The Beer & Whiskey Flood Drinking Disastersode of 1814-1875 | Episode 93 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
It's rare for us to have an episode with so
many feces mentioned right off the top, but do not worry.
Refreshments will be served Yello and welcome to Doomsday History's

(00:29):
most Dangerous podcasts. Together, we are going to rediscover some
of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely
unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and
around the world. On today's episode, we're doing another one
of a kind here, and I'll explain the rules as

(00:49):
we get into it. But for all those listeners who
love our more unhygienic content, well have we got a
treat for you. We're talking about the only consumer product
you can blow out your nose while friends and strangers
cheer you on. We'll discuss more context and uses for
PLoP than you could possibly shake a feces coated stick at,

(01:11):
and we'll see why the only thing that you cannot
kill about the British in countless and ghoulish ways is
their spirit. And if you were listening to this on Patreon,
there is only one extra segment in this episode. However,
it will definitely be different. I will be providing some
Dodge caravan math, but I will be belching the entire

(01:32):
thing for you on a dare from my family. This
is not the show you play around kids, or while eating,
or even in mixed company. But as long as you
find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something
that could potentially save your life, our work is done.
So with all that said, shoot the kids out of
the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and

(01:55):
let's begin back in the day nine thousand years ago
when saber tooth and while the animals still roamed through
Great Plains, at a time when our first upright walking
ancestors first lifted a rotting, fermented fruit to their lips

(02:17):
and choked it down. Alcohol has been humanity's constant companion.
It's been used in rituals, in medicine, and trade for
thousands of years. I've heard it described as humanity's earliest
and most enduring biochemical experiment, and as rotting fruit transformed

(02:38):
into wines and meads and early grain beers. It evolved
alongside us, and we evolved alongside it. It became one
of our greatest social ills and one of our favorite
party treats. Whether you sip it through it or blow
it out your nose in the form of vomit while

(02:58):
friends and strangers cheered you on. The majority of people
around the world will imbibe alcohol at least once in
their life, some for the rest of their lives, some
just untila kills them. Alcohol does kill roughly three million
people a year. For comparison, sharks kill about six people,

(03:19):
and vending machines they kill closer to thirteen. By the numbers,
take every person who died from every cause under the
sun in a year, from plane crashes to lawnmower accidents
to choking on a hot dog, even having your head
removed by a logging truck. Take all of it, Add
it all up, and in the grand calculus of death,

(03:43):
alcohol alone kills about five percent of everybody. Time was
when a product like that had to have a little
skull on the label, whether it simply poisons your blood
or broughts your liver or leads you to run yourself
over with your own cos there are lots of options,

(04:03):
and you'll notice there are no drinking songs about making
good choices. Getting crunked could lead you to a waffle
house at three am with some kind of vague grudge
and bleary eyesight, and I remind you there are no
end of enthusiastic future death row inmates who also enjoy
a drink or two willing to oblige your behavior with

(04:26):
the broken end of a wine, whiskey or beer bottle,
either of which will fit nicely into your neck and
or chest. Case in point. At the oldest pub in
Toronto here there once worked a bartender with a cast
that ran from her fingers to her elbow. She told
me she got it from punching a customer who patted

(04:46):
her on the bum until she had broken most of
her bones without realizing it. The point was, she was
as drunk as the man that she murdered. No one
ever talks about your booze initiated heart disease or various cancers,
just cirrhosis. Alcohol's poster child. And you may be asking
yourself why anyone drinks? Well, have you ever yelled chugged

(05:10):
to the point that it doesn't sound like a word anymore?
If so, you know how boos can turn things that
on paper aren't that interesting into the funniest thing ever.
It's part of its charm. And you may be thinking,
you're damned right it is, But and this is a point.
You can achieve the identical net effect by simply starving

(05:31):
your brain of oxygen by huffing solvents. I myself, I
stopped drinking years ago. It was a simple choice. Just
in my experience. Alcohol always takes away more than it gives.
But this is not going to be an episode about
abstinence or the evils of alcohol. So have no fear. No,

(05:52):
today's episode will be all about death and destruction. Alcohol
will simply be the star of today's show. But let
me take alcohol siedy here for just a second before
we begin and say it wasn't alcohol's fault. You'll just
have to wait and see now. As ideas go, what

(06:13):
we are about to do here would be considered in
poor taste for a true crime podcast. It might even
be for a negligent homicide podcast. But because of the
nature of our program, we are about to dive into
a very special, one of a kind, first ever in
podcast broadcast history episode. Welcome to our first ever historical

(06:38):
disaster drinking game aisode. And I should lay down some
ground rules. For one, every time I say something gross
related to human filth in any capacity, you take a sip. Sorry,
let me clarify. I know that sounds bad. I am
specifically referring to feces, bodily fluids, and various corps uses

(07:01):
that also includes animals. And I say sip because otherwise
you're going to get slotted into that five percent that
we just talked about. This is going to be a
challenging enough episode as it is. To begin our adventure
today and to get your mind off of all of that,
we will be enjoying a pint of matured porter. It's

(07:23):
an ancestor of modern stouts. Basically, just think of guinness
or anything dark brown to the point of almost black
from the British Isles. And I hope you brought your
smile because my promise for this episode is you're not
going to see another one for a while. Welcome to
Saint Giles in central London, England, in the early autumn

(07:46):
of eighteen fourteen. Ooh, you say eighteen hundreds England. I've
never been. It sounds positively regal. Well, let me stop
you right there. When I started researching, was Saint Giles
considered worse than other localities. It kept auto correcting localities
to slums. And we have talked about the reality of

(08:08):
eighteen hundreds London before they are quite literally some of
our grossest episodes, which is saying a lot. Remember all
those people who got bathed in the rotting, bacteria laden
gore of an exploding horse corpse, of all of the dank,
soap avoidant areas of Victorian London competing for the grim

