GUINNESS HISTORY - message in a bottle
We recently received a message from Michelle who wanted to know more about a Guinness bottle she acquired that had been dropped into the ocean with a message inside as part of a publicity stunt in 1959. I have been in contact with our archive in Scotland to find out more about these bottles and their fascinating story. They are now a collector’s item and their story and some pictures of the bottles and their contents are below.
In the summer of 1959 Guinness was celebrating the fact that 200 years had passed since the first Arthur Guinness had acquired his brewery in Dublin. To mark this occasion A W Fawcett, the Managing Director of the exports company in Liverpool, decided to carry out an unusual publicity stunt. Consequently, some 150,000 specially embossed bottles were dropped into the Atlantic Ocean from 38 different ships over a period of six weeks starting on 14 July 1959. Amazingly, these bottles are still turning up all over the world more than forty years after the event, which must surely make the “Bicentenary Bottle drop” Guinness’s longest running advertising promotion! No complete list has been kept of the bottles that have turned up over the years, however we have heard about bottles being found in California, in Texas, in South Africa, in France, in Wales, the Bahamas and Canada.
The bottle used in the Bottle drop was sealed to protect the small number of documents it contained. The most interesting of these was a colourful certificate “from the office of King Neptune”. In addition there was a little booklet telling the story of Guinness, a special gold-coloured 1759-1959 Guinness label, and some instructions on how to turn the bottle into a table-lamp should you feel so inclined! Sometimes the bottles contained other items such as an advertisement for Ovaltine (who helped to sponsor the bottle drop) or a notice about the ship concerned.
The image below shows an example of the bottles and their contents.
These bottles are now collector’s items. We already have several examples of the bottle in our archive, but if you have one and are interested in a valuation you could contact Mike Peterson of the Association of British Brewery Collectibles:
Website: www.breweriana.org.uk
Email: Mike.Peterson@ntlworld.com