September 20, 2025 • 25 mins
In 1814, a poor neighborhood in London fell victim to a strange, tragic and boozy disaster -- this calamity would eventually leave eight people dead. So what exactly happened? How could an entire neighborhood flood with a deadly deluge of beer? Join Ben, Noel and Max for a bizarre bit of boozy history in this week's Classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow Ridiculous Historians, we return to you with this week's
(00:03):
classic episode. This is a parable cautionary tale for all
our fellow ridiculous historians who like to tipple a beer
every now and then. There is such thing as too much.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
There is, indeed on a personal level and at scale,
which we really start to see in eighteen fourteen when
a poor neighborhood in London fell victim to a bizarre
and boozy disaster, dare we say, a calamity that actually
resulted in some fatalities. What the heck was this thing
that happened? And how did it involve way too much beer?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Right, let's roll it. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
You know.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I guess we should begin today's episode by pointing out
that it is, not, to our knowledge, sponsored by Miller LT.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Although we had a lot of fun with those guys.
You had the best tagline of all time. Still, I'm
really surprised they haven't like purchased this from you.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
You know, it was a gift. We're just very giving
people on this show.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
And that is the gift that keeps on giving in
social media form. And I don't know if they'll ever
give us any more ads again? But what was it again?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Then, Miller lt The beer is so good that you
can drink it with your mouth. Yeah, And I think
that we arrived at that on our earlier episode about
ritual alcohol edemas or aka.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
You're not gonna say it, are you? You're not going
to say it. I tried to make you say last time.
That was a sore spot. But chugging is the word.
But chugging today, we're talking about a different kind of chugging. Chugging,
chugging it to the streets. Yes, yes, taking it to
the streets. That's well put. I'm ben oh, I'm null.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
And we are, of course joined with our super producer
Casey Pegram give it up for and fellow ridiculous historians.
Our journey today takes us to the early eighteen hundreds
in foggy Old London Town October, specifically when a bizarre
(02:26):
sequence of events through the community of Saint Giles, London
into a state of pandemonium and terror. What happened and
how did this come to pass?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Okay, so let's set the scene. He already did. Foggy
London Town eighteen fourteen. There's a brewery. Right, there's a
brewery called the Horseshoe Brewery which was located in the
corner of Great Russell Street and Tottenham Court Roads. The
Horseshoe Brewery was the building. It was like this historic
brewery and the mew And Company brewers, I guess it'd
(03:00):
taken it over or they were the ones occupying it
at this time, and they had. They were all about
being up to the latest technological brewing standards, which at
the time were giant wooden vats secured with these iron
rings like a giant barrel basically, right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, these giant barrels girdled with heavy iron hoops, and
this was sort of a fad or a trend for
breweries at the time. The vats were meant to be
displayed to visitors, right, They were meant to be a
show stopping spectacle and to impress potential customers. So there
(03:44):
was this kind of one upsmanship contest where in different
breweries would try to build progressively larger vats and barrels.
And you just said how big these were. To put
it in another perspective, their three stores tall, and as
you said, they're built of wood with just some hoops
(04:05):
around them, very heavy iron hoops for structural integrity.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah, and let's not forget the type of beer that
was being brewed here was something akin to a stout,
like a dark porter ale, which was very popular at
the time, and this that would hold three thousand, five
hundred barrels of this brown stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
And everything is fine for years, yeah, for like four years.
Everything is fine until it isn't. On October seventeenth, eighteen fourteen,
in this area Saint Giles, which we should mention is
a poor area of London, several things are happening. There
is a woman named Anne Seville who is mourning the
(04:47):
tragic death of her two year old son John, who
had just died the day earlier, on October sixteenth, and
she is mourning in her cellar apartment. A lot of
people live in basements in this area. And then upstairs,
on the first floor of this tenement on New Street,
a lady named Mary Banfield is sitting down for tea
(05:09):
with her daughter Hannah, who is four. And then across
the way or nearby, there is a fourteen year old
named Eleanor Cooper at the Tavistock Arms Public House who's scouring.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Pots teenage barmaid.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Teenage barmaid. Yeah, a scullery maid at the very least.
She is by this outdoor water pump that's right next
to a brick wall that's about twenty five feet high,
and the brewery that you mentioned, NOL that you described
for us earlier is directly on the other side of
that barrier. They're famous for this porter that you mentioned,
(05:47):
and they produced more than one hundred thousand barrels of
this each year. It was big business. And around four
thirty pm that day, a storehouse clerk named George Crick
looks at one of these huge wooden vats and he's
looking at it from above right, and as he's staring down,
(06:08):
he notices something's off. One of those hoops, which weighs
seven hundred pounds, has slipped off a cask. And the
porter of that's storing is ten months old. Crick's been
with the company for almost two decades and he knew
that this kind of thing, this slippage of the hoop,
could happen maybe once to three times a year, and
(06:32):
he didn't think too much of it. He was just like,
sometimes things happen, were.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
They not doing proper maintenance on this monstrosity.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
It's hard to say. Man, you know, they must have
had to do some sort of regular maintenance just because
it's wood.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, but I imagine that like safety and you know, health
inspections wasn't really much of a thing back in these days.
