A Brewery Vat Burst and Drowned Eight Londoners in Porter

At about 4:30 on the afternoon of October 17, 1814, an iron hoop slipped off a 22-foot wooden vat of fermenting porter at Meux & Co's Horse Shoe Brewery, on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Great Russell Street. The clerk, George Crick, had noticed the slipped band hours earlier. Hoops failed three or four times a year, and nothing had ever come of it. He wrote a note to a partner and went back to his rounds.

The vat held roughly 3,500 barrels of ten-month-old porter. When it gave way, it took out a neighbouring vat and stove in the back wall of the brewery. A wave somewhere around fifteen feet high surged out into the St Giles rookery, one of the worst slums in London — densely packed back-to-backs where families lived in cellars below street level.

In one of those cellars, an Irish family was holding a wake for a two-year-old boy who had died the day before. Five of the mourners drowned in beer. Three more were killed elsewhere on New Street: Eleanor Cooper, 14, crushed against a wall while drawing water; Mary Mulvey, 30, and her three-year-old son Thomas Murry; and a 60-year-old named Ann Saville. Several of the bodies were children under five.

The coroner's jury heard the evidence and returned a verdict of casualty by act of God. That ruling mattered. It blocked compensation claims and kept Meux & Co solvent. The firm then petitioned Parliament and clawed back the excise duty already paid on the lost porter — about £7,250 in 1814 money. They were brewing again within months. The wooden vat, slowly, stopped being an industry standard; lined cast-iron and concrete took over in the decades that followed. The Horse Shoe Brewery itself stood until 1922. The Dominion Theatre is on the site now.