In an event never before matched, Norris and Ross McWhirter were born August 12, 1925, in Middlesex, England. The twins were the sun of William McWhirter, who was the editor of the Sunday Pictorial newspaper, and later founded a newspaper chain, the Northcliffe Newspapers. In 1943, despite being just 14 years old, both twins volunteered for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and served together on a minesweeper in the Pacific Ocean until WWII ended.
After the war, the McWhirters finished college (Norris with a law degree, although he never practiced law) and followed in their father’s footsteps, becoming journalists. They specialized in sports, and in 1951 founded an agency to compile and distribute sports statistics to newspapers, advertisers, encyclopedias, and whoever else would purchase them. They also founded the Association of Track and Field Statisticians.
Their next venture was triggered by a sporting event. In 1954 Roger Bannister ran the first sub four-minute mile in history, and Norris McWhirter was at the time providing commentary for the BBC. It was such a momentous moment that McWhirter acquired some of Bannister’s fame, just because he’d been the one to announce it. One of the other runners in the race was Christopher Chataway, who worked at the Guinness brewery. Chataway mentioned McWhirter and his twin brother to Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director, and told Beaver about the McWhirter twins’ remarkable grasp of sports records and statistics. What Chataway knew, but the McWhirters didn’t, was that Sir Hugh Beaver had an idea.
It seems that Beaver had just recently been on a hunting trip in Ireland with some friends. He’d shot at a golden plover, but missed, and claimed it was because the golden plover was the fastest bird in Europe. His companions argued that no, the red grouse was the fasted bird (they were both wrong, but the plover is faster than the grouse). Beaver realized there was no way to settle the argument either way, and moreover, there were probably arguments like that happening constantly. And not only that, but how many of those arguments were taking place in pubs, where Guinness stout was consumed — and if only there were a reference book available, it might lead to satisfaction, settled arguments, and more pints of Guinness.
Norris and Ross McWhirter were summoned to the Guinness offices and interviewed by the directors — not for a job, exactly, but to test their knowledge of sports statistics. They evidently impressed everyone there, and got a commission to create a book that became, in 1954, the Guinness Book of World Records. It was an immediate hit (partly because the first thousand or so copies were distributed for free to pubs), and within a few months was the best-selling nonfiction book in England.
Both McWhirters kept working on the Guinness Book of World Records until 1975, when Ross was assassinated by Irish separatists because he’d offered a reward for information about the bombs the group had been planting in London. Both McWhirters were active in right-wing politics at the time. Norris stayed with the world records book for another ten years, and retired in 1985. After that he created another book, Norris McWhirter’s Book of Millennium Records, published in 1999. It was successful, but didn’t match any of the publishing and sales figures of the record-breaking Guinness Book of World Records, which has been published for 69 years straight (a record), in 100 countries and 23 languages (probably also records), and has a database of 53,000 entries (probably not a record). There have also been television series based on the book, museums, and the organization itself (no longer the Guinness Brewery) is now the primary international sanctioning body for record attempts of all sorts. You can find out more at their website.
