The London Beer Flood: The Iron Hoop That Killed 8 People in 1814

At about 4:30 PM on the afternoon of 17 October 1814, George Crick noticed something wrong with one of the vats.

Crick was the storehouse clerk at Meux & Co's Horse Shoe Brewery, at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street in London. The vats he looked after were enormous—wooden vessels 22 feet tall, bound with heavy iron hoops, holding porter left to mature for months. This one was filled to within 4 inches of the top with about 3,555 barrels of ten-month-old beer.

One of the iron bands around it, each weighing around 700 pounds, had slipped.

That happened 2 or 3 times a year, so Crick wasn't alarmed. He told his supervisor, who said "no harm whatever would ensue." Crick was told to write a note to one of the partners, Mr Young, so it could be fixed later.

About an hour later, Crick was standing on a platform 30 feet away, holding that note, when the vat burst.

The wave

The force of the release knocked the stopcock out of the vat next to it, which started emptying too. Hogsheads of porter were smashed and added to the flood. Estimates of the total range from about 128,000 to 323,000 imperial gallons—roughly 580,000 to 1.47 million liters of beer.

It went straight through the back wall of the brewery.

Behind the brewery was New Street, a small dead-end lane in the St Giles rookery—one of the poorest, most crowded slums in London, home to many Irish immigrant families. A wave of porter estimated at 15 feet high swept into it. 2 houses were destroyed and 2 more badly damaged. The ground was low and flat, without proper drainage, and the beer poured into cellars where whole families lived.

The 8 who died

In one of the destroyed houses, 4-year-old Hannah Bamfield was having tea with her mother and another child. The wave swept her mother and the other child into the street. Both survived after time in hospital. Hannah was killed.

In the other house, an Irish family was holding a wake in the cellar for a 2-year-old boy. The beer flooded the room. The boy's mother, Anne Saville, died, along with 4 other mourners: Mary Mulvey, her 3-year-old son, Elizabeth Smith and Catherine Butler.

Around the corner, 14-year-old Eleanor Cooper, a servant at the Tavistock Arms on Great Russell Street, was washing pots in the pub yard when the brewery wall fell on her.

Another child, Sarah Bates, was found dead in a house in New Street.

Everyone inside the brewery survived. 3 workmen had to be dug out of the rubble.

The story that grew afterward

You may have heard a cheerful version of this: crowds rushing into the streets with pots and pans to scoop up free beer, mass drunkenness, a ninth victim who drank himself to death in the days after.

Brewing historian Martyn Cornell went back to the newspapers of the time and found none of it. Contemporary reports describe the crowds as orderly. Cornell points out that the London press was openly hostile to St Giles's Irish community. If there had been a drunken free-for-all in the rookery, the papers would have been delighted to say so.

What the newspapers did report was grimmer. Watchmen at the brewery charged people a fee to look at the wreckage of the vats. The mourners who died in the cellar were given their own wake at a pub on Bainbridge Street. Families laid out the other bodies in a nearby yard, and strangers who came to look left money for the funerals.

"By misfortune"

The coroner for Middlesex, George Hodgson, held the inquest on 19 October in the St Giles workhouse. The jurors were taken to see the brewery and the bodies. George Crick testified first—his own brother had been one of the injured workmen. He told them the hoops came off 3 or 4 times a year and had never caused trouble before.

The jury found that the 8 had died "casually, accidentally and by misfortune."

That verdict meant Meux & Co owed the families nothing. The disaster still cost the company about £23,000 in lost beer, damage and a new vat. After a private petition to Parliament, it recovered around £7,250 in excise duty on the lost porter, which saved it from bankruptcy.

The brewing industry gradually moved away from giant wooden vats after 1814, replacing them with lined vessels. The Horse Shoe Brewery kept operating until 1921. The Dominion Theatre stands on the site now.

What's known

There's no mystery about what happened here. A familiar warning sign—a slipped hoop—was treated as routine. A vessel holding over 100,000 gallons gave way next to homes where the city's poorest people lived. 8 people died, most of them women and children, and the official verdict called it bad luck.

Documented: The slipped hoop and Crick's warning; the burst and chain reaction; the wave into New Street; the 8 victims named at the inquest; the "misfortune" verdict; the excise rebate.

Legend: Crowds drinking in the street; a ninth death from alcohol poisoning.

The London Beer Flood gets told as a joke. The people of New Street wouldn't have found it funny.

Watch the Short below, then tell us: should the verdict have been "misfortune"?