So that's probably like left their own devices a little bit.
But yeah, so that one who pops off, and you
can imagine like what we're talking like maybe like eight
of these hoops for the giant cask, right, Yeah, So
that's significantly weakening it structurally, and then the other hoops
(07:10):
start to kind of follow suit, or at least the
I don't know, it starts to weaken the entire thing.
It's like a domino effect on the rest. Right, Yeah,
that's a good way to put it. So George Creek
goes ahead and fills up the vat all the way
almost to the top, almost to the brim, I think
four inches away from the top, and this's like more
(07:31):
than twenty feet highway. He sees the thing pop off,
and then he's just like, ask screw it, and still
sees that it slipped.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
I say, at this point, it slipped, and he told
his boss about it and his boss said that quote
no harm whatever would inceed and.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Sounds like a real villainous type. I know, I can't
help a picture him as such.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
And he told Krick he was just like, George, you
should write a letter to another guy who works at
the brewery and they can fix it later, but we'll
be fine for now. Don't worry about it. And then
Craik sits down and he's filled up the vat he
writes this letter, and it's about five point thirty when
he finishes writing the letter, and then he hears a
(08:12):
massive explosion.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, yeah, a massive explosion that set forth all of
those thousands of barrels of this. It was hot, actually,
because it was mid ferm Ent right, just gushing, and
it was so forceful that it actually took out a
(08:35):
wall in the brewery that allowed it to continue to
flood into the streets of that area describing earlier, and
not to mention that as it went it took out
the other casks that were around as well. It may
have not held the same volume total, but added up
together made for a whole nother problem.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Right exactly, So that large barrier we mentioned earlier where
the fourteen year old Eleanor Cooper is working. That wall collapses.
It kills her instantly. The sheer force of this explosion
sends bricks flying through the air across Great Russell Street,
and a deluge of beer rushes through the neighborhood. And
(09:22):
it's sweeping away like this an actual flood. It's sweeping
away everything in its past.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Well, this is like three hundred and twenty plus thousand
gallons of beer.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Yeah, in one that first vat alone held the equivalent
of one million pints of beer.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Jesus.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
And again, as as we said just a moment ago,
that wasn't the only vat that went, and there was
no drainage. We should mention that on these city streets
there's not like a sewage system.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Have we talked about the Great Stink of London, Ben,
I think we have. Remember how nasty that city was
pre sewage system? Yeah, you know, it was just the
streets were literally really caked and human excrement. And so
this beer is washing all that along with it. People
are getting swept up in the flood. Can you imagine
the smell?
Speaker 1 (10:09):
It must have been disgusting.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
I mean to think about how it smells like downtown
Atlanta or somewhere like little five Points, like after like
a weekend, you know it, it smells like pe and stale beer.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Or just outside of our buildings, just outside of our building.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
It's true. This must have been that like to the
mp power, and.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
It happens so quickly it's difficult for us to fully
articulate how quickly this occurs. People who live in the
neighborhood are losing their minds. They're screaming zois and whatnot,
and they're hopping up on pieces of furniture. They're trying
to save themselves from drowning, which was a real possibility
(10:47):
because this flood was so strong and so forceful that
some of the houses that were in disrepair crumbled themselves,
so your house could fall on you.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
All right, here's where it gets gross. Okay, it's already
pretty gross at this point, but a lot of the
folks were trying to, you know, make this see the
silver lining in this situation. And you know, likely they
were alcoholics because they were just like, hey, free beer.
So they would get like whatever receptacle they'd get their
hands on, a bucket or whatever, and start scooping this
(11:23):
stuff up and drinking it, and some people just lapped
it up off the street. And again, lots of poop
mixed in with this beer at this price.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Lots of poop, detritus, road dirt, roadkill.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
And let's also not forget that this beer was mid fermentation, so.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
It wasn't even done.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Yeah, it was even like beer beer. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
So where are we at fatality wise at this point, Ben,
as this deluge makes its way through Saint Giles Rookery,
another area where I believe some of the city's poorest
were living. And this is another very sad detail here, Ben.
This happened during the day, so the men would have
been away at work, so the folks that were at
home that would have experienced the brunt of this beer
(12:08):
nami would have been children and women.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Right exactly. Let's explore some of the fatalities. So we
mentioned the unfortunate end of fourteen year old bar maid
Eleanor Cooper. She died pretty quickly, near instantly as far
as we can tell. But let's also revisit some of
the characters we introduced earlier in the story. And Seville,
(12:35):
who was mourning again the death of her two year
old son John, was holding a wake in their basement apartment.
When the beer flood hit, they had no time or
no way to get out. So Seville, along with the
other three mourners, were all killed by this beer. And
(12:59):
then the couple that we had mentioned, the mom and
daughter having tea on the first floor of their tenement,
Mary Benfield and her four year old daughter, Hannah, they
both passed away. So this, this gets us up to
let's see eleanor the four mourners, Mary and Hannah. This
(13:19):
gets us up to seven fatalities in a matter of minutes.
