and the brewhouse roof had partially fallen in by 1759.
Guinness rode down to Dublin in late November 1759 to inspect the premises. The Earl of Meath's land-agent (a Mr John Cary at the Dublin Castle Yard office) was willing to take any tenant on any terms that would resume the rent payments. The negotiation across the first three weeks of December 1759 settled on the unusual long-lease structure for which the lease is universally remembered: nine thousand years from the thirty-first of December 1759, at the fixed rent of forty-five pounds the year for the whole term, with the option to surrender at any point on a year's notice but no rent escalation, no rent review and no renegotiation rights for the freeholder. The Earl of Meath's view, by Cary's surviving notes, was that the long fixed-rent term made the rent reliable; Arthur's view was that the term made the premises effectively his own freehold for as long as he was willing to pay the forty-five pounds.
THE THIRTY-FIRST
He came to Dublin Castle Yard at two in the afternoon of the thirty-first of December 1759 with the lease counterpart in his coat pocket, two witnesses from the Leixlip brewery, and the hundred-pound legacy bank-draft in his name from the Cashel solicitors. The lease was read aloud by Cary in the Castle Yard office, was signed by Arthur in the long counter-signature line at the foot of the parchment, was witnessed by the two Leixlip men and by the Castle Yard clerk, was sealed with the Earl of Meath's seal-of-office and counter-sealed with the small Guinness brewing seal Arthur had brought from Leixlip, and was filed in the Earl of Meath's lease-archive. Arthur paid the first year's rent of forty-five pounds in coin on the counter. Cary handed him the keys of the premises. He walked across the Liffey on the Mellows Bridge, took possession of the yard at half-past three in the winter afternoon, and brought up his first cart-load of brewing equipment from Leixlip across the next week.
THE PORTER PIVOT
He brewed Dublin-pattern ale for the next decade at St James's Gate on the model he had perfected at Leixlip: a strong, hopped, malt-and-barley ale at the standard Dublin tavern strength of six per cent alcohol by volume. The brewery was profitable through the 1760s; by 1770 he had bought out his Leixlip operation and consolidated the family business at St James's Gate. The decade saw two important commercial pressures on the Dublin ale trade. The first was the rising volume of imported London-brewed porter (the dark, heavy, hop-heavy beer that the London brewers had developed in the 1720s and that the Dublin taverns had been importing in volume from the 1750s, on the strength of the cheap sea-freight cost from the Thames). The second was the Dublin tavern-keepers' increasing preference for the longer-keeping porter style over the rapidly-souring Dublin ale.
Arthur made the porter pivot through the 1770s and 1780s. He brewed his first batches of Dublin-brewed porter in 1778 on the strength of the experience the Dublin brewer John Purser had brought back from a working trip to the London porter-houses; he scaled the porter brewing through the 1780s; and in 1799 (in his seventy-fourth year, four years before his death) he committed the whole St James's Gate operation to porter and discontinued the brewing of ale. By 1810 his sons had taken the brewery's porter output to the leading position in the Dublin trade; by the 1820s it had displaced the London-imported porter on the Irish side of the Irish Sea; by the 1880s it was the largest single brewery in the world.
THE LEASE TODAY
Arthur Guinness died at St James's Gate on the twenty-third of January 1803 in his seventy-eighth year, leaving the brewery to his sons. The nine-thousand-year lease has been in continuous operation since 1759, has been renewed by acquisition of the underlying freehold (the brewery purchased the Earl of Meath's interest in the underlying freehold in 1886 on the public flotation of the brewery on the London Stock Exchange), and is preserved as the central single founding document of the brewery at the on-site Guinness Storehouse museum at St James's Gate. The brewery has expanded across the next two and a half centuries from the original four-acre plot to the present sixty-acre site that occupies the whole of the western Dublin riverside between St James's Gate and the Camac; produces approximately three million pints of Guinness stout per day at the modern site; and is the single most-visited paid tourist attraction in the Republic of Ireland with approximately one million seven hundred thousand visitors per year. The harp of Brian Boru that the brewery put on the bottle label in 1862 is the harp on the coinage of the Republic of Ireland and on every Irish passport. The Guinness name in modern Irish-and-international commerce carries the weight of the nine-thousand-year lease signed across the counter at Dublin Castle Yard on the thirty-first of December 1759.