As "House of Guinness" hits screens could the story behind Jameson be next?

The filmmaker behind a new short about the notorious "Jameson Affair", in which the whiskey heir James Sligo Jameson caused the murder and cannibalization of a Congolese slave girl, is developing a TV series about the distilling family.

Writer/director/producer John Christopher is working on the pilot episode for the potential series, which he says would chart the rise of the family – followed by a slide into "moral decay" for some of its members. Netflix released the trailer this week for "House of Guinness", written by "Peaky Blinders" creator Steven Knight and set during one of the more colorful periods of the Guinness brewing family’s history.

Mr Christopher told the Irish Mail on Sunday there is a "good story to be told" around the Jameson dynasty too. The filmmaker intends to begin with the original John Jameson, the "very inspirational" Scottish-born founder of the world-famous whiskey company.

"How he did that is a very interesting story," he said. "Then as wealth and privilege come, you have that moral decay that can bleed into it [as the tale progresses]."

The TV commercial specialist is working with Trinity College Dublin (TCD) history lecturers to help piece together the "very cleansed" backstory of the Jamesons, which has been "taken over" by the drinks brand.

The story of the now almost forgotten Stein dynasty, which Jameson married into, would be retold in Mr Christopher’s series.

"Their names have kind of been erased from history," he said. "The Steins were a massive whiskey-distilling Scottish family, and [Jameson] basically just took over that distillery [in the Liberties, Dublin] and then 20 years later, named it Jameson and Sons...And you’ve got a lot of interesting history in Ireland around then – the 1780s, 1790s – with the Liberty Boys and the Urban Boys, gangs that were around Dublin at the time."

 The filmmaker, from Co. Wicklow, regards his short "The Axe Forgets", which is up for five nominations across this weekend at the Louth International Film Festival and Underground Cinema International Film Festival in Dun Laoghaire, as a proof of concept for the prospective series, which has already had interest from potential investors.

He said the TV show would build up to the ghastly episode the short film centers on, involving the whiskey founder’s grandson, James Sligo Jameson (1856 - 1888). The Scottish-born naturalist and explorer has several bird species named after him and once wrote in his diary: "Ever since my childhood, I have dreamt of doing something good in this world."

But he is best remembered for the "Jameson Affair", a scandal which occurred while he was part of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition in the Congo Basin, led by the famous explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley.

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James Sligo Jameson (1856 - 1888).

Jameson paid a local tribal chief six handkerchiefs to instigate the ritualistic murder and cannibalization of a slave girl of about 10.

He wrote in his diary he thought it was "all a joke" before the girl appeared, when he "witnessed the most horribly sickening sight I am ever likely to see in my life". But accounts from contemporaries and evidence elsewhere in his diaries suggest that he knew what was about to play out, expressed much curiosity about cannibalism, calmly sketched as it unfolded and even took pride in being one of the few Europeans to witness cannibalism first-hand.

He died just a few months later in the modern DR Congo with a severe fever. His wife later had Jameson’s sketches of the cannibalism incident redacted from his diaries, and they have never been publicly seen, though copies had been drawn by a contemporary.

Mr Christopher uses those sketches – and the hallucinatory state of Jameson in his final hours – to tell the story without actually depicting the horror. His Jameson is shown wrestling with guilt over the legacy-spoiling incident. "It is this idea of, what does a man in the 18th and 19th century do with guilt?

"Do they understand that emotion? His psyche throughout the film gives him many chances to face what he’s done, but he continues to try to hide from it.

"Did he 'do good in this world' [as per his diary]?

"He says in his own diaries that he’s basically become a de facto slave trader himself, because he’s just not able to do the thing he wants to do, which is study. ‘Then you’re also as good as the company that you keep – and he’s with the notorious slave trader Tippu Tip, who himself did some horrible, horrible things, way worse than Jameson."

Jameson is widely believed to be one of the real-life figures who inspired the Kurtz character from Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella "Heart of Darkness", later used as the basis for Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s "Apocalypse Now".

* This article was originally published on Evoke.ie.