(08:29):
title of worst living conditions. Well, okay, there was Bethnal
Green that was one of London's poorest areas. Then there
was Clerkenwell, which was the pickpocket ridden setting for Charles
Dickens' Oliver Twist. Then there was Whitechapel, which was known
for its crushing poverty way before Jack the Ripper moved
in with his property value, schmoperty values, mentality and well

(08:53):
of all of the pockets of eighteen hundreds English hell,
the greater London area had to offer. Saint John Giles
wore a fly coated tin or pewter crown. Saint Giles
was a squalid, dilapidated labyrinth of extremely overcrowded and crumbling
tenement buildings. Common single room lodging houses and illegal cellar

(09:15):
dwellers were cramped to the rafters with hoboes, and beggars,
and criminals and thieves, and barefoot children and old timey
prostitutes that did not know the gentle caress of soap
and iw gross. The Irish picture a scene so thick
with chimney smoke that I looked and smelled like it

(09:36):
was on fire. On any given day, it might smell
like chemical fumes, or tar vapor, or just the dust
from old horse feces. It's the kind of place no
one speaks kindly of, and even less people would visit willingly.
One contemporary said, the entire neighborhood was buried in smoke

(09:56):
and wretchedness. Everything smelled like old beer and boiled cabbage
and every other stink humanity is capable of producing, and
all of it lit by the thin flicker of oil lamps.
Now London proper like downtown Fancy London was having a heyday.
The Napoleonic Wars were just wrapping up. Wealthy people strolled

(10:18):
the Regent Street in their finest laces. Philosophers debated the
future of man and sipped cognac in smoky lecture halls,
while all the while the barely toothed people of Saint
Giles lived hands of mouth, meaning sometimes they chewed on
their own hands out of hunger, like a chocolate bar.
Kids as young as six worked ten hour days in factories,

(10:41):
and the life expectancy was only thirty five. Of course
it was. You should have seen what they drank. It
came from the Thames River, where sewage and dead animals
and industrial runoff and human waste plotted and ran through
open drains along the streets on its way into the Thames.

(11:01):
Indoor plumbing was virtually nonexistent at the time, and a
dozen families might share the same overflowing outdoor toilet. Set
in quotes and left in the sun, these would bake
into something with the reek of hot ammonia and sour
whiz and more to the point. In poorer areas like
we're in, drinking water often came from shallow wells or

(11:24):
public pumps dug right beside cesspools or graveyards or slaughterhouses.
Water from a local tap or well might vaguely smell
of rust and sewage, and might come with a little
green film of algae on top. Urban graveyards were often
overfilled by the mid century, and some were known to

(11:44):
leak or seep into adjoining wells. Medical officers of the
time did report that cloudy well water was sometimes visible
with organic matter. They kept using the word putrefaction. Okay,
maybe pause the show for an hour or two at
this point and kind of sober up a bit before continuing.

(12:06):
That was an awful lot that we just went through. Okay,
now that you're all back. The one stop shop for
most people's aquatic and hydration needs was the Thames River.
Like we said, we also said it was the final
destination for thousands of cesspits and drains and sewers discharging
untreated filth. Someone might hard defecate the most foul choleric

(12:30):
diarrhea into the river, while only a few feet away
someone shrugs, finishes their bath and fills their mug. There
were tails of the surface becoming so thick with human
spackle that a person could walk across it. Do you
have any idea how long a condition this bad has
to exist before all living memory of what water used

(12:53):
to look like is dead and gone. Cholera was so virulent,
and the bring out your Dead car our guys were
so busy that people often died halfway through filling out
their wills and just kind of lay indoors for days
at a time before they could be removed. Coffins often
satin homes or alleyways, and sometimes they leaked bodily fluids

(13:15):
and decay. And I remind you air conditioning, for what
it was worth in England was still one hundred and
twenty years away. Everything was awful. And if you still
romanticize the era, let me tell you, if you met
Jane Eyre in real life, you would uncontrollably and unapologetically

(13:36):
shove her away from you while physically gagging from the
smell coming off her. I said a lot of awful
things about alcohol to kick off this episode, and then
I went and ruined drinking water. So the safest bet
for us is to actually go back to alcohol. For one,
boiling the water during brewing kills a lot of pathogens

(13:57):
and bacteria, and the fermentation process that produces the alcohol
is an even more potent germ killer. And another big
part that you wouldn't think about because you live in
the modern era is because beer was produced in sealed
equipment and then stored immediately in casks and barrels, it
was safe from any random member of the public just

(14:18):
casually throwing up into it or dipping their germ soaked
genitals into it. Beer was just a cleaner and safer
option in an overcrowded and life infested city that didn't
quite yet understand what sick make not people so good
feel to really belay the point, This was an era
where you could easily have a chamber pot filled with

(14:40):
fetid brown liquid thrown in your face at any moment
and from any direction, serving up some much needed hydration
in libation after a long day of coughing on things
or signing up old dead horses. Stood the Horseshoe Brewery.
It towered over the backstreets of Saint Giles, taking up
an entire city blow, looming over the corner of Tottenham

(15:02):
Court Road and Great Russell Street, and it ran along
Bainbridge and New Streets, pressing right up against the Saint
Giles Rookery. The Rookery was a slum of cramped dwellings
built over cellars. The brewery was founded in eighteen sixty
four and basically took the name from the tavern that
it had paved over, which had existed on the same

(15:24):
spot since sixteen twenty three. By the mid seventeen eighties,
the brewery was pumping out forty thousand barrels of porter
a year, and a few years before we got here,
in eighteen oh nine, the operation had been bought up
by the family of Henry mw. They did okay for
themselves as families go. They were fairly close to the

(15:45):
top of London's upper crust. How could they not be.
They'd cornered the market on a public alternative to diarrheaing
yourself to death. And I'm not saying all the land
and titles in high society. Influence went to their heads
and made them eccentric weirdos. But Lady Valerie Mew once
scandalized polite society by having her carriage pulled by zebras,