But that's not all. There was one more fatality, right.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Noal, Yeah, this is probably as a direct result of
these booze scoopers that were talking about earlier that were
just you know, chugging the stuff from the streets, hence
my opening phrase, chugging it to the streets. And apparently
this last death was alcohol poisoning. Not to make light,
but you know, it's sort of like you did it
to yourself, buddy, You escape the actual delus that all
(13:47):
of these innocens you know, were subjected to, and then
you went, you went and drank yourself to death like
a jerk, because isn't like half fermented booze. Dangerous, isn't
it like ethanol really strong or something like? Oh? I
thought so, I know, like moonshine, if you drink it
before it's finished or something like that, it can be
really really dangerous. But I don't know if that applies.
(14:07):
I'm just spit on here.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
But do we know whether or not that was intentional
alcohol poisoning? You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Where they just trying not to drown and they managed
to not drown. Interesting but they unclear but unclear unclear.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
I don't know. I just want to just not that
they need me to defend them, but possibly, I though
I don't want to sound too cynical about it, I'm
tempted to think it's the first idea you proposed, and
that they just drank themselves to death. There could have
been more deaths, more fatalities. It's pretty astonishing in fact,
(14:42):
that so few people died as a result of this
flood this uh which say earlier beer nami, Like, yeah,
the worst damage does occur there on New Street, And
now this neighborhood is soaked in beer. Everything stinks, people
(15:03):
are covered in hot malt liquor. Three brewery employees almost died,
but they were luckily pulled from this temporary raging river
and people rescuers arrived on the scene, and they were
trying with their bare hands to go through the rubble
and find anyone who was trapped inside, and they had to.
(15:23):
They were in a really weird situation because people are
losing their minds, wailing and screaming, and they're like, you
have to be quiet because we're trying to hear people
in the rubble.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a real scene, Ben, And surprise, surprise,
this story doesn't have a happy ending on multiple levels.
On the corporate level, right on the corporate greed and
corruption level, there's some real palm greasing going on here
and some shady backroom deals that caused the responsible parties
(15:57):
being the brewers, to kind of get a scott free.
And remember Ben, you mentioned houses were lost, foundations were wrecked,
homes were crumbled because of this. This was that much beer.
Can you believe it? It blows my mind that it
would have kept that momentum going long enough to actually
damage people's properties. I can't even picture the sheer volume
(16:19):
of stinking, brown hot booze.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And yeah, this does have a maybe Sobering is not
the right word for this episode, but it's funny. There
is a sobering aspect to this story, which is that
this community was largely composed of Irish immigrants and newspapers,
and the establishment at the time very much looked down
on immigrants from Ireland, and the company that owned the
(16:46):
brewery eventually did just find because you would think they
would take an enormous financial hit right from losing literally
all of their inventory, killing eight people, and destroying a neighborhood.
But they initially thought they were going to be in
tough times because they had already paid the excise taxes
on the booze. But somehow they got Parliament to give
(17:10):
them a pass and they got their money back.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah. Not only that, they got Parliament or whatever governing
body was overseeing this thing to rule the disaster. The
collapse of this cask as an act of God, an
unavoidable act of God, meaning no mortal entity could be
held responsible and meaning no mortal got a dime, right,
(17:37):
And this was only two days after the flood. Jury
convened to investigate the accident, they visited the side of
the tragedy. They viewed the corpses of the victims. They
heard testimony from Crick we mentioned earlier, and as you said, Noel,
they said this had been an act of God, and
that the victims had met their death casually, accidentally, and
(17:59):
by fortune. I would agree with the last part. I
was definitely a serious case of misfortune.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
And there was a lot of speculation about the court
being corrupt or bribed, but there was never an official
statement made, and the brewery soldiered on for a long time,
for more than a century. It wasn't until nineteen twenty
two that it was demolished and they built something called
(18:28):
the Dominion Theater on part of the site. In twenty twelve,
there was a pub in the area, the Hole Born Whippet,
that began marking the Great Beer Flood of eighteen fourteen
with a vat of porter brewed especially for the day,
which to me feels like it's in poor taste. I'm
just gonna go on the record and say.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
That I would agree with you on the record.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
So another strange aspect of this story is that this
is this is not the only strange beverage flood. I
think do we ever mention the Great Molasses Flood.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
I don't know if we've done a full episode on it,
but this is definitely a parallel. It's like the American equivalent,
yeah of this, because I don't know there's ever been
another booze flood kind of like this. Because they switched
after this. This did bring about some change in the
brewing process. They changed it to concrete casks as opposed
to these shoddy, you know, rickety wooden cast But what's
the Great Molasses floods? It great as well. We were
(19:29):
talking off air about how it's funny when we have
a date and then the great a thing, implying there
may have been lesser versions of that.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
The mediocre beer flood. Yeah. So the Great Molasses Flood,
also known as the Boston Molasses Disaster, occurred in January
of nineteen nineteen, when a huge storage tank of molasses burst,
causing molasses to rush through the streets at like thirty
five miles an hour. One hundred and fifty people were injured,
twenty one people died. And then there was the Honolu
(20:00):
molasses spill, which happened in twenty thirteen. So this stuff
isn't just ancient history. Luckily, no humans as far as
we know passed away in that molasses spill, but it
did tremendous damage to the maritime environment. And then there's
one other one. I just like the name. I don't
know if you've heard this name. No, I want to
see what you think about it. The Pepsi Fruit Juice Flood.
