The set of Guinness papers we’ve been sorting through for their owner includes a fairly complete two-decade run of Guinness Time, the in-house magazine for the brewery at Park Royal.
While the contents is on the whole fairly dull (egg and spoon races, meet the toilet attendants, and so on) the covers are works of art, redolent of the periods in which they were produced.
Those presented below are all from the 1950s and so there are a couple of references to TV, the hot trend of the day.











4 replies on “GALLERY: Guinness Time in the 1950s – design of the times”
I was curious about “Hang on the bell, Nellie” – the fact that they quote, or parody, an entire verse suggests it’d be something known to their readers – so I investigated and found this. It was a popular song of the time (first recorded 1949 – but the turnover in popular music was a lot slower then). Curiously enough, it was based on an older source – a dramatic poem called “The Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight”, which was published in 1870 (having been written three years earlier, by a 16-year-old girl) and was a hit for decades afterward. A Google image search for the title brings up some very dramatic illustrations of the crucial scene, including one which appears to be a (staged) photograph – that model earned her fee.
I can’t help with the illustrator, although the style is distinctive.
Thanks! I was wondering the same and you saved me a bunch of Google searches.
Do these documents give any clue as to whether or not Guinness is/was brewed with a portion of aged/soured stout?
They do!