Unbelievable But True: The Week's Wildest Real Story

On October seventeenth, 1814, a wave of dark brown porter beer, over one-point-five million liters of it, tore through a London neighborhood. Last week we covered the Australian government losing a war against emus. This feels like a logical next step in the historical record. Eight people died. Drowned. In beer. I feel like that requires some explanation. It all started at the Meux and Company Brewery on Tottenham Court Road. They had enormous fermentation vats. One in particular was twenty-two feet tall, held together by massive iron rings. That's the size of a three-story building. Just filled with beer. And on that afternoon, a brewery worker noticed one of the seven-hundred-pound iron rings had slipped off the vat.

His superior told him not to worry. That it would be fine. A classic "it'll be fine" moment. About an hour later, the whole thing gave way. The pressure of the fermenting porter caused a catastrophic failure. The explosion was so loud it was mistaken for cannon fire. And this liquid doesn't just seep out. It's a wave. A fifteen-foot-high wave. And it crashed directly into the adjacent neighborhood, the St. Giles Rookery. Which was not a nice part of town. It was one of London's most notorious slums. People lived in crowded tenements, often in basement apartments. The wave of beer and debris slammed into these buildings, collapsing walls and flooding the cellars where entire families were living.

A mother and daughter were taking tea when the wall came down. Another group was holding a wake for a two-year-old boy in a basement. The beer flooded the room. So the brewery's vat explodes. It kills eight people in their own homes. What was the legal outcome? The company was taken to court. An inquest was held. Witnesses described the brewery's neglect. And the verdict? The coroner and the jury concluded the entire event was an Act of God. An Act of God. For a broken iron hoop on a beer tank that someone had been warned about. Correct. No one was held accountable. The brewery not only avoided prosecution, they later petitioned Parliament for a tax rebate on the thousands of barrels of porter they lost.

They asked for a tax break. And they received it. The rebate, worth about seven thousand pounds, saved the company from bankruptcy. This feels like a pattern. An industrial disaster happens in a poor neighborhood, and the corporation responsible just… walks away. It's a very old pattern. You can draw a straight line from this to the Great Molasses Flood in Boston in 1919. Right. Same story, different sticky liquid. A giant tank of molasses burst in a largely Italian immigrant neighborhood. Twenty-one people died. The company tried the same tactics. They initially blamed anarchists, claiming the tank was sabotaged. Did that work? Not that time.

The court case dragged on for years, but the company was eventually found liable for shoddy engineering. It was a landmark ruling. The London Beer Flood, on the other hand, set a very different kind of precedent. So what happened to the brewery? And the neighborhood? The brewery operated for another hundred years or so before it was demolished. The Dominion Theatre stands on the site now. Is there a plaque? A memorial to the victims? No. Nothing. The St. Giles Rookery itself was eventually cleared away to build New Oxford Street. The disaster just became one more reason for the city to bulldoze the slum. The memory was paved over. So the story just survives as a strange piece of trivia.

A footnote written in beer.