London Beer Flood - October 17

The London Beer Flood took place on this day in 1814.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's October.

(00:22):
The London Beer Flood took place on this day in
eighteen fourteen. This flood started when a three story tall
vat of fermenting beer broke at a brewery in London,
and accounts about the day, there are two different companies
described as being responsible for this vat of beer. One

(00:43):
was the Mrs Henry Mew and Company on Bainbridge Street.
The other was the Horseshoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road.
Now those two roads, Bainbridge Street and Tottenham Court met
at an intersection, and Mrs Henry Mew and Company had
bought a brewery that same year. That's why there's a
discrepancy and who exactly was responsible for this broken vat.

(01:08):
When the vat ruptured, it released a fifteen foot high
wave of porter which broke the taps off of other
vats in the brewery, causing a huge chain reaction that
completely flooded the surrounding area. This sounds like the set
up for a joke, but it was a tragedy. Many
buildings were completely destroyed. There wasn't any kind of drainage,

(01:31):
so the beer just plowed through everything in its path.
At least eight people were killed. This included a mother
and a daughter who were having tea together. It also
included a family who had been gathered in their basement
mourning the death of their two year old. Because this
was a tragedy and because there was so much property damage,

(01:52):
there was an inquest. One of the hoops that was
holding that vat together had broken and slipped off earlier
in the day, but that apparently wasn't all that unusual
and occurrence. George Crick, who was a seventeen year old
employee of brewery, reported the broken hoop to his boss
and was told that it wouldn't be a problem. He

(02:14):
was instructed to delegate replacing the hoop to another employee
in spite of that. Though the inquest determined that this
was pretty much an act of God, it cleared the
brewery of all wrongdoing. The brewery never had to pay
any kind of reparations, and the taxes that it had
already paid on the beer it was brewing were waived.
This brewery did eventually reopen after the catastrophe, but it

(02:36):
closed again in ninety one. There were a lot of
rumors following this, and you'll still see this in accounts
written more recently up to today, claiming that people rushed
into the streets with their pots and pans and other
vessels to try to scoop up some of this free beer.
It is true that there are people out there who
will try anything, but this idea of a chaotic rush

(03:02):
out into the streets to scoop up beer with any
vessel handy was almost certainly false. It was more meant
to insult the predominantly Irish population of the neighborhood by
playing on negative stereotypes. There are also elements of this
story that sound really similar to the Boston molasses flood,

(03:23):
which happened just over a hundred years later and killed
twenty one people in Boston's North End. That may indeed
wind up being its own episode of the stay in
history class at some point in the future. So I
will avoid going into all the details of it here today.
You can learn about this in the February four episode

(03:43):
of Stuff You Miss in History Class called six Impossible Episodes,
which is six brief stories that weren't quite enough to
stand on their own as a podcast. You'll notice this
particular story is barely long enough to cover this podcast,
which is only five minutes long. That's pretty much all
the detail that we know about it. Thanks to Tari
Harrison for audio work on the show, and you can

(04:04):
subscribe to the stand History Class on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,
and where a Realty get your podcasts. Tune in tomorrow
for a Battle and What's Now Alabama