Meux’s Horse Shoe brewery, Tottenham Court Road

Toward the end of September, we posted about Matson’s molasses spill in Hawaii and then the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. We would be remiss if we did not also post about the London Beer Flood which occurred on this day, 199 years ago. It was not strictly a nautical event but as beer is always of interest to sailors, we consider it to be close enough.  (For the sake of propriety we will not post about the Pig Manure Flood in the German village of Elsa in 2006.)

It is not easy to separate fact from fiction in the accounts of the London Beer Flood of 1814.  The bare-bones facts seem to be that a  vat of porter containing 3,555 barrels of beer, burst suddenly at around 5:30 PM on Monday October 17, 1814, in Henry Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery in the parish of St. Giles, London, England. Eight people, all women and children in tenements adjacent to the brewery, are believed to have died in the flood of more than 570 tonnes of beer.

Martyn Cornell, author of Beer: The Story of the Pint: The History of Britain’s Most Popular Drink describes the scene on his blog:

The vast flood of escaping porter, weighing hundreds of tons, had crashed down New Street behind the brewery and smashed into the buildings there and fronting Great Russell Street to the north. By good fortune the tenements in and around New Street, all in multiple occupation, were comparatively empty, because of the time of day. Had the accident happened an hour or more later, the men would have been home from work and the death toll greater. Instead all those killed were women and children. As the huge wave of beer, at least 15 feet high, roared down the street it flooded cellars, knocked in the backs of houses and washed people from first-floor rooms. One little girl, Hannah Banfield, aged four, was taking tea with her mother Mary, a coalheaver’s wife, in an upstairs room of one of the New Street houses when the vat collapsed. When the torrent of porter rushed in, Hannah was swept from the room through a partition and killed, while her mother was washed out of the window and badly injured and another child in the room “nearly suffocated”.

Houses in Great Russell Street, including the Tavistock Arms pub at number 22, that backed on to New Street had their cellars and ground floors filled with beer and their backs badly damaged. Those living in the cellars had to climb up on top of their highest pieces of furniture to save themselves from drowning in porter. At the Tavistock Arms, where beer had washed right through the taproom and into the street outside, pouring into the “areas” (basement entrances) of the houses opposite, part of the back wall collapsed on top of one of the pub servants, Eleanor Cooper, aged 14, who was at the pump in the yard, scouring pots. She was dug out of the ruins nearly three hours later, still standing upright, but dead.

Cornell also notes that many of the accounts of the aftermath of the flood are probably fictional.

“Eyewitnesses told of besotted mobs flinging themselves into gutters full of beer, hampering rescue efforts and many were killed suffocated in the crush of hundreds trying to get a free beer… The death toll eventually reached 20, including some deaths from alcohol coma…”

Apparently none of theses accounts was reported in the papers at the time and are most likely simply urban myths that may have grown in the retelling of the tale.