Guinness - Metal Sign - Tortoise

GILROY ANIMALS

Tortoise: 1936. The first poster showed a speeding tortoise bearing a GUINNESS®. The caption - "Have a Guinness when you're tired" - echoes the restorative and tonic values traditionally associated with GUINNESS® in early advertising as encapsulated in the original slogan - "Guinness is good for you". In the humorous illustrated booklet, which Guinness produced for Christmas 1937, the tortoise appeared with the following poem containing a characteristic rhyming pun: " "It's Christmas," said the tortoise, "Have something good for you." So Guinness he has brought us, And Tortoise what to do."

JOHN GILROY

John Gilroy, (1898-1985) was one of the 20th century's most versatile, gifted and imaginative artists. He is best known for producing some of the most memorable and attractive images in British advertising, but was also a respected and successful landscape and portrait painter of royalty and celebrities. After producing several successful poster designs, Gilroy was recruited in 1925 by the advertising agency S.H.Benson's who handled the accounts of many well-known national brands including Wills Gold Flake, Coleman's mustard, Macleans toothpaste and Bovril. In 1928 Benson's began work on the first advertising campaign for GUINNESS® beer and from then until the early 1960s Gilroy was above all associated with advertising GUINNESS®. Gilroy is particularly associated with two campaigns for GUINNESS®, which ran simultaneously for nearly thirty years from the 1930s. The first involved the slogan "Guinness for strength" showing people performing incredible feats of strength empowered by GUINNESS®. The most popular posters in this series were the "Girder"(1934) depicting a workman effortlessly carrying a massive girder on his head and the horse and cart with the farmer pulling the cart (1949). The second campaign, featured zoo-animals. At the time Benson's had been trying unsuccessfully to develop a human "Guinness family" for its advertising. The idea of using animals to advertise GUINNESS® occurred to Gilroy after visiting the circus. While watching a performing sea-lion he entertained the curious thought that the animal would be smart enough to balance a glass of GUINNESS® on its nose! It became the concept for one of the world's longest running advertising campaigns "My Goodness, MY GUINNESS”. The hapless zookeeper, a caricature of Gilroy himself, watched over the family of animals which included an ostrich swallowing a GUINNESS®, glass and all, a pelican with a beak full of bottles, a tortoise, a lion, bear, crocodile, kangaroo, giraffe, polar bear, gnu, kinkajou, penguin (particularly associated with Draught GUINNESS® to emphasise its coolness) and, of course, most famous of all, the toucan. All of the zoo animals appeared together for the first time in 1953 with a poster designed to commemorate Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. In the 1930s Guinness "adopted" the characters from Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books and Gilroy illustrated several parodies of the Mad Hatter's teaparty, the Walrus and the Carpenter, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, etc. These were used as Underground posters, as magazine ads and in a series of illustrated booklets of nonsense rhymes Guinness sent out to its friends in the medical profession each Christmas (hence their name "doctors' books"). During the Second World War Gilroy continued working on advertisements for GUINNESS®. Posters depicted a sealion offering a GUINNESS® to a zookeeper in battledress and a sailor escaping with his comrade's GUINNESS® aboard a torpedo. Due to the paper shortage, some posters were printed on the back of existing ones - this is why a Gilroy kangaroo poster in 1943 had a very dark background. The last major Gilroy poster was 1961 showing the animals at the seaside. Besides various different sized posters, they had graced hundreds of press ads and advertising miscellanea including ceramic models and table lamps in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Mid 1950s cinema commercials involved puppet animations of Gilroy's posters while the earliest television commercials for GUINNESS® used live or cartoon versions in the same way. Besides advertising Gilroy also produced for Guinness some of the early covers of the Guinness company magazine, painted a series of pictures of brewery scenes and portraits of members of the Guinness family. Gilroy actually described himself as a portrait painter, rather than a commercial artist, and throughout his career was in great demand. He painted all the main members of the Royal Family, Sir Winston Churchill, Edward Heath, Lords Mountbatten and Alexander of Tunis, Pope John XX111, Sir John Gielgud and many other celebrities. A most prolific artist, Gilroy also produced a vast number of sketches, landscapes and whimsical designs for Royle's greetings cards.