Act Of God

A narrative history of the 1814 London Beer Flood - and the story that popular history replaced it with. On the afternoon of Monday 17 October 1814, a twenty-two-foot wooden maturation vat at the Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road failed under hydrostatic pressure, sending a fifteen-foot wave of fermenting porter into the streets of the St Giles Rookery. Eight people died. Seven of them were women and children. One was a fourteen-year-old domestic servant, scouring pots in a pub yard. One was a sixty-year-old woman holding a wake for her two-year-old son, killed the day before by the ordinary diseases of poverty. Three of the dead were retrieved from the same flooded cellar, found together: a thirty-year-old woman, her three-year-old son, and her sixty-five-year-old mother. The coroner's inquest returned a verdict of casualty, accidentally, and by misfortune - the legal classification known as an Act of God. The brewery's partners bore no liability. No compensation was paid to the families of the dead. The community of St Giles raised thirty-three pounds, five shillings and sevenpence at a public house on Bainbridge Street, charging sixpence at the door for the right to view the dead, and used the money to buy coffins. Nine months later, Parliament passed the Allowance of Duty to Meux and Company Act on the personal recommendation of the Prince Regent, restoring £7,250 in excise payments the brewery had lost when its porter flooded the streets. The Act passed both Houses in thirteen days. It generated no recorded opposition. ACT OF GOD is the full history of what happened that afternoon and what happened for the century that followed - told through the lives of the people the flood killed, the legal and financial machinery that protected the enterprise that killed them, and the extraordinary subsequent career of the fortune the brewery produced. It traces the Meux family from the coroner's workhouse to a Hertfordshire baronetcy; follows the fortune to Lady Valerie Meux's Egyptology collection, her attempt to repatriate looted Ethiopian manuscripts, and the battery of naval guns she purchased privately and presented to Lord Roberts to relieve Ladysmith during the Boer War. It ends at the Dominion Theatre, which stands today on the ground where the vat stood, and which carries no plaque. Along the way, the book maps the myths that popular history has attached to the Beer Flood - the boom heard five miles away, the drunken Irish mobs, the hospital riot, the inflated death toll - tracing each one to its first identifiable source and checking it against the contemporary London press. None of them appear in the 1814 newspapers. All of them serve the same cultural function: they convert a serious event into a comic one, and in doing so they make it easier to remember as an anecdote and harder to reckon with as an argument. The argument is this: the Beer Flood was not an Act of God. It was the product of specific engineering decisions, specific maintenance practices, and a specific legal framework that distributed the costs of industrial failure to the people with the least power to refuse them. The system that produced the verdict and the parliamentary rebate has changed substantially since 1814. The structural pattern has not. For readers of Erik Larson, Patrick Radden Keefe, and David Grann.

Maße: 22.9 x15.2 x3.0 cm