(16:08):
so you tell me. By eighteen eleven they'd revamped the
brewery into a complex industrial operation that brewed almost an
unheard of one hundred thousand barrels of beer in a year,
and some of the vats that held that beer were
larger than houses. These were the biggest in the world,
and some were over two hundred years old, so they

(16:32):
held more than they leaked, but they definitely leaked. The
largest was twenty two feet or almost six and a
half meters tall and over sixty feet or eighteen meters across.
That is about the size of a two story building
and as wide as four Dodge caravans parked end to end.
A vat that size would hold around one hundred and

(16:54):
sixty three thousand gallons or seven hundred forty thousand liters,
and was held together by thirty massive iron hoops. The
brewery had as many as a dozen different fats on
the go at the same time. The whole neighborhood smelled
kind of sour like yeasty beer because of it. So
what did it taste like? Well, I've heard it described

(17:17):
as having the deep toasty flavor of burnt bread crust
with dark molasses, roasted nuts, and a touch of earthy
bitterness from the English hops. And after months of aging
away in barrels, it would pick up a faint woody sharpness,
and people describe the mouthfeel yep, that's a term, as bready,
almost to the point of being chewy. I can't help

(17:40):
but feel like this was the stuff you got down
and capped down, mostly just to fill your stomach. And
if you grew up listening to commercials for beers made
out of glacier fresh spring water. You might start to
make a face when you consider the beer brewed at
the Horseshoe was basically made from boiled urine with the
occasional pube or bone fleck strained out of it. I mean,

(18:02):
boiling diaper water can only do so much, so this
wasn't exactly a delicate sipping beverage, although it kind of was.
Everything I've said so far aside. Meuse was respected enough
to find in upscale taverns and gentlemen's clubs. Back then,
beer wasn't branded for consumer recognition the way modern laggers

(18:23):
are today. He wouldn't specifically order a glass of Triple
Fart or Runoff Light. You'd order a pint of Meuse
Porter or mews Stout. It was a robust, hearty, thick
and smoky brew, rich and full bodied, and surprisingly consistent,
depending on how much your drinking hole of choice water
bears down. Today, most beers sit around five percent alcohol

(18:47):
by volume. This stuff sat somewhere closer to seven and
possibly as high as nine percent, strong enough to help
one forget those cold English nights, and if you took enough,
maybe make you forget that you live in a Victorian slum.
Our story today takes place October seventeenth, eighteen fourteen, and

(19:10):
the day started like any other. Everything was gross. Merchants
petaled cabbage and fish flower, girls in blue blacks, and
chimney sweeps whistled their happy working songs while children played
in the fece soaked gutters, daring each other to get
run over by horse drawn carriages. Entertainment was in short supply,

(19:30):
but the whole thing had a little Merry Poppins like
charm to it. Except everyone at cholera and their outfits
were caked with dried human waste, and absolutely no one
was singing about anything. Chimney sweeps only whistled while they
worked to blow the stink out of their faces. Also
on topic, toothpaste. As we know it was still at

(19:52):
least a half century away. The brewing vats were held
together with massive iron hoops, each weighing several high undred pounds.
Like we said well today, around four point thirty a
clerk named George Creek noticed something was off. Literally, he
noticed that one of the heavy iron rings on one
of the vats had been slipping. This was the kind

(20:13):
of thing that had happened before, and everyone knew it
posed no immediate danger, but he reported it all the same.
I often tell people about the distinction between why you
know what you don't know, and what you don't even
know that you don't know. And in this case, what
they didn't know was that six hundred and eighty tons

(20:34):
of beer was pressing equally against all sides of the
vat from within, on constant readiness to take advantage of
the smallest failure to reveal itself and relieve some of
that pressure. Like a balloon waiting for a pin prick,
it pressed outward, silently, watching, patiently, feeling out the iron
ring as it slipped a little bit at a time.

(20:56):
Fats always creaked, but a shudder passed through this one,
almost like a groan. Workers paused to listen, but nothing.
What they didn't know that they didn't know was that
they were in grave danger. George Creek just finished up
quilling off a letter about it to one of the
operating partners. Went from out of nowhere, a rivet screened loose,

(21:18):
followed by another and another, as the oak panels of
the vat, now swollen and trembling, split apart and unleashed
with a thunderous crack that echoed across the entire neighborhood.
The massive wooden structure exploded with intense force, and in
an instant a surge of beer, fifteen feet high and

(21:41):
black as tar, thundered through the brue house, sweeping away
heavy timbers like driftwood. This triggered a chain reaction as
the shock and pressure of it all destroyed nearby vats
and hundreds of stacked barrels. Adding to the chaos. Debris
from the explosion landed on rooftops several streets, over the

(22:01):
roof of the brewery itself. Buckled beams and joys smashed
into each other, and in moments a wave of beer
and debris, acting like a battering ram, punched through brick
and mortar. As the back wall of the brew house
collapsed outward, The two closest houses were almost immediately and
completely demolished. Eleanor Cooper had been upbarmaid at the Tavistock

(22:24):
Arms before she was crushed flat between the weight of
a collapsing stone wall. She was only fourteen. The liquid
tore through homes, smashed fences, and surged into filling low
lying cellars where the poorest lived right up to the rafters,
forcing terrified inhabitants to scramble to stay above it. Whole

(22:44):
rooms crumpled inward, trapping families beneath their furniture, and the
torrent of brood. Residents screamed as the liquid burst through
their doors without warning and drowned them where they sat.
In one house, Mary Banfeld and her four year old
his daughter Hannah, were having a lovely spot of tea,
and then they drowned. In another, an Irish family had

(23:06):
gathered to mourn a deceased toddler and found themselves quickly
joining her in the afterlife. All were drowned and swept
away for the beer. This was its first time outside,
and it wanted to see the big city. New Street
was the first to be hit. Children playing nearby were
immediately swept away and swallowed by the dark, thunderous, unstoppable, roaring, frothing,

