The Beer Flood is no fairy tale or a dream.
It is a reality of 17 October 1814 wherein one of the 6.7 m wooden vats of fermenting porter burst at Meux & Co’s Horse Shoe Brewery, London and the escaping liquid dislodged the valve of another vessel and destroyed several large barrels: between 580,000–1,470,000 litres of beer were thus released.
At around 4:30 in the afternoon of 17 October 1814, George Crick, Meux’s storehouse clerk, saw that one of the 320 kg iron bands around a vat had slipped. The 6.7 m tall vessel was filled to within 10 cm of the top with 3,555 imperial barrels of ten-month-old porter. As the bands slipped off the vats two or three times a year, Crick was unconcerned.
He told his supervisor about the problem, but was told “that no harm whatever would ensue”. Crick was told to write a note to Mr Young, one of the partners of the brewery, to have it fixed later.
An hour after the hoop fell off, Crick was standing on a platform around 9 m from the vat, holding the note to Mr Young, when the vessel, with no indication, burst. The force of the liquid’s release knocked the stopcock from a neighbouring vat, which also began discharging its contents; several hogsheads of porter were destroyed, and their contents added to the flood.
Between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons were released.
The force of the liquid destroyed the rear wall of the brewery; it was 25 feet (7.6 m) high and two and a half bricks thick. Some of the bricks from the back wall were knocked upwards, and fell onto the roofs of the houses in the nearby Great Russell Street.
A wave of porter some 4.6 m high swept into New Street, where it destroyed two houses and badly damaged two others. In one of the houses a four-year-old girl, Hannah Bamfield, was having tea with her mother and another child. The wave of beer swept the mother and the second child into the street; Hannah was killed.
In the second destroyed house, a wake was being held by an Irish family for a two-year-old boy; Anne Saville, the boy’s mother, and four other mourners (Mary Mulvey and her three-year-old son, Elizabeth Smith and Catherine Butler) were killed.
Eleanor Cooper, a 14-year-old servant of the publican of the Tavistock Arms in Great Russell Street, died when she was buried under the brewery’s collapsed wall while washing pots in the pub’s yard.
Another child, Sarah Bates, was found dead in another house in New Street.
The land around the building was low-lying and flat. With insufficient drainage, the beer flowed into cellars, many of which were inhabited, and people were forced to climb on furniture to avoid drowning.
All those in the brewery survived, although three workmen had to be rescued from the rubble; the superintendent and one of the workers were taken to Middlesex Hospital, along with three others
Stories later arose of hundreds of people collecting the beer, mass drunkenness and a death from alcohol poisoning a few days later. The brewing historian Martyn Cornell states that newspapers of the time made no reference to the revelry, or of the later death; instead, the newspapers reported that the crowds were well-behaved. Cornell points out that the popular press of the time did not like the immigrant Irish population that lived in St Giles, so if there had been any misbehaviour, it would have been reported.
The area surrounding the rear of the brewery showed a “scene of desolation that presents a most awful and terrific appearance, equal to that which fire or earthquake may be supposed to occasion”.
Watchmen at the brewery charged people to view the remains of the destroyed beer vats, and several hundred spectators came to view the scene.
The mourners killed in the cellar were given their own wake at The Ship public house in Bainbridge Street. The other bodies were laid out in a nearby yard by their families; the public came to see them and donated money for their funerals.
Collections were taken up more widely for the families
As the coroner’s inquest reached a verdict of an act of God, Meux & Co did not have to pay compensation.
Nevertheless, the disaster—the lost porter, the damage to the buildings and the replacement of the vat—cost the company £23,000. After a private petition to Parliament they recovered about £7,250 from HM Excise, saving them from bankruptcy.
The Horse Shoe Brewery went back into business soon afterwards, but closed in 1921 when Meux moved their production to the Nine Elms brewery in Wandsworth, which they had purchased in 1914.
At the time of its closure the site covered 9,600 sq m.
The brewery was demolished the following year and the Dominion Theatre was later built on the site.
Meux & Co went into liquidation in 1961.
As a result of the accident, large wooden tanks were phased out across the brewing industry and replaced with lined concrete vessels.
[…] A foaming torrent—equivalent to eight feet deep—crashed through the streets of St. Giles, a impoverished slum packed with tenements. The wave demolished walls, flooded basements, and swept away entire families; eight people drowned, including a mother and her infant son trapped in their downstairs room during a funeral wake. Rescue efforts were chaotic, with locals mistaking the beer for a brewery mishap until the full horror emerged. It was an absurd yet tragic industrial failure in a city oblivious to such a bizarre deluge. […]