Meet the record breakers

Since 1955, one organisation has been on a mission to certify life’s weirdest and most wonderful endeavours. But is it now just another big business? By Imogen West-Knights

ACOUPLE OF SUMMERS AGO, I went to the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. I’d spent a lot of time in the city before, but I’d never visited the brewery. The tour is good. You can learn about how barrels are made, get your face printed in the head of a pint and have a drink in a bar with a 360-degree view of the city. But what stayed with me most was something I saw there by accident. One of the exhibit rooms was closed off, but only partially. Curiosity got the better of me, and behind the door, I found a room that was empty but for a table. On the table, there were a handful of editions of the Guinness Book of Records. I hadn’t thought about this book since I was in primary school. Back then, the Guinness Book of Records meant a big, brightly coloured, hardback volume containing 500-odd pages of pictures of people doing things like growing their hair very long or juggling knives. These were books that children gleefully unwrapped on Christmas Day and argued over with their siblings. As I flicked through the old editions – 1994, 2005, 2012 – I thought about the connection between Guinness the stout and Guinness the book for the first time, as well as a hundred questions I hadn’t thought to ask as an eight-year-old marvelling at the man with the stretchiest skin or the most needles inserted into his head.

Even now, in the age of YouTube and TikTok, when you can catapult yourself into fame, riches and recognition for feats of all kinds with nothing more complicated than your phone, the Guinness Book of Records continues, somewhat incredibly, to exist. The book, which since 1999 has gone by Guinness World Records, is still an overwhelming blizzard of wacky pictures and hard data.

But the company that publishes the book, also called Guinness World Records, is not the same as when I held my first annual, the green and silver 2002 edition. Sales of the book have declined in recent times, and the company has had to find new ways to make money – not all of which have met with the approval of the GWR old guard. When I spoke to Anna Nicholas, who worked as the head of PR for the book in the 80s and 90s, she lamented how things had changed: records are now more sensationalist, she said, to meet the demand of an audience that can see extraordinary things whenever they like on social media. “Guinness seemed to have had no issues with shamelessly and unapologetically selling out its devoted audience,” claimed one once-ardent fan in a 2020 blogpost.

It is strange to think of Guinness World Records – a business named after a beer company, which catalogues humanity’s most batshit endeavours – as the kind of entity that could sell out.

At first glance, it seems like accusing Alton Towers or Pizza Express of selling out. But the deeper I delved into the world

of record breaking, the more sense it made. Despite its absurdity, or maybe because of it, record breaking is a reflection of our deepest interests and desires. Look deeply enough at a man attempting to break the record for most spoons on a human body, or the woman seeking to become the oldest salsa dancer, and you can find yourself starting to believe that you’re peering into humanity’s soul.

ON A WINDY LATE AUTUMN MORNING, at the Olympic Park in east London, I found a young man pogoing with as much nervous solemnity as it is possible to pogo. Tyler Phillips was there to try to break the record for most consecutive cars jumped over on a pogo stick. Behind him, five taxis were lined up side by side, with a gap between each. A dozen Guinness World Records employees stood around to witness this attempt. Their number included a man in a navy and grey suit with a GWR logo on its breast pocket – a suit I later learned is reviled by many at the company for the high voltage of static it produces – who was introduced to me as Craig Glenday, the book’s editor-in-chief, who watched with the unruffled air of someone for whom seeing a man pogostick over cars is all in a day’s work.

The atmosphere was tense. Final measurements were taken. Cameras were set up. Phillips did some practice runs without the cars. On one occasion, he found himself sprawled on the pavement. I winced.

Finally, it was time. Everyone fell silent. Phillips steadied himself, and began. He nailed the first jump. Then the second, then the third. All breath was held. When Phillips jumped the final taxi and landed unscathed, he let the pogo stick fall to the ground and did a celebratory backflip, elated. “Yes!” he shouted, before running over to wrap Glenday in a bear hug. (Phillips has since beaten his own record, jumping over six cars in Milan in February 2022.)