(23:31):
fifteen foot tall high wave that roared through the streets
and alleyways. Cellar dwellings were instantly swamped, like we said,
and a lot of these things were already prone to
flooding even in just moderate rain. The force of the
liquid reduced homes to brubble, crumbling under the impact, while
others were left buckled and cracked. In a matter of minutes,

(23:52):
at least eight neighborhood residents had been drowned and or
crushed beneath the collapsing masonry, probably both. Really. In total,
eight people died, Most of them were women and children.
They had no chance against the power of the black tsunami,
that's what people called it. Neighbors began digging through the
rubble and mud immediately, others though, and this is where

(24:16):
it gets a little gross again. Imagine finding a pint
of free beer and you chug it, and then you
kind of fish half of a ring finger or a
children's ponytail out of your mouth. You familiar with the
phrase waste not, want not Well. Residents were dazed but
compelled to grab whatever they could to collect as much

(24:37):
free beer as they could teacups, kettles, pots, bottles, bedpans,
even their hats. But one man did use his child
repeatedly as a kind of a vacuum to hoover up
as much as he could hold in his little mouth
before racing him home to spit it out into a
wash basin. I'm thinking it's the same kind of impulse
that had people collecting pieces of the Space Shuttle after

(24:59):
it exploed, knowing full well that they were mildly radioactive. Now,
I don't want to create the impression that everyone was
immediately pushing each other out of the way to dive
in mouth first. That wasn't really the scene. People were
extremely well behaved. There were no drunken fistfights, and nobody rioted,
nobody looted. To all accounts unimaginable horror aside, everyone remained

(25:23):
very composed and well behaved. Now here's the thing about
free street beer in eighteen hundreds England. A friend once
taught me that if you have a barrel of feces
and you add a drop of wine, you still have
a barrel of feces. Where if you take a barrel
of wine and add a single drop of feces, you
now have two barrels of feces. It doesn't take much

(25:46):
to ruin a thing, was the takeaway of the story,
and every square inch of London was caked in a
semi opaque coat of going back centuries. Crowds were drawn
in either by grief for what just happened or simple curiosity.
Some watchmen began actually charging a small entrance fee so
you could go and visit the smashed brew house, and

(26:08):
bodies were of course laid out in the grim Victorian
custom of public viewing, and this of course was free.
There were accounts of people dying from alcohol poisoning, but
nothing that I could really prove, so I chalk all
that up to just exaggerated reporting to sell newspapers. Before
too long, the Horseshoe Brewery recovered and continued operations, but

(26:32):
they had to reset the sign counting the number of
days since their last workplace safety incident back to zero,
and the residence of Saint Giles slowly got back to
drowning in debt instead of alcohol. Today, the London beer
flood of eighteen fourteen is often told with a smirk,
you know, just a curious little historical oddity. It was

(26:55):
just another bizarre incident in a city with a long
strange history. Case in point, not that long before this,
a creep named the London Monster had been running around town,
stabbing ladies in their buttocks. So, like I said, there
was always something strange to be had for the families
and survivors. They learned that you don't have to work

(27:18):
in an industrial plant to be killed by it. And
like all major cities with time, creepy alleyways and hovels
were paved over with condos and the slums became a
little more than a memory. So you're listening to a
podcast talk about poop and alcohol, and you're drinking right

(27:38):
along with it, and the host keeps telling you to
sip and preaching sensibility, but you're all shut up. You
don't know me. I'll do what I want and you're
not made so think so good anymore. And hopefully someone
else is there with you listening to this. And do
you know what the paramedics will probably do? That's right,

(27:59):
Step one. Don't even wait to hear the rest of this.
Just get nine to one one on the horn and
call a professional. A lot of people don't know that
alcohol can poison you, and it's easier than you think.
It happened to me once. Our bodies are designed to
filter alcohol through our livers and survive our appetite for it.

(28:19):
But it can be toxic in large amounts. And when
I said poisoned, I really meant kill people. Get so drunk.
They think they're the life of the party, but in
fact they are a medical emergency currently urinating into a
pile of coats on your bed, which they have collapsed
on unconsciously, and their pants are still on. Basically, you

(28:39):
can totally poison yourself by drinking too fast. When you
consume a toxic amount of alcohol in too short of
a period of time, you overwhelm your body's ability to
even process it. And alcohol is a central nervous system depressant,
so it can slow down your breathing and your heart
rate and your body temperature to dangerous levels. As a

(28:59):
rule of thought, your liver can tackle about one drink
an hour. Everything above and beyond that has nowhere to
go and just parks itself in your bloodstream. And when
your blood alcohol content rises too high, let's skip down
the path of consequences. Confusion, stupor, lots of consciousness, seizures,
dangerously slow or irregular breathing, a low body temperature, approaching hypothermia,

(29:24):
the risk of choking on your own vomit, and don't laugh,
I know someone that happened to Then there's coma and
of course death. I dated a girl named Mary in
high school, and she took care of me after I
overdid it in her kitchen one night and I tried
climbing out her window. She saved my life. And if
I ever had the opportunity to speak to her again

(29:46):
in this life, I'd apologize for our entire relationship, but
more specifically for puking on her bed, which soaked into
her mattress. Alcohol in the body shuts down the systems
that keep you alive. So how do you know when
it's serious? If someone is confused, they won't wake up,
or they can't stay conscious, if they're breathing slowly or irregularly,

(30:08):
if their skin starts to feel cold or look bluish
at all, and of course the vomiting. Well, here's what
you do. You call emergency services. You just do it
right away. You are on a clock, and while you
are waiting for them to arrive, you want to roll
the person onto their side with their head slightly tilted downward.
It's called the recovery position, and its whole point is

