London Beer Flood 1814: The Vat That Burst

A wooden vat as tall as a house bursts in central London. A wave of beer rushes through a slum. Eight people die. An inquest jury calls it misfortune. This is the London Beer Flood. Here's how it happened.

Start with a drink. In the early seventeen-hundreds, London brewers perfect a dark, strong beer called porter. Its name is believed to come from the street porters who love it. It becomes the first beer to be widely exported. And it has a quirk. Porter is matured at the brewery, in vast wooden vats, for months. So brewers build big vats. By eighteen fourteen, one of the biggest breweries stands where Tottenham Court Road meets Oxford Street. It is the Horse Shoe Brewery. Henry Meux bought it in late eighteen oh nine, and it brews porter and nothing else. By eighteen eleven it brews more than a hundred thousand barrels a year, which makes it the sixth biggest porter brewery in London. And it keeps its beer in some very large containers.

Meet the container. It is a wooden vat, bound by twenty-two iron hoops, and it stands twenty-two feet tall. That is about the height of a two-storey house. On the afternoon of Monday the seventeenth of October, it holds three thousand, five hundred and fifty-five barrels of porter, ten months old, filled to within four inches of the top. Wooden vats are held together by hoops, and hoops do slip. The brewery will later say that hoops on its vats failed three or four times a year, with no harm done. Remember that sentence. The vat stands near the back wall of the brewery. The wall is twenty-five feet high, and two and a half bricks thick. On the other side of it is a street called New Street.

New Street is in the parish of St Giles, and St Giles has a reputation. At its heart is a slum, the rookery, a maze of crowded lodging houses that have been falling apart for generations. It has a large Irish Catholic population, and two nicknames: Little Ireland, and the Holy Land. People say a St Giles cellar to mean the very bottom of poverty. Hogarth drew these streets. Dickens will write about them. New Street is a dead end, and the brewery is right beside it. So here are two Londons, a few feet apart. On one side, porter stored by the thousand barrels. On the other, people living in cellars below the street. And on this Monday afternoon, in one of those cellars, mourners are gathering for a wake.

The wake is for a two-year-old boy, in a cellar on New Street. His mother, Ann Saville, is there with the other mourners, most of them Irish immigrants. In another house, four-year-old Hannah Banfield is having tea with her mother, Mary. And in the yard of the Tavistock Arms, on Great Russell Street, a fourteen-year-old girl is washing pots. It is about half past four. Meanwhile, inside the brewery, a clerk has noticed something.

His name is George Crick, and he is the brewery's storehouse clerk. Around half past four, he sees that an iron hoop has slipped off the great vat. It is the smallest of the twenty-two. He tells his supervisor. The supervisor says that no harm whatever will come of it, and asks him to write a note to Mr Young, one of the partners, so that the hoop can be fixed later. That is not an unreasonable answer. Hoops have slipped before. So Crick writes the note. About an hour later, he is standing on a platform thirty feet from the vat, holding it. It is about half past five.

Without any warning, the vat bursts. One account says it gave way as completely as if a quart pot had been turned up on the table. The force knocks the stopcock out of the vat beside it, and that one empties too. Hogsheads are smashed. The brewery's own wall, twenty-five feet of brick, collapses, and bricks land on roofs in Great Russell Street. How much beer is loose? Estimates differ. The vat itself held about one hundred and twenty-eight thousand gallons. One tally of the final loss is about two hundred and seventy-six thousand. And estimates run as high as three hundred and twenty-three thousand gallons. All of it heads one way, through the gap in the wall, into New Street.

A wave of porter, at least fifteen feet high, rushes into New Street. It destroys two houses and badly damages two more. In one, Hannah Banfield is swept through a partition. Her mother, Mary, is thrown into the street, and survives, injured. Hannah does not. In the cellar, the wake is overwhelmed. In all, eight people die, every one of them a woman or a child. In the brewery, everyone survives. Three workmen are dug out of the rubble. These are their names: Ann Saville, Mary Mulvey and her son Thomas, Elizabeth Smith, Catherine Butler, Hannah Banfield, Eleanor Cooper and Sarah Bates. Then comes the question nobody can avoid: whose fault was this?

On Wednesday the nineteenth of October, a coroner's inquest meets in the workhouse of St Giles parish. The jury views the brewery and the bodies first. Crick tells them that hoops had failed three or four times a year without harm. Remember that sentence? The verdict is that the eight died casually, accidentally and by misfortune. In law, that is an accident, so the brewery does not have to pay compensation. A relief fund for the families raises more than eight hundred pounds within a month. And Meux and Company? They claim a loss of twenty-three thousand pounds, and petition Parliament. Parliament lets them off duty on the lost beer, worth about seven thousand, two hundred and fifty pounds. That saves the firm from bankruptcy. But the story does not end there.

By now you may have heard a wilder version: drunken crowds in the street, a boom heard five miles away, a ninth death, bodies shown for money. The historian Martyn Cornell has gone through the newspapers of the time, and finds no support for the boom, the drunken crowds, or the ninth death. The true part is smaller. The dead were laid out in a pub, and visitors did come, and they gave money to the families. It was not a night of revelry. It was a night of grief, in a slum, a few feet from a wall. So what happened to the brewery?

It goes back to work. It closes in nineteen twenty-one, when production moves to Nine Elms, and in nineteen twenty-two it is demolished. A few years later, the Dominion Theatre is built on the site. Wooden vats are gradually phased out of the industry, replaced by lined concrete. So the next time somebody tells you a tank cannot simply burst, tell them about a Monday in October, eighteen fourteen. And then tell them about Boston. More than a century later, another giant tank gives way, and this time it holds about two point three million gallons of molasses. That is the next story.