(20:22):
That sounds like a drink. That sounds like a really
cool band. Hey, you guys going to see the Pepsi
Fruit Juice Flood A Red Rocks. I caught him in Bonnaroo.
You know. I just I love their live work, so
they've taken a different direction on their new album.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
The Pepsi Fruit Juice Flood, which I feel like they
might put out as a beverage. One day was a
flood of twenty eight million liters of fruit and vegetable
juice into the streets of a town in Russia called Lebdian,
and it was caused by a collapse of a pepsiico warehouse.
No deaths resulted from the spill, but there were two
(21:02):
injuries and the streets were a wash with pineapple, apricot, tangerine, grape, mango, pomegranate, apple, cherry, orange, grapefruit,
and tomato.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Juice.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
So if you're going to make a commemorative drink for that,
those would be the ingredients. And I think that would
taste pretty nasty.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Right, it does seem so that doesn't seem like a
very good combination of flavors. It's like, I did you
ever drink V eight? I like vat splash, but no,
I did not like tomato juice. If that's what you're
asking me, what ms I drink clamato next?
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Like? What what's the difference between vight splash and V eight?
Speaker 2 (21:33):
VA splash has like fruit juices in it. It has
just a little bit. It hides the carrot juice in
the tomato juice. It's veiled. Kids like to drink it.
It's a tasty juice beverage. Well, you know what, maybe
I'll give it a shot. No, I have never tried
V eight nor V eight splash. Have I experience in
a life unlived?
Speaker 1 (21:51):
No?
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Man, it takes you know, you've got your path, you
got your story. You know doesn't have to include V eight.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Thanks man, And I really drink?
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Do you drink other beverages that you know that I don't.
I don't drink like uh milk, I don't drink milk.
You don't drink milk, no nut milk. I feel like
milk is an ingredient.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
We actually we had this conversation before with one of
our coworkers, a great guy, Paul Decktt, who also has
the nickname Mission Control, and he is definitely a fan
of drinking milk. Wouldn't you say so? Casey? Absolutely, have
you guys had that conversation about milk as an ingredient
versus a beverage.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
I mean, I consume it as a beverage too, so
I'm right there with him. I like chocolate milk.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, same, same I used to Did you guys ever
hear the story? This has nothing to do with the
great beer flood of eighteen fourteen, but did you guys
ever hear this story of I guess the old urban
legend that chocolate milk was originally created to hide blood
clots and impurities.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Delicious way to hide it?
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Okay, well, Casey on the case and this ends tail
for today. Thank you so much for tuning in ridiculous historians.
Thank you, super producer, Casey pegrum Noel my friend as always,
thank you for exploring this strange, disturbing tale.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Yeah, there's a lot going on here. It's sort of
a tale of wealth and poverty and you know, the
rich running roughshod over the poor. We sort of didn't
really see that aspect of it until the end, but
it's definitely there. And it's gross. It's gross philosophically and
also physically gross because it's hot beer rushing through the
poop laden streets of London town right washing away children
(23:37):
having tea parties.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
I know, no one got in trouble, no one went
to jail. It's a shame, but at least it did
lead to better safety standards.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
That's true. We speaking of things leading to things. This
is the part of the show where we lead to
the end of the show.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Nice segue, nod, My segue.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Game is on fire.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
It's great.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I'm really working on I've been saving that one.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
You've been putting in the work.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Thanks Ben.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
You can find us on Instagram, you us on Facebook,
you can find us on Twitter, but more importantly, you
can find us and your fellow Ridiculous historians on our
Facebook community page, Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah, it's a lot of fun. There's some good conversation there,
some good memory, some good history, weirdness, good conversation. I
already said that all of those things you can find
it right there, go to ridiculous historians. All you have
to do is like name one of our names or something.
And even if you just like make up something clever,
we'll let you in. If it's funny, we'll let you
in totally. We'd like to thank our research associate Gabe,
(24:29):
who helped us out with this one. We'd also like
to thank our buddy Alex Williams, who composed this theme.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Do you think he even knows that we include a
thank you to him in every episode?
Speaker 2 (24:40):
I told him, Oh, you told him? Yeah, he nodded.