(30:31):
really just to make sure they don't choke if they
throw up, never put them on their backs, keep them warm,
and stay with them. They don't need coffee They're not
going to be able to walk this off, and you
cannot stop the damage by trying to make them throw up.
It's all in their bloodstream and it has to work
its way through. Literally, the only cure is time. There's

(30:53):
nothing you can do to make a liver work faster,
So your job is to keep them alive until the
alcohol is metabolized. And because of the nature of how
it works, it's probably actually getting worse inside while you're
sitting there watching them, and that is why we call
for help. You're not going to be running intravenous saline
to mean their blood pressure, or intubating their throat to
clear their airway if needed. You don't even have an

(31:15):
EKG machine to monitor their heart rate or the know
how to spot the signs that this is turning into
a whole neurological emergency that threatens their brain. You can't
just push bread in their mouth and hope it'll soak
some of it up. The only cure is time and
watching them closely, and medical intervention. Just got to say
that again. The keys to their survival. I was gonna

(31:38):
say start with you, but really they start an ambulance.
This is as good a time as any to please
check yourself and make sure you can still count your
fingers or legibly pronounce your own name before continuing. Take
a day or two if needed. That's the beauty of
not doing this show live. We're not going anywhere all

(32:05):
right now that everyone has had play again, without further ado,
welcome to part two. We are going to travel roughly
two hundred and ninety miles or four hundred and seventy
kilometers in a straight mine west northwest across the Irish
Sea to a little place called you guessed it, Ireland,

(32:26):
the Emerald Isle, the Old Country, the land of saints
and scholars. Today we'll be visiting the capital of the
Republic of Ireland, Dublin. And when people tend to think
of Dublin and Ireland in general, they tend to think
of rolling green hills and poor weather and shamrocks, probably

(32:46):
because they are not thinking of it in terms of
eighteen seventy five Dublin specifically, Today we will be visiting
the Liberties District. The Liberties was a neighborhood just southwest
of the city, near christ Church and Saint Patrick's cathedrals.
If that helps at the time to understand the people.

(33:07):
Take what I told you about London, picturing another densely
packed neighborhood filled with narrow streets, except this time, instead
of the indigent and morlocks, it was filled with poor
working class people. Then turned down the mad screaming and
pump up the stomach noises and yeah, you're starting to
get it. Everything from textile workers to cobblers to fishmongers

(33:30):
all made home among the workshops and tanneries and distilleries.
Money was tight in the area, and family squeezed into dark,
crumbling tenements, saying gray silver a bisected piece of bread,
while the children make art from the mold on the
walls to entertain their only friends, the plague rats before
they blew out their only candle, and as many as

(33:52):
ten to twelve people climbed onto a single mattress filled
with straw. If these people saw you sleeping on a sofavah,
they would think that you were rich, as there are
stories of people who slept standing up. The overcrowding was
relentless and the accommodations were underwhelming. The streets were lined

(34:14):
with open drains and stagnant water, which made cholera and
typhus and smallpox very popular. Poverty was on display, yes,
But from this kind of hardship comes simple human warmth.
Kids playing in the streets, adults trading stories and sharing
a laugh over washing lines or pub tables. You know

(34:34):
how when you impersonate Irish people, you always go tart
to tar tatar. That is because we all believe that
the Irish have a song in their hearts. That said,
in eighteen seventy the effects of the Irish famine were
still in full effect. Let me put it like this.
A popular activity for new parents was to pray that
they would see their second birthday. So desperate people from

(34:58):
the country made their way into the cities in search
of work. If they were lucky, they might land a
job hauling carts through the narrow streets, or laboring on
the docks or in the distilleries. Women might be able
to bring in a few pennies a day doing freelance
laundry or seamstress work, while their barefoot, hollow eye children
were sent out to sell matches or whatever people were

(35:20):
willing to pay them for. Imagine doing all of this
with only a pot of weak tea and a little
bit of bread to carry you over for the day,
and I said that most people think of green Hills,
or shamrocks or bono, but let's be honest, when most
people think of Ireland, they're thinking of booze. Whisky has
famously been a part of Ireland's history for well over

(35:42):
a thousand years. They call it the water of life,
and they've been making it since at least the eleven hundreds.
The word whisky itself comes from the Gaelic term ishkebaja.
Go ahead, ask me how you get whiskey from ish gabaja.
Do you have any idea how drunk you have to
be to try and pronounce whiskey and say ish kabaja.

(36:04):
The earliest written mention of it was in the Annals
of Klon Mcnoise from fourteen oh five. Magrenell, chieftain of Montirolis,
drank himself to death over Christmas. It's a hard time
of year for a lot of people. It is believed
that Moorish alchemists taught medieval Irish monks how to distill it,
and that was that. By the mid eighteen hundreds there

(36:26):
were breweries and distilleries across Dublin. Their whiskey industry was booming,
and if they recorded gross domestic product back then, by
the best estimates, whiskey would have counted for about eighty
seven percent. By the eighteen hundreds, Irish whisky was the
most popular in the world, with Scotland as a very
close second, and that was only because Ireland just edged

(36:50):
out Scotland for the earliest recorded mention of the stuff.
The Liberties were home to many large and pretty famous
brewers and distilleries like Guinness and Jamison. Livestock was also
common in the city at this time, so you can
think of it as the smelly industrial heart of Dublin.
This part of the story takes place June the eighteenth,

(37:12):
eighteen seventy five, sixty years after Part one. Dublin wasn't
as bad as London, but it was still part of
the United Kingdom, and this was one hundred and fifty
years ago. The first licensed distillery in the world was
in Ireland, opened in sixteen o eight by none other
than King James the First, a man who hated witches

(37:35):
but loved getting crunked. Irish whiskey was produced in a
pot still which looks vaguely like a wind swept Genie's lamp.
It took malted and unmalted barley and turned it into
smoky liquid amber warmth. From there, the liquid satin barrels,
maturing in warehouses across the city. It was aged in

(37:55):
special wooden casks or barrels for years until if finally
achieved a smoke heer and spicier taste. There were at
least four major distilleries in the local area, and thousands
of illegal ones, but that's a different story. Among them
stood the Malone's Bonded Warehouse on Chambers Street, owned by
the big shots at DWD. That's the Dublin Whiskey Distillery.

