Beer, Brewery history, History of beer
The Great Manchester Beer Flood of 1831
11th July 2019 Martyn Cornell	6 Comments
Anything they do in That London, Manchester can do as well, including the catastrophic collapse of a giant vat full of maturing porter. Admittedly the Great London Beer Flood of 1814 was rather bigger than the event in Lancashire 17 years later, with the vat that burst at Meux's brewery, off Tottenham Court Road, containing nearly six times as much porter as the one that collapsed at Mottram's brewery in Salford in 1831, but eight people, all women and children, died in the London flood, while the only real victim of the one in Salford was a pig that must have had a serious hangover the next day.
Here's a report of the event in Manchester, from an Irish newspaper, the Westmeath Journal, in Mullingar, Thursday 3 March 1831, p2:
Another newspaper had a slightly different take on the event, including the drunken pig. This is from the Chester Courant of Tuesday March 1 1831, courtesy of Peter Dyer:
A Flood of Porter – On Wednesday morning a large porter vat, containing about 380 barrels of the best brown stout, burst on the premises of Messrs. Mottram, in Brewery-street, Salford (Manchester.) The liquid rushed out with such force as to carry before it a portion of a wall, under which it nearly buried a man and horse, which were at the outside. Another man, who was in the same room in which the vat stood, was carried out into the yard by the flood. The beer overflowed a pond, and was for a few minutes two feet deep in the cellar of a cottage. All sorts of vessels were in requisition for carrying off the precious liquid from the pond. Among other comers was a sow, which was seen in the course of the day staggering off in a state of disgusting inebriety. The loss from the accident, we regret to state, is estimated at from £700 to £1000.
The Westmeath Journal was right to say that London brewers "occasionally" suffered from such "casualties": among others there were at least two vat collapses at Whitbread's brewery in Chiswell Street, in 1776 and 1794, in the latter of which hundreds of rats "were taken up by pailfuls in an intoxicated state," while one of four vats, each containing 1,500 barrels, collapsed at Henry Thrale's Anchor brewery in Southwark (later Barclay Perkins) in 1772. Outside London, a 530-barrel vat collapsed at Searanke and Biggs's brewery in Hatfield, Hertfordshire in 1805, though locals with "tubs and pails", knee-deep in beer, managed to save around 150 barrels-worth of beer; and a 40-fee-high vat containing 720 barrels of vinegar burst at Fardon's vinegar brewery in Westley Street, Birmingham on Christmas day, 1891, flooding the surrounding streets several feet deep: THAT must have stunk.
In Cork, Ireland, in 1913 a 560-barrel vat at Murphy's Lady's Well brewery burst. One brewery worker, who had been underneath the vat when it collapsed, had to swim 40 yards through porter to save himself as the stream carried him along. Outside in the street the porter was diluted with water from a fire-hose by quick-reacting brewery workers, to stop anyone from trying to drink it.
Mottram's brewery, incidentally, looks to have recovered from its loss and ran through until 1897, when it was acquired by a local rival, the Cornbrook Brewery Co. Ltd, itself acquired by Eddie Taylor's United Breweries in 1961.
By coincidence, on the same page of the Westmeath Journal as the story about the collapsing vat was another report of an accident at a brewery, this time more tragic:
The newspaper report suggests the poor victim's internal pain was caused by his diving into the cold water after the accident: my understanding of how this works is that in fact he almost certainly didn't stay in the cold water long enough. If you're unlucky enough to be badly burnt or scalded, you have to cool down the affected parts as much and as quickly as possible, because otherwise the underlying flesh, muscle and organs stay very hot, conpounding the harm the heat has already done. This was discovered in the Second World War, when doctors realised that badly burnt RAF pilots who had ditched in the sea recovered much better from their injuries than those who had bailed out over or crashed on land: the cold sea water cooled down their burnt bodies internally and lessened the harm. Morris's brewery in Lewes became Ballard's in 1876, which was acquired by Page & Overton's brewery in Croydon in 1927.
beer vat collapseMorris's brewery LewesMottram's brewery Salfordporter
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6 thoughts on "The Great Manchester Beer Flood of 1831"
Rod Jones says:
Another top bit of research Martyn.
I thought the Meux incident was a one-off.
By no means … they were pushing the envelope with those big vats.
Ryan Schreyer says:
Now it's 8am here and I'm barely through my first coffee, so my brain is a little fuzzy… but I half remember reading that incidents like this weren't all that uncommon due to factories trying to one-up each other with the size of their vats during this time period?
Mind you, it could have been about American factories and molasses floods? Man, my brain is NOT working today.
Ah yes, the Great Boston Molasses Flood. Now THAT was a disaster: 21 people came to a sticky end.
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Doug Hoverson says:
The only comparable disaster I have found in my Wisconsin research was reported in the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel 10 November 1874. It stated (imprecisely) that "a large beer cooler" collapsed and flooded the offices below. The headline read "Just Our Luck. Three Hundred Barrels of Beer Broke Loose, and We Were Not There." The deadliest vat explosion in Wisconsin (at Rahr's Bellevue Brewery in Green Bay) which killed six and injured seven, was caused by fumes igniting, rather than cooperage failing.
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