He's a very demure kind of dude.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Yeah. Oh, what's our comic book recommendation?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Comic book recommendation for today? This one might be a
little on the nose, but I had a friend tell
me how I got the movie version of Watchmen all
wrong and how I need to go back and watch
it again. I have not done that yet, but I
really felt like it kind of missed the mark of
what that comic was all about. So I really recommend
going back and revisiting not the movie Watchmen, but the
(25:08):
incredible seminal graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Watchmen I also, oddly enough, have an Alan Moore recommendation
that I was thinking about cool Providence. Providence is the
is the story of a writer who explores the world
of HP Lovecraft. It's a guy who kind of who
wants to meet HP Lovecraft and has all these weird
(25:34):
experiences that if you like HP Lovecraft, you like Alan Moore,
You're gonna love this. That's all I can say.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
See you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Fellow Ridiculous Historians, we return to you with this week's
(00:03):
classic episode. This is a parable cautionary tale for all
our fellow ridiculous historians who like to tipple a beer
every now and then. There is such thing as too much.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
There is, indeed on a personal level and at scale,
which we really start to see in eighteen fourteen when
a poor neighborhood in London fell victim to a bizarre
and boozy disaster, dare we say, a calamity that actually
resulted in some fatalities. What the heck was this thing
that happened? And how did it involve way too much beer?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Right, let's roll it. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
You know.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I guess we should begin today's episode by pointing out
that it is, not, to our knowledge, sponsored by Miller LT.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Although we had a lot of fun with those guys.
You had the best tagline of all time. Still, I'm
really surprised they haven't like purchased this from you.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
You know, it was a gift. We're just very giving
people on this show.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
And that is the gift that keeps on giving in
social media form. And I don't know if they'll ever
give us any more ads again? But what was it again?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Then, Miller lt The beer is so good that you
can drink it with your mouth. Yeah, And I think
that we arrived at that on our earlier episode about
ritual alcohol edemas or aka.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
You're not gonna say it, are you? You're not going
to say it. I tried to make you say last time.
That was a sore spot. But chugging is the word.
But chugging today, we're talking about a different kind of chugging. Chugging,
chugging it to the streets. Yes, yes, taking it to
the streets. That's well put. I'm ben oh, I'm null.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
And we are, of course joined with our super producer
Casey Pegram give it up for and fellow ridiculous historians.
Our journey today takes us to the early eighteen hundreds
in foggy Old London Town October, specifically when a bizarre
(02:26):
sequence of events through the community of Saint Giles, London
into a state of pandemonium and terror. What happened and
how did this come to pass?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Okay, so let's set the scene. He already did. Foggy
London Town eighteen fourteen. There's a brewery. Right, there's a
brewery called the Horseshoe Brewery which was located in the
corner of Great Russell Street and Tottenham Court Roads. The
Horseshoe Brewery was the building. It was like this historic
brewery and the mew And Company brewers, I guess it'd
(03:00):
taken it over or they were the ones occupying it
at this time, and they had. They were all about
being up to the latest technological brewing standards, which at
the time were giant wooden vats secured with these iron
rings like a giant barrel basically, right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, these giant barrels girdled with heavy iron hoops, and
this was sort of a fad or a trend for
breweries at the time. The vats were meant to be
displayed to visitors, right, They were meant to be a
show stopping spectacle and to impress potential customers. So there
(03:44):
was this kind of one upsmanship contest where in different
breweries would try to build progressively larger vats and barrels.
And you just said how big these were. To put
it in another perspective, their three stores tall, and as
you said, they're built of wood with just some hoops
(04:05):
around them, very heavy iron hoops for structural integrity.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah, and let's not forget the type of beer that
was being brewed here was something akin to a stout,
like a dark porter ale, which was very popular at
the time, and this that would hold three thousand, five
hundred barrels of this brown stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
And everything is fine for years, yeah, for like four years.
Everything is fine until it isn't. On October seventeenth, eighteen fourteen,
in this area Saint Giles, which we should mention is
a poor area of London, several things are happening. There
is a woman named Anne Seville who is mourning the
(04:47):
tragic death of her two year old son John, who
had just died the day earlier, on October sixteenth, and
she is mourning in her cellar apartment. A lot of
people live in basements in this area. And then upstairs,
on the first floor of this tenement on New Street,
a lady named Mary Banfield is sitting down for tea
(05:09):
with her daughter Hannah, who is four. And then across
the way or nearby, there is a fourteen year old
named Eleanor Cooper at the Tavistock Arms Public House who's scouring.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Pots teenage barmaid.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Teenage barmaid. Yeah, a scullery maid at the very least.
She is by this outdoor water pump that's right next
to a brick wall that's about twenty five feet high,
and the brewery that you mentioned, NOL that you described
for us earlier is directly on the other side of
that barrier. They're famous for this porter that you mentioned,
(05:47):
and they produced more than one hundred thousand barrels of
this each year. It was big business. And around four
thirty pm that day, a storehouse clerk named George Crick
looks at one of these huge wooden vats and he's
looking at it from above right, and as he's staring down,
(06:08):
he notices something's off. One of those hoops, which weighs
seven hundred pounds, has slipped off a cask. And the
porter of that's storing is ten months old. Crick's been
with the company for almost two decades and he knew
that this kind of thing, this slippage of the hoop,
could happen maybe once to three times a year, and
(06:32):
he didn't think too much of it. He was just like,
sometimes things happen, were.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
They not doing proper maintenance on this monstrosity.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
It's hard to say. Man, you know, they must have
had to do some sort of regular maintenance just because
it's wood.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, but I imagine that like safety and you know, health
inspections wasn't really much of a thing back in these days.
So that's probably like left their own devices a little bit.