(38:18):
Malone's Bonded Warehouse and Reed's Malthouse stood at the corner
of Chamber and Rd Streets and aging away. In this
warehouse sat more than three hundred thousand gallons of whiskey
sitting in about five thousand large wooden casks, which back
then they called hogsheads, and if you don't do gallons,
that was about one point two million liters. They warehoused

(38:40):
product from several different distilleries, and the air inside smelled
faintly sweet from all of the evaporating alcohol. On this day,
around four forty five, Everything was all finished for the
day and everyone had all gone home except for one
excise officer who checked the malthouse and the warehouse locking
up for the night. It wasn't exactly a mission impossible bunker.

(39:05):
They basically worried more about the cask count and people
disobeying the don't steal barrel sign that was over the door.
Whiskey casks were stacked, sometimes several barrels high, in fairly
tight quarters with little ventilation, and the warehouse promises that
they'll keep your stuff safe without you having to worry
about people dipping their genitals in it. For no reason,

(39:28):
all was in order, and the world just kept ticking along,
leaving it be to age quietly in peace until about
eight o'clock that night. With all the hearths and fireplaces
and ovens and kilns and industrial chimneys in the area,
smoke was ever present, but this was different. This had

(39:49):
a mixed aroma that had a sharp medicinal smell that
stung the nose. It was kind of a sweet, burnt
toffee kind of ascent, and they described it as an overpowering,
spirited vapor so heavy that it made people cough and
even stagger All eyes spun to the warehouse just in
time to see a powerful column of blue flame breaking

(40:10):
through the roof and shooting thirty feet in the air.
There hadn't been anyone inside the warehouse to bear witness
or call an alarm up till now and possibly prevent
what happened next. It could have been spontaneous combustion or
human error, but it really didn't matter at this moment.
By a thirty alarms were ringing, and everyone from fire

(40:31):
crews to police, to soldiers to gawkers were pulling up
their goloshes and running to the scene. A bonded warehouse
was built to be solid and secure and in theory fireproof.
They were constructed with thick masonry, brick and stone walls.
The thing is Being fireproof from the outside meant that
the warehouse itself became an unintentional heat retaining structure on

(40:55):
the inside, a massive sealed oven chamber, if you will,
and all that heat had nowhere to go, so it
just radiated back inwards on its own contents, roasting the
barrels like an early Christmas ham. It acted like a
heat trap and burned much hotter than a traditional vented
wooden structure. Now, the barrels were designed to prevent vapor

(41:16):
from escaping, which trapped the expanding pressure created inside as
the liquid heated and expanded to the point where it
overpowered the barrel's ability to hold itself together. And once
that first cask burst, neighboring barrels quickly began to fail.
Like dominoes, Bottled whisky meant for retail is diluted down
to a lower alcohol content, but the whisky in these

(41:38):
casks was undiluted, high proof, and highly combustible. The floor
became a pool of flaming liquid, building by the minute
as more and more whisky burst free. All that liquid
and vapor turned the oven like effect into a blast furnace,
which only accelerated the destruction inside. The room likely hit
about a thousand degrees celsius or eighteen hundred at fahrenheit,

(42:00):
but the hottest parts of the flaming ethanol could have
topped two thousand degrees celsius or thirty seven hundred fahrenheit.
And of course, liquid is a slave to gravity, and
it constantly sought out any available exits it could seep
through under doors or through cracks in the building whatever
wasn't airtight. The first visible exit was a low window sill,

(42:22):
and the moment that blue orange liquid of ribbon flame
cascaded over the sill onto the street and met with
all that fresh air, everything kicked into a much higher
gear as the inferno mixed with real oxygen for the
first time. The sound of hawk asses escaping while oxygen
tried to rush in would have been as loud as

(42:42):
a turbine, and as windows and doors failed, each added
to the number of points of exchange. When all fifteen
members of the Dublin Fire Brigade arrived on the scene,
they were completely overwhelmed. They knew they were in trouble.
And you remember all the police and soldiers arriving at
the Cook County Assessor's office at the end of the
Blues Brothers movie, Well, that is what they called on

(43:05):
to help them control the blaze. There was more than
enough liquid inside the warehouse to create a sustained flowing waterfall,
and onlookers gasped. You expect smoke and flames, and maybe,
if you're lucky, a little crumbling of the walls. You
do not expect a half foot deep river of burning alcohol.
Ribbons of blue flame wove down through the steep, narrow,

(43:27):
cobbled stones of the streets, and it must have been mesmerizing.
Flames ran down the gutters, igniting whatever it could. The
liquid burned blue, but added yellow and orange highlights wherever
it came into contact with other non liquid burnables. The
crackle of a warm fire and the ooze and aws
of the growing crowds of onlookers did not inspire concern.

(43:50):
But as gravity carried the flaming river downhill towards Chambers
Street and New Street on its way, it spread to
wooden stables and pig pens, and nothing disinvites kurios like
the collective screaming of horses and pigs and goats and chickens.
That is all many residents needed to hear before evacuating,
and it is a credit to those who ran towards

(44:11):
the danger to free what animals that they could not.
Everyone left voluntarily. Of course. Police constables hauled terrified families
from their cramped rooms and toss them into the street
with the simple instruction to run where the fire wasn't.
There wasn't a panic, but there was a lot of
shouting and coughing. The Dublin Fire Brigade, police and soldiers

(44:32):
scrambled to keep the flames from spreading the nearby buildings,
many of which were packed with their own uniquely flammable wares.
Captain James Robert Ingram was in charge of the scene,
and they were lucky to have him. He knew that
water was only going to spread the flames further. As
it was. The flow measured only two feet wide by
six inches deep, but stretched for more than four hundred

