Obituary: Norris McWhirter

By ARNOLD PICKMERE

Editor, compiler. Died aged 78.

Norris McWhirter and his identical twin brother Ross (who was murdered by the IRA in 1975) founded the Guinness Book of Records in 1955.

Excluding versions of the Bible, its regular editions became for many years the world's biggest-selling book and also, the legend goes, the title most stolen from public libraries.

The book's origins lay with Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of Guinness, who in the early 1950s wondered whether the golden plover or the grouse was Europe's fastest game bird.

He was something of a crack shot and the best version of the story says he was miffed when he missed a plover while shooting in County Wexford. And a few years later, he missed a grouse.

His discovery that reference books could not tell him which bird was faster led him to the idea that a book of such facts might help drinkers in the 81,400 pubs in Britain and Ireland settle their nightly factual disagreements. And they might feel grateful to Guinness for the help.

Norris and Ross McWhirter were chosen to assemble the book. They were unusually well-equipped for the task.

The brothers grew up on facts, and, as Norris described it, they had the right sort of "quirky" minds.

Their father, William, was editor of the Daily Mail newspaper and every week brought home about 150 newspapers and magazines.

The McWhirter boys made a hobby of collecting newspaper clippings, finding out at an early age about the world's highest mountains, deepest lakes, longest bridges. As their collection grew so did their knowledge.

After wartime service in the Royal Navy, they both went to Oxford University, gaining degrees in law (Ross) and economics (Norris).

They were both athletes for the university.

Norris also ran for Scotland and Great Britain and was an Olympic hopeful until he broke a leg playing rugby.

Both became sports journalists (Norris covered four Olympics) and commentators with the BBC.

But they also ran a successful fact-finding agency on the side, servicing newspapers, advertising agencies and others.

The first edition of the Guinness records book had 8000 entries, put together by the brothers working 90-hour weeks for a time. This initial edition went mainly to pubs, with only a few copies sold elsewhere.

The book grew to having about 35 people working on it, and about 20,000 letters from round the world flowed into the office each year.

As not only editor but also compiler of the Guinness book until the mid-1990s, Norris travelled extensively, checking old and new entries for the annual catalogue of human and natural extremes.

Those inquiries could be somewhat delicate. For example, in 1980, when the title had its 25th anniversary, such checks included seeing whether Charles Osborne, of Anthon in Iowa, was still suffering from the hiccups that started in 1922.

They had caused his first wife to leave him and also made it impossible to keep in his false teeth.

And what about the woman from Birmingham who had been married eight times? Was she perhaps up to No 9?

In those days the book was selling four million copies a year in 23 languages.

And Norris' travels allowed him to make such claims (not in the book ) as: "I am the only person in the world to meet both people who were over 120 years old."

One, in 1997, was Madame Jeanne Calment, of Arles in France, who was then approaching 122.

The other, Shigechiyo Izumi, died at his home in Japan in 1986 aged 120 years and 237 days.

Even in the 1990s Norris McWhirter was still fronting up on British television before bands of children and answering impromptu questions using his encyclopaedic memory ("I have trouble forgetting things").

Children, he noted in 1993, were fascinated by human bodies and would wonder, for example, who was the world's tallest man.

"It was, of course, Robert Pershing Wadlow, who died in 1940 aged 22, who was 2.72m or 8ft 11 1/10in," he would say.

The tragedy in the life of Norris McWhirter was the death at the hands of the IRA of Ross, the younger of the twins by just 20 minutes.

An outspoken critic of the IRA, Ross had realised he was in some danger, checking under his car before driving and varying his routes when travelling.

In November 1975, the Guinness book editor and television presenter was in his house at Enfield, north London, when two men approached his wife Rosemary as she returned home, demanding her car keys.

When Ross McWhirter came to the door his wife ran inside.

McWhirter was shot and the men escaped in his wife's car.

Early the next month, his attackers, Harry Duggan and Hugh Doherty, exchanged shots with police in central London.

Four men, including these two, were arrested after a six-day siege, charged with 10 murders and 20 bombings and jailed for life.

They were freed in April 1999 under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday agreement - the multiparty peace deal for Northern Ireland.

Norris McWhirter, pale and drawn and guarded by armed Special Branch men, made his first public appearance about a week after the shooting.

He gave a speech at the Savoy Hotel supporting the freedom of association aims his brother had stood for and observing that "the preservation of a person's right to live in peace" was a priority of the time.

Norris McWhirter is survived by his second wife, Tessa von Weichardt, and a son and daughter by his first wife, Carole Eckert, who died in 1987.