But yeah, so that one who pops off, and you
can imagine like what we're talking like maybe like eight
of these hoops for the giant cask, right, Yeah, So
that's significantly weakening it structurally, and then the other hoops
(07:10):
start to kind of follow suit, or at least the
I don't know, it starts to weaken the entire thing.
It's like a domino effect on the rest. Right, Yeah,
that's a good way to put it. So George Creek
goes ahead and fills up the vat all the way
almost to the top, almost to the brim, I think
four inches away from the top, and this's like more
(07:31):
than twenty feet highway. He sees the thing pop off,
and then he's just like, ask screw it, and still
sees that it slipped.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
I say, at this point, it slipped, and he told
his boss about it and his boss said that quote
no harm whatever would inceed and.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Sounds like a real villainous type. I know, I can't
help a picture him as such.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
And he told Krick he was just like, George, you
should write a letter to another guy who works at
the brewery and they can fix it later, but we'll
be fine for now. Don't worry about it. And then
Craik sits down and he's filled up the vat he
writes this letter, and it's about five point thirty when
he finishes writing the letter, and then he hears a
(08:12):
massive explosion.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, yeah, a massive explosion that set forth all of
those thousands of barrels of this. It was hot, actually,
because it was mid ferm Ent right, just gushing, and
it was so forceful that it actually took out a
(08:35):
wall in the brewery that allowed it to continue to
flood into the streets of that area describing earlier, and
not to mention that as it went it took out
the other casks that were around as well. It may
have not held the same volume total, but added up
together made for a whole nother problem.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Right exactly, So that large barrier we mentioned earlier where
the fourteen year old Eleanor Cooper is working. That wall collapses.
It kills her instantly. The sheer force of this explosion
sends bricks flying through the air across Great Russell Street,
and a deluge of beer rushes through the neighborhood. And
(09:22):
it's sweeping away like this an actual flood. It's sweeping
away everything in its past.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Well, this is like three hundred and twenty plus thousand
gallons of beer.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Yeah, in one that first vat alone held the equivalent
of one million pints of beer.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Jesus.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
And again, as as we said just a moment ago,
that wasn't the only vat that went, and there was
no drainage. We should mention that on these city streets
there's not like a sewage system.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Have we talked about the Great Stink of London, Ben,
I think we have. Remember how nasty that city was
pre sewage system? Yeah, you know, it was just the
streets were literally really caked and human excrement. And so
this beer is washing all that along with it. People
are getting swept up in the flood. Can you imagine
the smell?
Speaker 1 (10:09):
It must have been disgusting.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
I mean to think about how it smells like downtown
Atlanta or somewhere like little five Points, like after like
a weekend, you know it, it smells like pe and stale beer.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Or just outside of our buildings, just outside of our building.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
It's true. This must have been that like to the
mp power, and.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
It happens so quickly it's difficult for us to fully
articulate how quickly this occurs. People who live in the
neighborhood are losing their minds. They're screaming zois and whatnot,
and they're hopping up on pieces of furniture. They're trying
to save themselves from drowning, which was a real possibility
(10:47):
because this flood was so strong and so forceful that
some of the houses that were in disrepair crumbled themselves,
so your house could fall on you.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
All right, here's where it gets gross. Okay, it's already
pretty gross at this point, but a lot of the
folks were trying to, you know, make this see the
silver lining in this situation. And you know, likely they
were alcoholics because they were just like, hey, free beer.
So they would get like whatever receptacle they'd get their
hands on, a bucket or whatever, and start scooping this
(11:23):
stuff up and drinking it, and some people just lapped
it up off the street. And again, lots of poop
mixed in with this beer at this price.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Lots of poop, detritus, road dirt, roadkill.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
And let's also not forget that this beer was mid fermentation, so.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
It wasn't even done.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Yeah, it was even like beer beer. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
So where are we at fatality wise at this point, Ben,
as this deluge makes its way through Saint Giles Rookery,
another area where I believe some of the city's poorest
were living. And this is another very sad detail here, Ben.
This happened during the day, so the men would have
been away at work, so the folks that were at
home that would have experienced the brunt of this beer
(12:08):
nami would have been children and women.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Right exactly. Let's explore some of the fatalities. So we
mentioned the unfortunate end of fourteen year old bar maid
Eleanor Cooper. She died pretty quickly, near instantly as far
as we can tell. But let's also revisit some of
the characters we introduced earlier in the story. And Seville,
(12:35):
who was mourning again the death of her two year
old son John, was holding a wake in their basement apartment.
When the beer flood hit, they had no time or
no way to get out. So Seville, along with the
other three mourners, were all killed by this beer. And
(12:59):
then the couple that we had mentioned, the mom and
daughter having tea on the first floor of their tenement,
Mary Benfield and her four year old daughter, Hannah, they
both passed away. So this, this gets us up to
let's see eleanor the four mourners, Mary and Hannah. This
(13:19):
gets us up to seven fatalities in a matter of minutes.
