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Rory Tingle
Friday, 17 October 2014
An unlimited, free supply of beer – it sounds wonderful doesn’t it? But when it is over one
million litres in volume and in a tidal wave at least 15 feet high, as it was in the London
Beer Flood on 17 October 1814, the prospect seems less appealing.
Two hundred years to this day, a broken vat at the Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham
Court Road flooded the local area with porter, a dark beer native to the capital, killing
eight people and demolishing a pair of homes. George Crick, the clerk on duty, told a
newspaper what happened: “I was on a platform about 30 feet from the vat when it
burst. I heard the crash as it went off, and ran immediately to the storehouse, where the
vat was situated. It caused dreadful devastation on the premises it knocked four butts
over, and staved several, as the pressure was so excessive. Between 8 and 9,000 barrels
of porter [were] lost.”
The beer inundated the nearby slum of St Giles Rookery – an area of poverty and vice
which inspired Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’ – flooding the cellars where whole families lived.
Some of the inhabitants survived by clambering onto pieces of furniture. Others were not
so lucky. Hannah Banfield, a little girl, was taking tea with her mother, Mary, at their
house in New Street when the deluge hit. Both were swept away in the current, and
perished. 10 best British beers
After the accident, watchmen charged people a penny or twopence to see the ruins of
the beer vats, and visitors came in their hundreds to witness the macabre spectacle. But
a report in The Times praised local people’s response to the disaster, noting how the
crowd kept quiet so the cries of trapped victims could be heard.
In fact, it seems like later rumours that people collected the beer in pots and pans were
untrue, as Martyn Cornell, author of Amber, Gold and Black: The History of Britain’s
Great Beers, explains: “None of the London newspapers report anyone trying to drink the
beer after the flood, indeed, they say the crowds that gathered were pretty well
behaved. Only much later did stories start being told about riots, people getting drunk
and so on: these seem to have been be prompted by what people thought ought to have
happened, rather than what did happen.”
An inquest heard that there had been an indication that the vat was unstable earlier in
the afternoon of the 17th, when one of the metal hoops holding it together snapped. A
jury cleared the brewers of any wrongdoing, considering the incident as an unavoidable
act of God. Henry Meux & Co., the owners, received a refund for the excise duty they
had paid to produce the beer they had lost.
However, one person, addressing himself only as a “friend of humanity” in a letter to the
Morning Post newspaper, thought the accident should have been foreseen. “I have always
held it as my firm opinion, that the many breweries and distilleries in this metropolis…
are most dangerous establishments, and should not be permitted to stand in the heart of
the town,” the correspondent wrote. “I am only surprised, when I consider the immense
http://www.independent.co.uk/lifestyle/foodanddrink/features/whatreallyhappenedinthelondonbeerflood200yearsago9796096.html?printService=… 1/2
9/1/2015 What really happened in the London Beer Flood 200 years ago?
body contained in these ponderous vats, that similar accidents do not more frequently
occur."
The Horse Shoe Brewery soon went back into production, only closing in 1921, when it
was replaced by the Dominion Theatre. The terrible scene that unfolded there two
hundred years ago has been largely forgotten, although a local pub The Holborn
Whippet – brews a special anniversary ale each year.
http://www.independent.co.uk/lifestyle/foodanddrink/features/whatreallyhappenedinthelondonbeerflood200yearsago9796096.html?printService=… 2/2