Drown your sorrows

Yr. Humble Chronicler has been on a diet now for two weeks. I have successfully subdued the urges for chocolate, crisps and human flesh, but alcohol is another matter entirely. I could murder a pint of Guinness. Or a glass of wine. Or a washed-out-bleach-bottle of prison hooch, for that matter.

I am told that water is a wonderful thing – no calories, no harmful additives and it’s free. My response has thus far been “Yes, but when did you last hear of someone drowning in beer?” I now have to eat my words.

I am speaking of an event that took place in 1814 in St Giles, pictured right. St Giles was, for centuries, a poor district, regarded as something of a no-go area by law enforcement. A major employer in the area was the Horse Shoe Brewery, owned by Sir Henry Meux.

On the roof of this brewery were several huge storage tanks. The largest of all, holding 135,000 gallons, was the porter tank. Porter is a drink historically associated with London, its name being derived from the fact that it was much favoured by porters working on the river - a short walk from the Horse Shoe Brewery, in fact.

On October 17, an event occurred that The Times described in its subsequent report as “one of the most melancholy accidents we ever remember.” The porter tank, despite twenty-nine metal hoops reinforcing it, unexpectedly burst. The impact of the explosion destroyed the other storage tanks, resulting in a veritable torrent of over 323,000 gallons of beer pouring down on to the streets below.

The flood completely destroyed two houses in New Street as well as knocking down the back walls of the Tavistock Arms, a poulterer’s shop and two houses in Great Russell Street.

Quite apart from the initial impact damage, the incident was worsened by two factors – the fact that the ground in that area is flat, and the fact that St Giles was a slum. Many poor families lived in basements, and so the beer, with nowhere else to go, flooded their homes. Many lost everything they owned. Despite the best efforts of rescuers from the brewery and elsewhere in the neighbourhood, eight were drowned and many more injured (including an unfortunate maidservant trapped under the wall of the Tavistock Arms). The last victim died the following day from alcohol poisoning.

A somewhat unexpected consequence was a rumpus at the nearby Middlesex Hospital, where the injured were treated – patients unaware of the disaster were convinced that those coming in had been supplied with free beer and, judging by the smell, there was plenty to go around.

Tottenham Court Road, 1896. The Horse Shoe Brewery is in the foreground to the right.

Once the initial disaster was over, a  number of people decided to take advantage of the free beer. I can’t imagine the mixed flavours of ale and porter mixed with brick dust, mud, horse manure, drowned people and whatever else was on the streets that day made for a satisfying brew, but then some people will drink anything. The area apparently retained a beery smell for some weeks afterwards.

Relatives of the deceased attempted to recoup some of their losses by charging people to see their drowned loved ones. This caused a somewhat unexpected addendum to the disaster, when the floor of an overcrowded house collapsed, dropping the gawkers into a still-flooded cellar.

The whole incident was ruled to be an Act of God, with nobody found at fault (I reiterate – 29 steel hoops reinforcing the tank). The Horse Shoe Brewery was in serious danger of bankruptcy, but fortunately for them was refunded the duty they had paid on the stored beer by court order.

The brewery was rebuilt and stayed there until 1922. It is now the site of the Dominion Theatre. We will rock you, indeed.

Fly me to the Moon

George Orwell is, of course, best known for his political writings – Nineteen Eighty Four, Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London and, of course, his Cerys Matthews biography, Homage to Catatonia. When he wasn’t busy being political, satirising the BBC or annoying T. S. Eliot, he was a man who enjoyed a good pint.

Unlike his contemporaries Dylan Thomas and Nina Hamnett, Orwell wasn’t an excessive drinker (although he was an excessive smoker, as alluded to by his essay Books vs. Cigarettes). He favoured the simple pint of beer, though never lager.

I have mentioned his once-favoured watering hole, the Fitzroy Tavern, in these pages a number of times before. However, this was not his perfect London pub. His perfect London pub was a little place called The Moon Under Water.

The Moon Under Water, despite what the photograph on the right may imply, was entirely fictional. It formed the title of a 1946 essay for the Evening Standard in which he set out his description of what he considered to be the perfect London pub.

He describes it as being two minutes from the bus stop and on a side street – this would more-or-less fit the Fitzroy, the Wheatsheaf and the dearly departed Beer House, Orwell’s three favourite hostelries. He says that despite this, the Moon is entirely free from drunks and rowdies, “even on a Saturday night.” Yr. Humble Chronicler does know of such a bar in Soho, but I’m afraid I’m keeping it to myself.

The Princess Louise

He says that the whole place should be “uncompromisingly Victorian,” but not in a fake way. I’m with him on this, partly because I hate the sleek, modern West End bars where the staff are very pretty but can’t pour a decent pint to save their lives (if you can even get a pint, that is). I know of several London pubs that are broadly Victorian in decor, including several in the West End. To my mind, the most uncompromisingly Victorian pub in London is the utterly beautiful Princess Louise in Holborn, which for many years boasted that it had last been redecorated in 1890. Then a few years ago they redecorated it again, but fortunately kept the old fixtures and fittings.

