The Disaster Sounds Funny. The Deaths Weren’t.

Eight people died. Yes, they died because of beer—a flood of it. Granted, that may sound like the stuff certain people’s dreams are made of, and some might even imagine swimming in a pool of beer. But consider what hundreds of tonnes of liquid can do when it suddenly moves through narrow streets and into homes below street level. You cannot outswim a collapsing wall and a fast-moving flood you never saw coming.

One little girl was taking tea with her mother when the disaster struck. Her mother survived, badly injured; four-year-old Hannah Banfield did not. ² Although I am not a beer drinker, my first thought when I encountered the London Beer Flood was, “Oh heck, the smell!” Then I discovered that eight people had died.

That is the difficulty with a disaster whose name sounds like an invitation: the absurdity arrives first, while the victims have to fight their way into the story afterwards. On 17 October 1814, a huge wooden vat failed at Meux & Co.’s Horse Shoe Brewery near London’s Tottenham Court Road. Porter burst through the brewery wall and into the surrounding neighbourhood of St Giles. What we now call the London Beer Flood was an industrial disaster in a desperately poor part of the city. ¹

The warning that seemed ordinary

Roughly an hour before the vat burst, storehouse clerk George Crick noticed that one of its heavy iron hoops had fallen off. According to his subsequent testimony, he was not alarmed because he had seen hoops fall before without serious consequences. He nevertheless wrote a note to Florance Young, one of the brewery’s partners and its vat-builder. At about half past five, while that note was still in his hand, the vat gave way. ²

There is something spine-chilling about that sequence. A warning appeared and was recognised, but past experience had taught the people handling it that this sort of thing did not usually end in catastrophe. I can imagine Crick rolling his eyes and muttering, “Not again—and look at the time,” but that is my imagination, not the evidence. We should be careful about pretending that we know what every person involved ought to have understood in 1814.

The testimony does, however, expose a familiar weakness in human judgement: when a problem repeatedly fails to hurt us, we can begin treating that history as proof that it cannot. Nothing terrible happened the last time, or the time before that—until this time.

The vessel stood approximately 22 feet high and contained 3,555 barrels of porter, according to Crick’s testimony—roughly 580,000 litres in that vat alone. When it burst, the force damaged other beer containers and brought down a substantial brewery wall. Crick estimated that between 8,000 and 9,000 barrels were lost altogether, although later accounts disagree about the total volume that reached the streets. ²

A quick background on porter: it was the dark beer of Georgian London and was matured before sale, which helps explain those enormous storage vats. Its name is traditionally associated with the porters who carried goods through London’s streets and markets. The vessels were not merely practical; their scale could bring a brewery considerable prestige. ¹ Sadly, an impressive sight inside the brewery had the potential to become a lethal force outside its walls.

The people beyond the wall

The neighbourhood around the brewery included crowded cellar homes below street level. When the porter escaped, those residents were terribly exposed. ¹ At the Tavistock Arms, fourteen-year-old Eleanor Cooper had been washing pots in the yard when the brewery wall collapsed. She was found nearly three hours later, still standing by the water butt, but she was dead. ²

Hannah Banfield was swept from the room where she had been having tea with her mother. In a New Street cellar, mourners had gathered for the wake of Ann Saville’s two-year-old son, John, who had died the previous day. The flood killed Ann Saville and four of the mourners: Elizabeth Smith, Mary Mulvey, Mary’s three-year-old son Thomas Murry, and Catherine Butler. Three-year-old Sarah Bates was also killed. ^{2, 4}

Eight people died because a brewery vat failed. Rescuers searched the wreckage, and contemporary accounts describe workers requesting silence so that anyone trapped beneath it could be heard. ² That detail changes the scene entirely: the sound we should imagine is not laughter or tankards clinking, but a neighbourhood trying to listen.

When the joke takes over

Later retellings supplied a far more entertaining aftermath: crowds helping themselves to free beer, drunken disorder, a hospital riot and even additional deaths attributed to drinking. Brewing historian Martyn Cornell found no evidence in contemporary London newspaper reports for those larger legends. One provincial newspaper did claim that some residents collected the escaping beer, but that is a long way from the sprawling tale of drunken chaos that later took over the story. ³

Those embellishments are infuriating because they turn people caught in a catastrophe into the cast of a drinking joke. Even if somebody had helped themselves to the beer, that would not make the deaths less tragic. We should not need victims or their neighbours to have behaved perfectly before taking their suffering seriously.

A bizarre disaster offers a storyteller an easy opening, but it also creates an obligation to move beyond it. The beer may catch our attention; the people deserve to hold it.

Who carried the loss?

I was extremely agitated when I read the inquest verdict. In the contemporary transcription, it concluded that the victims “Died by Casualty, accidentally, and by misfortune.” ² Wait—what? But there was more: the brewery paid no compensation to the victims’ families, while Parliament later granted relief on the excise duty already paid on the lost beer. A public collection helped pay the funeral costs of the dead. ⁴

My immediate reaction was considerably less polite: the individual lives seemed to count for less than helping the company recover. That is my reaction, not evidence of a conspiracy, and there is no need to invent one. The documented contrast is troubling enough: the beer could be accounted for as a commercial loss, while the families had to bury people.

The London Beer Flood catches our attention because it sounds impossible. It holds our attention when we understand that the people in its path had very little protection from it. We can begin with the beer, but we ought to finish with their names:

• Eleanor Cooper
• Mary Mulvey
• Thomas Murry
• Hannah Banfield
• Sarah Bates
• Ann Saville
• Elizabeth Smith
• Catherine Butler

Little did Londoners know that just over a century later, more people would die because another storage vessel failed. In 1919, a tank ruptured in Boston and 2.3 million gallons of molasses swept through the North End, killing 21 people. ⁵ Different liquid, same terrible lesson: the name of a disaster may sound absurd; the deaths never are.