On this day in 1814, the perils of drink would show themselves in an unexpected but deadly way with the London Beer Flood, writes Eliot Wilson
At the beginning of the 19th century, beer was Britain’s national drink. Around 35 gallons of it were consumed per capita each year – 300 pints for every man, woman and child – and it had seen off the challenge of the previous century’s gin craze, especially after the Gin Act 1751 increased duties on the spirit and restricted its sale.
There were almost 30,000 breweries in Britain at that time, and London was dominated by two: Whitbread & Co Ltd on Chiswell Street in Islington, and Henry Meux & Co’s Horse Shoe Brewery at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. The capital’s preferred beer was porter, a rich, dark, tart brew around six per cent ABV which added flavour to a bland diet and provided easily digested calories for men engaged in hard physical labour. And the two breweries were prodigious, Whitbread producing more than 200,000 barrels of porter a year and the Horse Shoe Brewery 105,000.
Even 200 years ago it was known that alcohol had its dangers, but on this day, 17 October, in 1814, the perils of drink would show themselves in an unexpected but deadly way.
The London Beer Flood
At the Horse Shoe Brewery, porter was fermented in enormous wooden vats more than 20 feet tall, bound by thick iron hoops. At 4.30pm that afternoon, George Crick, the Horse Shoe’s storehouse clerk, noticed that one of the hoops around the bottom of a vat had slipped and fallen off.
Crick was unconcerned; it was one of 22 securing the vat, and it became dislodged two or three times a year without incident, so he wrote a note to pass to one of the partners, Florence Young, who could have someone replace the hoop. He would give the note to Young later on.
That, at least, was his intention. An hour later, at 5.30pm, Crick was standing on a platform 30 feet from the vat in question, the note for Young still in his hand, when he heard a thunderous explosion. Without warning, the vat burst, disgorging 128,000 gallons of porter. The force of the liquid knocked the stopcock out of an adjacent vat which released another 40,000 gallons, and smashed several hogsheads in the storehouse.
The torrent of beer had a devastating force, smashing through the 25-feet high rear wall of the brewery. It was nearly two feet thick in parts but the porter, now a wave some 15 feet in height, swept the bricks aside and surged into New Street at the back of the building and on into Great Russell Street. The area was an impoverished and overcrowded slum, one of the capital’s so-called “rookeries” and a place of desperation and want that had inspired William Hogarth’s horrifyingly compelling Gin Lane engraving. The population mainly comprised Irish immigrants who now found that beer could be just as deadly as cheap gin had been 50 years before.
The damage
The inundation destroyed two houses in New Street and badly damaged two more; in the first, a four-year-old girl, Hannah Bamfield, having tea with her mother and another child, was killed. In the second house, an Irish family was holding a wake for two-year-old John Saville, who had died the day before; his mother, Anne Saville, and four other mourners died in the flood.
Eleanor Cooper, 14, had been washing pots in the yard of the Tavistock Arms when the back wall of the brewery had fallen on her. She was dug out of the ruins three hours later, still standing upright but dead. Three-year-old Sarah Bates was found dead in another house on New Street.
The final death toll of the London Beer Flood was eight, the coroner’s inquest concluding they had lost their lives “casually, accidentally and by misfortune”. Meux & Co was not held liable for the catastrophe because it had been ruled an act of God, but the lost beer and structural damage came to £23,000 (more than £66m today by share of GDP).
The company staved off bankruptcy by appealing to Parliament; it passed the Allowance of Duty to Meux and Company Act 1815 allowing the brewers “to brew Duty-free a Quantity of Strong Beer, the Duty on which will be equivalent to the Duty on the Beer lost, and to the Duties on the Malt and Hops expended in the Production of the Beer so lost”. It was effectively a refund of £7,250.
At the other end of the scale, a wake was held for the dead at the Ship, a pub on nearby Bainbridge Street, and all attending were asked to make a donation of whatever they could afford. It raised £33 5s 7d.
The Horse Shoe Brewery continued in operation until 1921, when Meux moved to Nine Elms. It was demolished the following year and the Dominion Theatre now stands on its site. The St Giles rookery began to be pulled down in 1843 and eventually made way for New Oxford Street.
Eliot Wilson is a writer, commentator and contributing editor at Defence On The Brink. Read his last On this day