The Guinness family has been declared cursed by almost everyone except the Guinness family. BBC Three investigated in 2004. And Netflix, having drawn 118.6 million viewing hours from the dynasty’s nineteenth-century grief in the first four weeks of House of Guinness, renewed the show on 12 June 2026 and sent the curse content sliding back up the algorithm. The family’s answer, as it has been relayed down the years: “any big family will have its share of grief.” It is a good answer, which is precisely why nobody wants it.
The Renewal
Steven Knight’s House of Guinness premiered on 25 September 2025: eight episodes, set in nineteenth-century Dublin and New York, opening immediately after the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness in 1868 and following his four adult children, Arthur, Edward, Anne and Ben, as they take over the brewery and the properties. It ended on a major cliffhanger and did serious numbers: by the end of its fourth week in Netflix’s global top ten, 118.6 million viewing hours, roughly 17.1 million completed viewings. Season 2 was greenlit on 12 June 2026, with production due to begin in early 2027. Netflix declined to comment, which in streaming is how you say obviously.
The show starts at Benjamin’s death because that is where the modern money starts too. Benjamin was once the wealthiest man in Ireland; his son Edward Cecil ran the largest brewery in the world from 1868 until 1889, was himself the richest person in Ireland, and in 1919 was created Earl of Iveagh and Viscount Elveden. Everything the curse narrative feeds on, every death that reads like an omen, happened to people attached to that fortune. Grief and inheritance travel in the same envelope.
The Ledger
The arithmetic starts with the founder. Arthur Guinness, 1725 to 1803, had 21 children with his wife Olivia Whitmore and outlived more than half of them; eleven died before adulthood, per Irish Central. Arthur himself lived to 78, which in his century read less like a curse than a triumph.
Then the twentieth century got specific. Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, great-grandson of the founder and British Minister of State in the Middle East, was assassinated in Cairo on 6 November 1944 by two members of the Lehi underground organisation. Three months later, on 8 February 1945, Viscount Elveden was killed in action by a V-2 rocket in Belgium.
Tara Browne, younger son of the 4th Baron Oranmore and Browne and Oonagh Guinness, and heir to part of the fortune, died in a London car crash on 18 December 1966, aged 21. According to Lennon, his death inspired the first verses of “A Day in the Life”. Immortality of a sort, at a price nobody quotes.
In 1978, twice: Lady Henrietta Guinness took her own life in Umbria, and the British diplomat John Guinness survived a car accident that killed his four-year-old son, Peter. In 1986, Olivia Channon, a descendant through Sir Henry “Chips” Channon, who had married Lady Honor Guinness and inherited her share of the fortune, died of a heroin overdose at Oxford after a party at Christ Church. She was 22. The Daily Mail reported that Henry Channon, another member of the dynasty on the same branch, died in October 2021 aged 51, leaving more than £30 million, £27.53 million after debts, on trust to his widow and four children.
And in the summer of 2020, Honor Uloth, 19, eldest daughter of Rupert Uloth and Lady Louisa Jane Guinness, and a granddaughter of the 3rd Earl of Iveagh, died after a swimming-pool accident at a family barbecue. The Scottish Daily Mail reported that a coroner ruled her death a tragic accident.
The Verdict
Laid end to end like that, the list has the rhythm of a haunting, which is exactly the trick of it. A dynasty three centuries deep, spread across baronies and branches and two countries, accumulates deaths the way it accumulates acreage. The family’s line, as relayed, says as much in the plainest available English: any big family will have its share of grief.
The curse question is not new either. The 2004 BBC Three documentary on the dynasty investigated it two decades before Steven Knight put the family in period costume. What has changed is not the grief but the distribution. In 2004 the question reached a late-night BBC Three audience; in 2025 it reached 17.1 million completed viewings in a month, with a season two on order. The curse, as a media product, has never been in better health.
The Balance Sheet
The dynasty itself is in decent health too, though the numbers wobble depending on who is counting and when. The Sunday Times Rich List 2025 put the whole Guinness family fortune at £856 million. The same list in 2019 valued the Earl of Iveagh alone at £973 million, and a 2020 report in the Scottish Daily Mail put the family at an estimated £906 million. Different years, different methodologies; the direction of travel matters less than the composition.
That composition, as Suffolk News reported in 2019, runs as follows: the Earl inherited £62 million of Guinness shares; the family’s stake in Diageo is unpublished but was believed worth £310 million; and he leads the Burhill Group, which owns 22 golf courses, with assets in the Elveden Estate and the £400 million Canada-based British Pacific Properties. A brewing fortune that has quietly become a land, leisure and property fortune, with the drinks conglomerate reduced to one line among several.
The most telling transaction is the oldest. In 1999, Iveagh sold Farmleigh, the family’s Irish home, and its park to the Irish Government for the market price of €29.2 million, £18.9 million at the time. Market price. No dynastic discount for the nation, no sentimental premium for the sellers. That is not how cursed families behave; that is how solvent ones do.
The Quiet Earl
Edward “Ned” Guinness, 4th Earl of Iveagh, born in 1969, became head of the family at 23, in 1992, when his father Benjamin died at 55. If any single Guinness had licence to believe in the curse, it is the man handed the whole apparatus in his early twenties by a premature funeral. Instead he has spent three decades on the Elveden Estate in Suffolk: 22,500 acres, one of the largest privately farmed estates in England, comprising some 2.6 per cent of the county. Formerly married to the interior designer Clare Hazell, he has two sons, and the heir apparent is Arthur Guinness, Viscount Elveden. The founder’s name, back at the front of the queue, which is how a brewing dynasty writes continuity.
No verified comment from the Earl or the family on the show, the renewal, or the revived curse coverage has surfaced. The silence is consistent with everything else: the relayed Irish Times line, the Farmleigh sale at market price, the barley over the headlines.
So the answer to Netflix’s question, and BBC Three’s before it, has been sitting in Suffolk all along. Production on season two begins in early 2027, and the curse will get another eight episodes, another cycle of listicles, another 118 million hours if the first run is any guide. Elveden will get another harvest. Only one of these is renewable forever.
The family knows which.
