Stanley Penn

In the late 1970's I wrote an article for Creative Review Magazine about Stanley Penn who had been responsible for writing Guinness advertisements for around 30 years.

He was a lovely old chap of around 80 when I met him and I discovered he had been hugely talented. His home was absolutely full of Guinness memorabilia. I got paid £50 for the article and blew the lot by taking him and his son out to lunch.

A few years later he passed away. The story as told to me was that his wife died and he was absolutely brokenhearted. A couple of weeks later he went to his local pub, bought everyone a drink and said "Goodbye". The locals thought he was going away somewhere.

In a sense he was. He went home, got into bed and closed his eyes.

The post mortem gave cause of death as "natural causes".