But that's not all. There was one more fatality, right.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Noal, Yeah, this is probably as a direct result of
these booze scoopers that were talking about earlier that were
just you know, chugging the stuff from the streets, hence
my opening phrase, chugging it to the streets. And apparently
this last death was alcohol poisoning. Not to make light,
but you know, it's sort of like you did it
to yourself, buddy, You escape the actual delus that all
(13:47):
of these innocens you know, were subjected to, and then
you went, you went and drank yourself to death like
a jerk, because isn't like half fermented booze. Dangerous, isn't
it like ethanol really strong or something like? Oh? I
thought so, I know, like moonshine, if you drink it
before it's finished or something like that, it can be
really really dangerous. But I don't know if that applies.
(14:07):
I'm just spit on here.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
But do we know whether or not that was intentional
alcohol poisoning? You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Where they just trying not to drown and they managed
to not drown. Interesting but they unclear but unclear unclear.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
I don't know. I just want to just not that
they need me to defend them, but possibly, I though
I don't want to sound too cynical about it, I'm
tempted to think it's the first idea you proposed, and
that they just drank themselves to death. There could have
been more deaths, more fatalities. It's pretty astonishing in fact,
(14:42):
that so few people died as a result of this
flood this uh which say earlier beer nami, Like, yeah,
the worst damage does occur there on New Street, And
now this neighborhood is soaked in beer. Everything stinks, people
(15:03):
are covered in hot malt liquor. Three brewery employees almost died,
but they were luckily pulled from this temporary raging river
and people rescuers arrived on the scene, and they were
trying with their bare hands to go through the rubble
and find anyone who was trapped inside, and they had to.
(15:23):
They were in a really weird situation because people are
losing their minds, wailing and screaming, and they're like, you
have to be quiet because we're trying to hear people
in the rubble.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a real scene, Ben, And surprise, surprise,
this story doesn't have a happy ending on multiple levels.
On the corporate level, right on the corporate greed and
corruption level, there's some real palm greasing going on here
and some shady backroom deals that caused the responsible parties
(15:57):
being the brewers, to kind of get a scott free.
And remember Ben, you mentioned houses were lost, foundations were wrecked,
homes were crumbled because of this. This was that much beer.
Can you believe it? It blows my mind that it
would have kept that momentum going long enough to actually
damage people's properties. I can't even picture the sheer volume
(16:19):
of stinking, brown hot booze.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And yeah, this does have a maybe Sobering is not
the right word for this episode, but it's funny. There
is a sobering aspect to this story, which is that
this community was largely composed of Irish immigrants and newspapers,
and the establishment at the time very much looked down
on immigrants from Ireland, and the company that owned the
(16:46):
brewery eventually did just find because you would think they
would take an enormous financial hit right from losing literally
all of their inventory, killing eight people, and destroying a neighborhood.
But they initially thought they were going to be in
tough times because they had already paid the excise taxes
on the booze. But somehow they got Parliament to give
(17:10):
them a pass and they got their money back.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah. Not only that, they got Parliament or whatever governing
body was overseeing this thing to rule the disaster. The
collapse of this cask as an act of God, an
unavoidable act of God, meaning no mortal entity could be
held responsible and meaning no mortal got a dime, right,
(17:37):
And this was only two days after the flood. Jury
convened to investigate the accident, they visited the side of
the tragedy. They viewed the corpses of the victims. They
heard testimony from Crick we mentioned earlier, and as you said, Noel,
they said this had been an act of God, and
that the victims had met their death casually, accidentally, and
(17:59):
by fortune. I would agree with the last part. I
was definitely a serious case of misfortune.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
And there was a lot of speculation about the court
being corrupt or bribed, but there was never an official
statement made, and the brewery soldiered on for a long time,
for more than a century. It wasn't until nineteen twenty
two that it was demolished and they built something called
(18:28):
the Dominion Theater on part of the site. In twenty twelve,
there was a pub in the area, the Hole Born Whippet,
that began marking the Great Beer Flood of eighteen fourteen
with a vat of porter brewed especially for the day,
which to me feels like it's in poor taste. I'm
just gonna go on the record and say.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
That I would agree with you on the record.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
So another strange aspect of this story is that this
is this is not the only strange beverage flood. I
think do we ever mention the Great Molasses Flood.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
I don't know if we've done a full episode on it,
but this is definitely a parallel. It's like the American equivalent,
yeah of this, because I don't know there's ever been
another booze flood kind of like this. Because they switched
after this. This did bring about some change in the
brewing process. They changed it to concrete casks as opposed
to these shoddy, you know, rickety wooden cast But what's
the Great Molasses floods? It great as well. We were
(19:29):
talking off air about how it's funny when we have
a date and then the great a thing, implying there
may have been lesser versions of that.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
The mediocre beer flood. Yeah. So the Great Molasses Flood,
also known as the Boston Molasses Disaster, occurred in January
of nineteen nineteen, when a huge storage tank of molasses burst,
causing molasses to rush through the streets at like thirty
five miles an hour. One hundred and fifty people were injured,
twenty one people died. And then there was the Honolu
(20:00):
molasses spill, which happened in twenty thirteen. So this stuff
isn't just ancient history. Luckily, no humans as far as
we know passed away in that molasses spill, but it
did tremendous damage to the maritime environment. And then there's
one other one. I just like the name. I don't
know if you've heard this name. No, I want to
see what you think about it. The Pepsi Fruit Juice Flood.