Glenday has been part of GWR since 2001, and has, as a result, led an extremely varied professional life. He has suffered in the line of duty. One time on a trip to Istanbul to meet the woman who can protrude her eyeballs furthest out of her face, he received an insect bite that led to an infection that almost resulted in amputation. He was once stranded for a week in the southern tip of Chile with the band Fall Out Boy, who were trying to fly to Antarctica to break the record for the fastest time to do a gig on each continent. “Locals thought I was in Fall Out Boy. They were like, ‘Why is this fat old man in Fall Out Boy?’” he recalled.

The first edition, published in 1955, was shaped by the McWhirter twins’ eclectic personal taste and sense of propriety

AFEW WEEKS AFTER WITNESSING PHILLIPS’S FEAT, I visited Glenday at the GWR headquarters in central London. At first glance, the office looks much like any other. Until, that is, your eyes alight on items such as the puck from the longest ice hockey game (52hr 1min, 2002) and the broken toilet seat from a 2007 attempt at smashing the most toilet seats with your head in a minute (47). It is here that Glenday and his team put the book together, as well as make or break the dreams of record-setting hopefuls all over the world.

Glenday was keen for me to try breaking a record myself. He browsed through the database of 60,000-odd records to find one that was easy to do in the office and not impossibly difficult to beat. We settled for the longest time standing on one leg blindfolded. The record stood at 31min 14sec. Glenday printed off six pages of guidelines. For more complicated records, the guidelines can run to dozens of pages, but these were relatively simple. I read that I was not permitted to rest my other leg on my standing leg, that I must have two independent i witnesses timing my attempt with stopwatches accurate to 0.01 seconds, film my attempt for Guinness’s verification, and be blindfolded even in the event that I were w in fact blind.

Like all record attempters, I was allowed three t goes. My first attempt clocked in at a pathetic 3.4 seconds. Then 25.06. Then 31.03. I’m somewhat ashamed to say a tiny part of me was surprised. As I read the guidelines, a voice inside me whispered: “What if this is my secret skill? A hitherto undiscovered genius I have?” I didn’t really expect to break the record. But the tiny possibility was thrilling.

As a child, I thought of Guinness as something like a mystical higher power, or some kind of government body. It seemed like it must have always existed. Not so. It began with an argument in 1951. The managing director of Guinness, Sir Hugh Beaver, was on a hunting trip in Wexford, and his party couldn’t agree which game bird was fastest. This dispute seems to have stuck with Beaver. Thinking back on the incident three years later, it occurred to him that these kinds of arguments must happen all the time and there would surely be an appetite for argument-settling answers in the form of a compendious book that catalogued world records, as well as the extremes of the natural world. This volume could be distributed to pubs that sold Guinness. It could also be sold in shops, and provide another revenue stream for the brewery.

For help, Beaver turned to identical twins named Ross and Norris McWhirter, who ran a fact and figure-provision service for the newspapers of Fleet Street. The first edition, published in 1955, was shaped by the brothers’ eclectic personal taste and sense of propriety. Norris hated popular music because he thought it was “ephemeral”, and so limited the number of records in this field. No records to do with sex were included, because the twins thought, as Norris put it in 1954: “You can get those records out of medical literature, but ours is the kind of book maiden aunts give to their nieces.” Instead, readers could discover the highest lifetime milk yield of a cow (147,476kg, held by a British friesian called Manningford Faith Jan Graceful). The foreword read: “Guinness, in producing this book, hopes that it may assist in resolving many such disputes, and may, we hope, turn heat into light.”

The book became wildly popular, and the annual Guinness Book of Records was born, with the McWhirter twins remaining at the helm for the next two decades. In 1975, however, Ross was shot dead by the IRA for publicly offering a substantial reward for information leading to the conviction of terrorist bombers in Britain. Norris continued alone, only stepping down as editor in 1985, and remaining in an advisory role until 1996, when he stopped working for GWR. “The book was Norris and Norris was the book,” was how Anna Nicholas put it to me. Under his editorship, GWR headquarters became a homing beacon for the UK’s biggest oddballs, who showed up claiming everything from the heaviest sausage dog to the world’s largest toothbrush. (Norris was also fervently rightwing – an enemy of trade unions, the European Union and sanctions against apartheid South Africa – though these beliefs were not evident in the book he edited.)