(44:55):
meters down one side of Mill Street, that is about
eighty two dodge caravans long. Captain Ingram had his men
try to damn the flow by ripping up the roads
and creating sand barriers, but it still seeped through. Then
he had an inspiration. If you've been listening to this
episode long enough, what is the one thing coating every

(45:16):
surface of Victorian life that they had in abundance? To
work with maneure, They used bio waste from nearby tanneries
and the abundant abundant animal feces laying around to slap
up a barrier by hand, the way Richard Dreyfus made
his mashed potato art. In close encounters of the third kind,
and to skip by an awful lot of work. The

(45:37):
fire was extinguished and dead by four am the next morning.
You know what else was dead by four am. Okay,
before we get into it, let me say that compared
to London, Dublin at least had a partial sewer system.
They did not have eleven thousand open faced pecal flume
rides sluicing down into their water source. Eighteen seventies, Doublin

(46:00):
was maybe thirty to fifty percent cleaner than eighteen tens London.
That said, the streets were still stained with mud, horse PLoP,
vomit and other objectionables, and cholera was still a thing,
of course, in spite of the fact that flames connecting
to businesses and homes along the way were resulting in
hugely destructive fires that brought down walls and hollowed out buildings.

(46:23):
The novelty of a flaming river of free alcohol drew
the crowds, all right. People scooped it up in anything
they could find, hats, tins, baby bassinettes. A reporter from
the Irish Times nearly hurled when he saw men taking
off their stinking boots and using them as drinking cups.
They were just trying to salvage what they could from

(46:44):
this hot mess. People just cupped their hands and raw
dogged the literal firewater right out of the feces lined
trenches that it traced. It would have been like going
into a bar and getting a drink for free, but
it had to be served in a bedpan. For those
of you too young to remember before toilets at night,
you just duked and whizzed into a special bedpan, and

(47:07):
then when it was full, you just tucked it under
your bed as a kind of an air freshener. I
guess they died from drinking raw high proof undiluted booze.
That first swallow of the free hooch would have been
a shock. I'm not saying high proof undiluted alcohol would
automatically blind anyone who sucked from it, but I'm not
not saying that either. Now, thanks to the fire brigade

(47:30):
and the police and the soldiers, not one single person
actually died from the fire or smoke or burns. No
one was even trampled in the evacuation. No, of all
of the people who died on this day, every single
one of them had been poisoned. They died from drinking raw,
high proof, undiluted booze. They were probably expecting a mellow burn,

(47:54):
but this stuff must have burned and clawed and peeled
the linings from their throats. It must have gone down
like paint thinner. Some doubled over, wretching, grabbing their skulls
which would have been spinning out of control, and collapsed
from nausea. It's hard to explain how badly you fixed
up when you're slurring your speech at one fifteenth the
normal speed, and it's hard to puke your troubles away

(48:17):
after your respiratory and pulmonary systems have collapsed. Don't even
get me started on their livers and other organs. A
man named McGrain said nearly everyone was trying it before
suddenly falling down and becoming insensible. People were found collapsed
in alleyways and tenements, overcome from the effects of the
toxic impure liquor mixed with debris, soot, and of course

(48:40):
all that aforementioned mammalian bio waste. Dozens were dragged to
the hospital after almost immediately falling into profound comas, and
some recovered. Others did not. Of the five thousand barrels
of liquor, sixty one were recovered and some went missing
under suspicious circumstances. They say that six men were trying

(49:03):
to roll the barrels down the street. They were arrested
in a beastly state of intoxication. Tightly packed tenement buildings
on Mill Street, Ardy Street, Chambers Street, and Cork Street
were destroyed, along with nearby businesses, and many families were displaced.
Could have been worse, though at least you didn't have
to cope with delirium tremens Kujo of all the beasts

(49:26):
that lapped from the liquid chaos at the home of
William Eyer, a dog appeared at his address, kicked in
his door, staggering and drooling and foaming at the mouth.
Kujo was tipsy, and to clarify, the appropriate amount of
alcohol for a dog is supposed to be zero, and
the appropriate outcome should have seen the dog outside adding

(49:49):
to the vomit on the Eyre's property before collapsing dead. Instead,
it burst into his house, possessed by high octane zumis,
tearing around his home, destroying every piece of furniture it
touched before lunging at mister Eyre in an attempt to
saw his head off with its teeth. Mister Eyre managed

(50:09):
to clock it with an iron bar, which it barely noticed,
but it did change tact and now ran upstairs, tearing
around from room to room, destroying every procession Ire owned
as robustly as any fire could have, before finally throwing
itself and bursting through a window and ending its rampage
in a heap on the road below. Property damage was extensive,

(50:32):
both from the dog and the fire, but I'm specifically
going back to the fire now. Numerous buildings and homes
were scorched or destroyed, but the real toll is always
the human cost. Dozens were admitted to hospitals, like we said,
and at least thirteen people died, and it was amazing
that the death toll wasn't higher. The Lord Mayor, Peter

(50:54):
Paul McSwiney said that these deaths would have probably happened
in any city where there was a tendance to indulge
immoderately in drink, and went on to say in the
present case, the unfortunate victims apparently could not restrain themselves,
as I understand, from the burning fluid, so what happened. Well,

(51:16):
when I ask listeners what their favorite kind of disasters are,
some like nautical or aquatic disasters, and others really appreciate
engineering or structural failures. Well, raise a glass, because these
are kind of both. In both events, the disaster was
triggered by the sudden failure of containers that proved dangerous

(51:36):
because of the nature of the liquid they held, or
just the sheer volume of it. Both happened in densely
packed urban neighborhoods constructed from stone and feces, where one
was bombarded by an overwhelming tsunami of fluid while the
other faced trickling fingers of living spreading flame. In London,
eight people died, mostly women and children, from drowning or crushing.

