Toucan Review: Dorothy L. Sayers Wrote Guinness Adverts

The detective novelist worked at the ad agency, and the toucan came out of a rhyme she is credited with

The Toucan on Carlisle Street holds a 4.5 from seventeen hundred and fifty-one people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is a Guinness pub, and the bird on the sign is one of the most famous advertising images ever made in Britain.

The bird

It was drawn by John Gilroy, in the 1930s, for the S. H. Benson agency – and the campaign he produced for Guinness is, by common consent, one of the finest bodies of commercial art of the century.

The toucan, the sea lion balancing the pint on its nose, the ostrich swallowing the glass whole, the zookeeper being followed by his escaped animals – all of them Gilroy, all of them beautifully painted, and all of them still instantly recognisable ninety years later.

He worked on it for over thirty years.

Sayers

And here is the fact that almost nobody knows.

Dorothy L. Sayers – the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, one of the great detective novelists of the age, and later a serious translator of Dante – worked as a copywriter at S. H. Benson for nine years.

She was very good at it. She is generally credited with the Mustard Club, an enormous campaign for Colman’s which ran for years and had its own mythology.

And she is widely credited with the toucan verse – the rhyme about how, if one Guinness is good for you, think what toucan do.

The attribution is repeated everywhere and the Prat has been unable to nail it down absolutely, and we are recording that, because we have been careful about exactly this for five hundred and forty-four articles.

What is not disputed is that she was in the building, writing copy, for the agency that made the campaign – and that she then wrote a novel, Murder Must Advertise, set inside a thinly disguised version of it.

Guinness is good for you

Which is the slogan, and which is a genuinely interesting piece of history.

The company ran market research in the 1920s, asking people why they drank it, and a very large number of them said, simply, that it made them feel good.

So they printed that. Guinness is good for you.

And for decades it was given to blood donors, to nursing mothers, and to hospital patients – on the basis that it contained iron, which it does, in quantities that are not medically significant.

The claim was eventually retired, for the obvious regulatory reasons. And it is on every Guinness-adjacent piece of merchandise in the world.

The pour

It takes as long as it takes. If you complain about the wait you have told everybody in the room exactly who you are.

Verdict

Tiny, packed, cheap, and one of the best Guinness pubs in London.

Go, wait for it, and look at the bird.

Why the pour takes so long

It is not theatre and it is not marketing, and the reason is genuinely technical.

Guinness is dispensed with a mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, not carbon dioxide alone – and nitrogen bubbles are far smaller and far less soluble, which is what produces the dense creamy head rather than a fizzy one.

Forcing the beer through a restrictor plate creates the surge – the visible cascade – and the beer must then be allowed to settle before the glass is topped.

The wait is a consequence of the gas. Everything else – the two-part pour, the harp facing the customer, the hundred and nineteen and a half seconds – is a ritual that has grown up around a piece of physics.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]