Here Is The Odd Paradise Of The Record Maniac

It was a raw and windy day in the autumn of 1954. A party of sportsmen waited in skillfully built blinds near the estuary of the Slaney River, close to Wexford on the southeast tip of the Irish coast. Among them was Sir Hugh Beaver, Knight Commander Order of the British Empire, Managing Director of Arthur Guinness, Son & Co. Ltd., scientist and asker of questions. The estuary is famous for its wild-fowling, and on this afternoon large numbers of geese and ducks had been moving about, with Sir Hugh bagging his share. But there was one kind of bird that Sir Hugh did not hit. Without warning, as is their way, a small flock of golden plover came streaking past the blind, to be gone almost before they had come. Sir Hugh fired both barrels, to no purpose. His vanity was not piqued, but his curiosity was.

That evening, as the hunters warmed themselves by their host's convivial fire and clutched the necessary whiskey and sodas, they reviewed the day's events.

"By the way, Sir Hugh, did you get any of those plover?" the host asked.

"The plover? No, beyond me, I'm afraid. My goodness, they do move. Doing a hundred, I should say."

"But surely not as fast as a driven grouse downwind?" suggested someone else.

"Oh, yes, far faster. Must be the fastest game bird we've got. In fact, it would just be a matter of luck...."

"What about teal, though? They can...."

The argument developed nicely and to no immediate resolution, as is the case with most such sporting discussions. But this one was going to have a remarkable result. There was no means of checking on the flight speed of birds that night, so Sir Hugh had to let the matter wait until he returned to London. There he consulted encyclopedias and various well-regarded reference books. He searched under Ornithology, Birds, Speed, Velocity, Shooting and other likely headings, but there was no precise mention of bird speeds. It then occurred to him that it was monstrous that you could pay $400 or so for a 24-volume encyclopedia and not have it tell you a simple thing like the speed of the fastest game bird. Why isn't there such a book? thought Sir Hugh, a book telling people about the fastest, longest, tallest, driest, hardest anything: a book of records.

Shortly thereafter Sir Hugh had a word with one of his young Guinness executives whom he knew to be of a sporting turn of mind. "Chris, where on earth d'you find out things like this? Top speeds, records and so on?" Christopher Chataway, who at that very time held the world 5,000-meter record, admitted he did not know. There should be such a book, said Sir Hugh, and there was no reason why Guinness should not publish it. He asked Chataway if he knew anybody who could put such a book together, and this time Chataway had an answer: the McWhirter twins. Chataway knew the twins as a pair of track fanatics who put out a magazine called Athletics World in addition to running a fact-finding business.

Now, it is a recognized nonfact of human nature that nine-tenths of the world's literate population is insensitive to accuracy, oblivious to the niceties of precise speaking and cares little if a race has been won in 47 seconds, 46.3 seconds, or even, praise be, in 46 flat. The remainder, their opposites, care intensely. They will spend hours verifying unimportant details; they cut short interesting discussions by Looking It Up in books of reference; they cite numbers from charts and lists and tables while the wine gets warm and the souffl� gets cold. It is to this school that Norris and Ross McWhirter emphatically belong.