Today, anyone arguing with their friends about the fastest game bird (the red-breasted merganser, at 130km/h) would consult the internet, not the latest edition of Guinness World Records. There is a decidedly analogue feel to the company. But when I sat down to chat

with Glenday, he claimed the age of information on demand has not killed the need for the book. In fact, he said, it may have helped them.

He positioned GWR as a kind of factchecker of the absurd. Glenday argues that the book serves as an authority in a way that the great wash of information on the internet can’t: GWR knows what the records are because it has measured them, taken video evidence and can point to the guidelines it checked the record against. “You might as well just shout a question into the street and see what answer you get back: that’s what the internet is like,” Glenday said, sounding a little like someone who had time-travelled from 1995 to speak to me about a thing called the internet.

There are, I posit, four types of Guinness world records. Type one: records broken without being record-breaking attempts. The most words in a hit single (Rap God by Eminem at 1,560); the most venomous viper (the saw-scaled viper Echis carinatus ). Type two: sporting achievements. The fastest boxing knockout (4 seconds), the longest tennis match (11hr 5min) and so on. Type three are the ones that stick in our memories from childhood: records that seem to exist purely in order to be records. The largest toast mosaic (189.59 sq metres), fastest time to roll an orange one mile (1.6km) with your nose (22min 41sec), and perhaps the most iconic of all, longest fingernails (13.06 metres). And the fourth kind: marketing stunts. In 2020, for instance, Bush’s Beans set the record for largest layered dip (493kg and 70 layers) to “celebrate the Super Bowl”.

For some observers, the existence of this last category is a sad reflection of how far the company has fallen. “They’ve lost the intellectual integrity that the twins had,” said Norris’s son, Alasdair McWhirter. “For them, it was a knowledge-based quest, and they had tremendous enthusiasm for that. Whereas now everything is done to make money.” Since 1997, when Guinness merged with another conglomerate, and formed Diageo, GWR has had to operate as a self-supporting business rather than the novelty arm of a beer company. (GWR is now owned by the Canadian conglomerate the Jim Pattison Group.)

These days, GWR Consultancy, which was introduced in 2009 and offers adjudication services to customers for a fee, accounts for half of the company’s revenue. Brands looking to break a record as part of a publicity campaign cannot exactly buy their way into the book, but a fee starting at £11,000 ($13,500) gets them the services of a GWR consultant, who can help them brainstorm which record the company could attempt for most viral PR, and an official adjudicator for their attempt. In 2022, Mastercard got a bunch of footballers to break the record for the highest-altitude game of football on a parabolic flight: 6,166 metres, played in zero-gravity conditions on a specially outfitted aircraft. Perhaps slightly less impressively, in 2021, Currys created the world’s largest washing machine pyramid (13.6 metres) in a car park in Lancashire.

I asked Glenday what he thought of complaints that the organisation had changed for the worse. “We’ve appended that corporate side to the business, rather than replaced anything,” he said. Besides, he added, most of these records-as-marketing-stunts don’t make it into the book.

GWR HAS FACED OTHER CRITICISMS since the introduction of the consultancy services. The most serious of these concern Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, who ruled Turkmenistan between 2007 and 2022. Berdymukhamedov was a dictator whose regime carried out arbitrary detentions, controlled the media, persecuted homosexuals and women seeking abortions, and discriminated against minorities. He was also a keen GWR fan. Between 2011 and 2018, his government and bodies linked to the government made seven applications to GWR for record attempts. According to his wishes, the city of Ashgabat sought and broke the record for “the highest density of buildings with white marble cladding”. A tower he ordered to be built won the record for the largest architectural image of a star.