On Tottenham Court Road stood Meux & Co’s Horse Shoe Brewery, one of the largest brewers in London, where porter — the dark beer of the capital — was matured in wooden vats of enormous size. The greatest of them stood 22 feet tall and was filled nearly to the brim with 3,555 barrels of ten-month-old porter, bound round with massive iron hoops. At about half past four on the afternoon of October 17, 1814, a storehouse clerk named George Crick noticed that one of the 700-pound iron bands had slipped from the vat. It happened two or three times a year; his supervisor told him no harm would come of it, and to write a note to have it mended.
An hour later the vat burst without warning. The escaping beer tore the stopcock from a neighbouring vat, smashed several large barrels, and blew out the brewery’s rear wall — 25 feet high and two and a half bricks thick. Between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons of porter escaped in all, by the differing accounts of the time. A wave of beer some 15 feet high swept into New Street, a cul-de-sac of the St Giles rookery, eight acres of some of the worst slum housing in London, destroying two houses outright, badly damaging two more, and pouring into the inhabited cellars.
Eight people were killed, all of them women and children of the rookery. In one of the destroyed houses an Irish family was holding a wake for a two-year-old boy; the boy’s mother and four fellow mourners died. A four-year-old girl taking tea with her mother was killed in the second house; a servant girl of fourteen was buried by the falling brewery wall in the yard of the Tavistock Arms; and a child of three was found dead in another house in the street. Everyone inside the brewery itself survived. The names and ages of the eight dead — the youngest three, the eldest sixty-five — were read out at the inquest two days later.
The coroner’s inquest sat at the St Giles workhouse before George Hodgson, the coroner for Middlesex. The jury walked to the scene, viewed the brewery and the bodies, and heard Crick and the other witnesses. It returned the verdict that the eight had lost their lives “casually, accidentally and by misfortune” — in the law of the day, an act of God. Meux & Co therefore owed no compensation to the families of the dead.
The disaster had still cost the brewery some £23,000 in lost beer, ruined buildings and the destroyed vat, and it faced ruin. After a private petition, Parliament allowed it to recover about £7,250 in excise duty on the lost porter, and the firm was saved; it brewed on the site until 1921, and the Dominion Theatre stands there today. Across the industry, the flood ended the age of the giant wooden vat: brewers turned instead to smaller vessels and to lined concrete tanks.