The clientele, Orwell suggested, should largely be regulars who are there for the conversation. This is interesting, as Orwell was not a naturally gregarious fellow, and often found it difficult to talk to people about anything other than politics.

The range of food he suggests should be readily available would not, I suspect, be found in any non-gastro-pub in London. Cheese, pickles, caraway seed biscuits and liver sausage sandwiches are unusual bar snacks today, and as for his suggestion of mussels, given that most pubs can’t even microwave properly, I certainly wouldn’t trust them with shellfish. A hearty lunch is a possibility, though rare due to the aforementioned dependence on the microwave (here, even the Fitzroy falls down).

Some of his criteria are simply unknown today – he considers the serving of beer in a handleless glass to be a “mistake.” Strawberry-pink china mugs, his favoured drinking vessel, are entirely alien to the modern drinker (though Orwell admits that even then they were a rarity in London).

He says that perhaps the most desirable quality of such a pub is that it should have a decent garden, although he admits that he knows of only three such pubs (none of which he names). I myself have encountered none in the City or West End. The King’s Head in Islington has a small garden, not accessible to the public, and the Dolphin in Hackney has a patio out back (at least, I think it does, I was drunk at the time). There are many more out in the suburbs.

Although Orwell’s pub was never real, the Wetherspoon’s chain of pubs was set up with his essay in mind – hence the large number of such pubs with the word “Moon” in the title, including several Moons-Under-Water. I suspect Wetherspoon’s was not what Orwell had in mind, given its straight glasses, young bar staff, lagers, fake-Victorian decor and heinous numbers of chavs. They did boast (possibly they still do, it’s a while since I’ve been in one) of having no music to allow conversation, as Orwell stipulated, but I suspect this was also to keep overheads down – no music, no royalties.

So, Orwell’s pub remains but a dream, and with pubs closing at an alarming rate, I suspect it will some day become entirely irrelevant. Which is a shame. I’d like a strawberry-pink china mug one of these days.

Further Reading

http://www.whitebeertravels.co.uk/orwell.html#moon
 - The full essay.

http://londonparticulars.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/puttin-on-the-fitz/
 - In which the Fitzroy is discussed.

http://londonparticulars.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/a-bright-cold-day-in-april/
 - George Orwell, the West End and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Pepys gets stoned

Samuel Pepys is one of those Londoners whose exploits could fill a book (you could call it, I don’t know, The Diary of Samuel Pepys or something). I suspect I’ll end up returning to him more than once.

I think my favourite fact about him, though, was to do with the fact that he suffered from kidney stones. Not a particularly cherishable fact in itself, nor was the operation he had to remove it. I won’t go into details here, but it involved some significant below-the-waist jiggery-pokery that would make any man wince. Put it this way, an important preoperative procedure was to hire four strong men to hold the patient down and tie him up.

In the 17th century, pre-anaesthetics and pre-antiseptics, the most common advice given by doctors to patients contemplating surgery was “don’t.” Indeed, this policy was in operation well into the middle of the 19th century. Pepys’ operation was a resounding success, removing a stone the size of a tennis ball from his bladder, but was not without its complications – the wound later went gangrenous, causing a great deal of pain for him in later life.

"Ouch."

No, my favourite part was that Pepys considered the operation to be a second birthday, and would actually hold a party every year. The 1663 diary entry for this day reveals that the operation had no long term effects on his appetite. For the twelve people invited (including Mrs Turner, whose house had formed the operating theatre), the feast on offer was “a fricasee of rabbits and chicken, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a most rare lamprey pie, and a dish of anchovies.” Plus desserts. Plus wine.

Another favourite dish was “umble pie”, an inexpensive dish made from deer offal. Sources differ as to what sort of offal it was – some go with liver, lights and intestines, some favour the testes. In any case, this particular delicacy is the source of the phrase “humble pie”.

On a foody note, perhaps related to Pepys’ kidney trouble was the fact that Londoners in those days drank very little water. Again, the advice was “don’t.” What was recommended instead for the average working Londoner was a drink called “small beer.” This was weak and low in alcohol, but, importantly, the water used to make it still had to be boiled. The principles of water-borne disease wouldn’t be understood Dr John Snow conducted his studies in Soho in the 19th century, but nonetheless it was noted that people who drank water got ill and people who drank beer didn’t.

While drinking beer like water sounds rather fun, up to a point, it wasn’t really beer in the sense that we’d think of it. It was weak-tasting stuff, not unlike Budweiser in cans (allegedly), and nothing special as compared to the proper ales. And from this we get the term “small beer,” meaning “of little consequence” or “a bit rubbish”.

Here endeth the lesson.