(52:01):
In Dublin, at least thirteen people died, all men, all
with whiskey on their breath, all fatally intoxicated. Both disasters
drew big crowds, and both had legacies of municipal reforms
and lived in local memory for years as tales of bizarre,
almost surreal misfortune. In Saint Giles's case, we're talking about

(52:22):
some of the largest brewing vats in the world at
the time, which is ambitious and awesome as long as
your middle name is maintenance, which it was not. The
vats metal hoops had been weakened by age and the
pressure of the contents before giving away. In the days
that followed, the stench of spilled beer filled the air

(52:43):
as residents cleared debris and searched for missing loved ones.
Both the warehouse and the brewery were criticized out the
wazoo for the poor state of their equipment, and of
course there were lawsuits. However, if you have listened to
this show at all, you know that justice can be
fickle and not easily understood. In practice. The courts ruled

(53:05):
that the whole thing was an act of God, so
that was that no damages were owed. Now, if a
company destroyed my home and a court told me it
was okay because it was the will of Backrazog, I
would be pissed. If it helps at all. The Mew
Brothers were financially crippled by the loss, well at least

(53:27):
until Parliament granted them tax relief for all the lost beer,
which allowed them to recover. Following the disaster, London's breweries
began replacing their enormous wooden vats with steel and concrete tanks.
In the case of the Dublin warehouse, they couldn't determine
a cause for the fire like we said, so fault
and blame shifted to the victims, who were solidly ridiculed

(53:51):
in the press. As early Darwin Award winners. London was
treated as an industrial accident. Dublin was treated as a
moral failing. Even the Church went along with it. They said,
the true danger here was unbridled thirst, not actual fire,
and I'll give them partial credit. Malone's warehouse was nearly
ruined and damages ran into the thousands of pounds, which

(54:15):
would be millions today. The distillery operators were criticized for
safety oversights, but no criminal charges were ever laid. Like
the Mews, the Malones were seen as victims. The fire
was ruled an accident, and again that was that. And
of all the fires that Dublin had ever seen to
this point, this one stood out as one of the worst.

(54:38):
They very nearly passed a law banning makeshift cups, but
instead they modernized fire safety and regulations, and they improved
handling standards, so there was a silver lining. Who would
have ever thought that alcohol life's celebratory spirit could have
become an agent of such chaos and destruction. These disasters

(55:01):
really put a spotlight on a world where ambition outpaced
public and industrial safety. It also illustrated quite clearly how
no one eats more than the poor who were left
to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives. It's
a common story throughout history and around the world. The

(55:21):
poor live lives of quiet desperation, eking out in existence
in the shadow of their social betters, without ever earning
a second thought, cast aside and coded in a sheene
of waste products before a cleansing wave of alcohol came
and washed them all away. Now, I want you to

(55:50):
hold up a number of fingers, and if you can't
count them, or remember how many fingers you were using
in the first place, I want you to start drinking
water immediately and roll over onto your side. I knew
this was going to be a terrible idea. That's why
I switched it to a sipping game before we even began.
We mentioned different kinds of human and animal biote in

(56:10):
all of its many forms over eleven hundred times in
this episode, and as someone who walked away from drinking
it's easy for me to both spank and empathize with
anyone who did not play by the rules. The people
of the eighteen hundreds United Kingdom knew disaster pretty well.
They always were having fires and industrial accidents and outbreaks
of disease all the time. But the people of the

(56:33):
United Kingdom, even standing ankle deep in horse cakes as
always met horror with grit and humor, real stiff upper
lip kind of behavior, even in their poorest members. It's
admirable as hell, and no doubt ode to the centuries
of people surviving plague after war, after calamity, after catastrophe,

(56:54):
after you name it. It all became part of their
culture in the way that the Canadian spirits thought of
as polite cooperation, and the American spirit is shut up,
you don't know me, I'll do what I want. The
British spirit is keep calm and carry on. They rescued
each other, they mourned each other, and they shared their

(57:14):
tales of woe, usually with a glass of something dark
or bubbly or vaguely flammable in their hands. If you're
still conscious and able to cobble together coherent thought and
want to add me to your will as a small
thanks for all the laughs and vomit. Well, honestly, I
don't think you're going to live long enough to do that,
as whatever part of your brain that had that thought

(57:34):
is probably dying. But did you know the best way
to help the show is actually to share the show?
I'm serious about that. The more the show grows, the
more likely will eventually find a good life insurance or
funeral home sponsor. So we can stop with all of
these automated ads. And I apologize for them, I have
zero control over them. If you're sick of them. In

(57:56):
the meanwhile, you can always find our episodes ad free
on Patreon, patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo, and I
made a post online recently that most of you would
have missed, pointing out that the vast majority of Patreon
supporters just sign up make a monthly donation to help
keep the show they love going, and that's it. They

(58:18):
never log in, they don't answer emails, they don't care
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And I want everyone to know that I understand and
I get it. You will never meet anyone happier to
just let people be than me. If anyone is afraid
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(58:39):
a party bus where they have to coombaya in a
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I too, am an introvert, and like you, when my
role in any kind of social obligation gets reduced or canceled,
the feeling that washes over me, I'm assuming is what

(59:01):
heroin users must feel. Let me just say, as a
quiet one or a loner or an introvert, you are
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(59:24):
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(59:44):
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(01:00:07):
the money and had to choose, I always ask you
to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic
is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance
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(01:00:28):
and to date they have helped over six million people
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donate at Globalmedic dot Ca. On the next episode, I
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(01:00:49):
Difficult Situations, and Survival against the odds now. If she
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of checked boxes on our hands. I mean, it's not
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a lot of people will get crushed and some are
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(01:01:12):
air disaster of nineteen seventy two. We'll talk soon. Safety
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The Beer & Whiskey Flood Drinking Disastersode of 1814-1875 | Episode 93

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Beer & Whiskey Flood Drinking Disastersode of 1814-1875 | Episode 93