(20:22):
That sounds like a drink. That sounds like a really
cool band. Hey, you guys going to see the Pepsi
Fruit Juice Flood A Red Rocks. I caught him in Bonnaroo.
You know. I just I love their live work, so
they've taken a different direction on their new album.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
The Pepsi Fruit Juice Flood, which I feel like they
might put out as a beverage. One day was a
flood of twenty eight million liters of fruit and vegetable
juice into the streets of a town in Russia called Lebdian,
and it was caused by a collapse of a pepsiico warehouse.
No deaths resulted from the spill, but there were two
(21:02):
injuries and the streets were a wash with pineapple, apricot, tangerine, grape, mango, pomegranate, apple, cherry, orange, grapefruit,
and tomato.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Juice.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
So if you're going to make a commemorative drink for that,
those would be the ingredients. And I think that would
taste pretty nasty.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Right, it does seem so that doesn't seem like a
very good combination of flavors. It's like, I did you
ever drink V eight? I like vat splash, but no,
I did not like tomato juice. If that's what you're
asking me, what ms I drink clamato next?
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Like? What what's the difference between vight splash and V eight?
Speaker 2 (21:33):
VA splash has like fruit juices in it. It has
just a little bit. It hides the carrot juice in
the tomato juice. It's veiled. Kids like to drink it.
It's a tasty juice beverage. Well, you know what, maybe
I'll give it a shot. No, I have never tried
V eight nor V eight splash. Have I experience in
a life unlived?
Speaker 1 (21:51):
No?
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Man, it takes you know, you've got your path, you
got your story. You know doesn't have to include V eight.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Thanks man, And I really drink?
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Do you drink other beverages that you know that I don't.
I don't drink like uh milk, I don't drink milk.
You don't drink milk, no nut milk. I feel like
milk is an ingredient.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
We actually we had this conversation before with one of
our coworkers, a great guy, Paul Decktt, who also has
the nickname Mission Control, and he is definitely a fan
of drinking milk. Wouldn't you say so? Casey? Absolutely, have
you guys had that conversation about milk as an ingredient
versus a beverage.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
I mean, I consume it as a beverage too, so
I'm right there with him. I like chocolate milk.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, same, same I used to Did you guys ever
hear the story? This has nothing to do with the
great beer flood of eighteen fourteen, but did you guys
ever hear this story of I guess the old urban
legend that chocolate milk was originally created to hide blood
clots and impurities.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Delicious way to hide it?
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Okay, well, Casey on the case and this ends tail
for today. Thank you so much for tuning in ridiculous historians.
Thank you, super producer, Casey pegrum Noel my friend as always,
thank you for exploring this strange, disturbing tale.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Yeah, there's a lot going on here. It's sort of
a tale of wealth and poverty and you know, the
rich running roughshod over the poor. We sort of didn't
really see that aspect of it until the end, but
it's definitely there. And it's gross. It's gross philosophically and
also physically gross because it's hot beer rushing through the
poop laden streets of London town right washing away children
(23:37):
having tea parties.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
I know, no one got in trouble, no one went
to jail. It's a shame, but at least it did
lead to better safety standards.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
That's true. We speaking of things leading to things. This
is the part of the show where we lead to
the end of the show.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Nice segue, nod, My segue.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Game is on fire.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
It's great.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I'm really working on I've been saving that one.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
You've been putting in the work.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Thanks Ben.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
You can find us on Instagram, you us on Facebook,
you can find us on Twitter, but more importantly, you
can find us and your fellow Ridiculous historians on our
Facebook community page, Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah, it's a lot of fun. There's some good conversation there,
some good memory, some good history, weirdness, good conversation. I
already said that all of those things you can find
it right there, go to ridiculous historians. All you have
to do is like name one of our names or something.
And even if you just like make up something clever,
we'll let you in. If it's funny, we'll let you
in totally. We'd like to thank our research associate Gabe,
(24:29):
who helped us out with this one. We'd also like
to thank our buddy Alex Williams, who composed this theme.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Do you think he even knows that we include a
thank you to him in every episode?
Speaker 2 (24:40):
I told him, Oh, you told him? Yeah, he nodded.
He's a very demure kind of dude.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Yeah. Oh, what's our comic book recommendation?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Comic book recommendation for today? This one might be a
little on the nose, but I had a friend tell
me how I got the movie version of Watchmen all
wrong and how I need to go back and watch
it again. I have not done that yet, but I
really felt like it kind of missed the mark of
what that comic was all about. So I really recommend
going back and revisiting not the movie Watchmen, but the
(25:08):
incredible seminal graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Watchmen I also, oddly enough, have an Alan Moore recommendation
that I was thinking about cool Providence. Providence is the
is the story of a writer who explores the world
of HP Lovecraft. It's a guy who kind of who
wants to meet HP Lovecraft and has all these weird
(25:34):
experiences that if you like HP Lovecraft, you like Alan Moore,
You're gonna love this. That's all I can say.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
See you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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