The Great Vinegar Flood
The HP Sauce factory was a beloved part of Aston’s industrial landscape, but could the locals forgive it when it flooded their town with acid?
It must have felt like some strange new chemical weapon had been deployed. The first signal was the explosion, ringing out in the December gloaming. It was followed by streams of liquid, mephitic in such quantity, slicing thinly through the streets, blackbrown and topped with a whitish spume. Then there were the fumes. Invisible clouds of bitter, acidulated vapour that pulled forth dribbling sinus juices from the eyes and nasal cavities of anyone who got too close. Families, sitting down to their evening meal on a Friday in those doldrum days between Christmas and New Year, were summoned from their tables by the shouts and calls of their neighbours.
It was Aston, Birmingham, it was the 28th December 1956. It was the Great Vinegar Flood.
HP Sauce is one of the UK’s most familiar condiment brands. A tangy concoction of tomatoes, dates, tamarind extract, sweetener and spices, mixed into a malt vinegar base, it remains the best-selling brand of the unprepossessingly named ‘brown sauces’, popular in the UK and Commonwealth. Generally used as a spicier alternative to ketchup, fans of the sauce slather it all over chips, bacon butties, full English breakfasts and, in one case personally known to the author, on roast dinners. A long-standing myth is that former Prime Minister Harold Wilson poured the stuff over every hot meal, much to the chagrin of his wife.1
This is not the sauce’s only political connection. The ‘HP’ stands for ‘Houses of Parliament’, another probably mythical connection that was exploited by the sauce’s inventor following a claim that bottles were served in the Palace of Westminster.
That inventor was Frederick Gibson Garton from West Bridgford in Nottingham. A grocer by trade, he was in some respects a good businessman. He invented his sauce in the late nineteenth century and brewed it in a copper cauldron in his backyard before selling it from a small cart on which was painted the words ‘Garton's HP Sauce’, a name he had registered in 1895. So far, so smart. However, whatever skill he possessed as a saucier, he lacked a certain financial nous. Around the turn of the century he fell into debt with one of his suppliers, Edwin Samson Moore, the ruthlessly entrepreneurial founder of the Midlands Vinegar Company. With Garton unable to settle his debt with cash, Moore accepted the rights to the receipe in lieu of payment and even gave the impecunious Garton an extra £150 on top.2 The Nottingham man’s debt was duly discharged and Moore began the industrial production of the sauce at his plant in Aston.
Aston, a district just north of the centre of Birmingham, is most famous today for its football team, Aston Villa. An industrial, largely working-class area, its most celebrated sons are the four original members of Black Sabbath, who based their heavy metal sound on the repetitive crash of stamp forges in the local factories.3
Even in an environment thick with workshops, the HP factory was a prominent landmark, its distinctive sign rising above the rows of terraced houses that housed its workers. Changes came in the middle of the twentieth century; some of the terraces were pulled down to make way for a stretch of motorway. Although the new route ran straight through HP’s estate, the factory endured and the company constructed an aerial pipeline over the carriageway from one section of the now bisected factory to the other. The pipeline carried vinegar.
Vinegar had been the primary ingredient of HP sauce since Garton’s day, but production at scale required industrial quantities of the stuff. By the 1950s, the factory maintained huge vats of it, each one twenty feet high with walls three feet thick. You could, according to one former delivery driver, ‘have fitted a bus’ inside each one.4 One bus, or a hell of a lot of vinegar. It was one of these metal monstrosities that burst that December evening and threatened to pickle the streets of Birmingham with enough vinegar to season thirteen million bags of chips.
An explosion forced a rupture in a vat and sent fifteen thousand gallons of vinegar cascading out of the factory and into the streets that surrounded it. According to eyewitnesses, the flood ran waist-high, flowing downhill for a quarter of a mile. It ran over gardens, into houses and all over the shop. Sticks of furniture were carried off on the brown river. It was relentless. One resident, having sealed the gaps under her doors with rolled-up carpet, found that vinegar came into her house anyway. It bubbled its way through the plumbing system, coming up through the bath plug and squirting all over the place.5
Once the initial flow had stopped, the community gathered in the streets, armed with mops and brooms to sweep away the acid flood. Children collected bottles and jugs from kitchens with which to bail out the sodden streets. It was a valiant effort, but this was not amateur hour. Eventually, fire crews arrived with specialised pumping equipment but it still took hours to cleanse the area. Even then, it was a job only partly done. The worst affected houses were uninhabitable for the night; householders had to seek refuge with friends and relatives. They were soon able to return but the odour of vinegar lingered for weeks.
No one was hurt and, if rumours are to be believed, some even profited when the HP company, which accepted blame from the outset, paid compensation. ‘All the houses along Tower Road had new carpets’, said Eric Row, a former delivery driver for the firm, ‘I don’t know whether they all had carpets in the first place, but they all claimed for them!’6 It’s unlikely that the company minded too much. It was a minor event in its history and didn’t affect business. Although the lost vinegar was worth around £800 (about £17,000 in 2018 terms), the management reported record profits that year.7
The locals, many of whom relied on HP for employment, were more concerned when the factory closed in 2007. Heinz Foods, which had by then bought the company, shifted the Birmingham operation to its facilities in the Netherlands and the history of HP in Aston came to an end. The Birmingham workers held a ‘wake’ for the factory in March of that year, even placing some empty sauce bottles in a coffin and the story of the Great Vinegar Flood passed into local folklore.[10]
This story, which emerged in the 1960s, arose after Mrs Wilson gave an interview to the Sunday Times in which she claimed ‘if Harold has a fault, it is that he will drown everything with HP Sauce’. Harold himself later admitted that his preferred condiment was the more upmarket Lea & Perrin’s Worcestershire Sauce but as a Labour leader, he was happy to let the man-of-the-people HP version flourish
‘Frederick Gibson Garton’, Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History
L. M. Harrison, ‘Factory Music: How The Industrial Geography and Working-Class Environment of Post-War Birmingham Fostered the Birth of Heavy Metal’, Journal of Social History 44, no. 1 (1 September 2010): 145–58.
Paul Cole ‘Aston's streets flooded with 15,000 gallons of vinegar’, Birmingham Mail 28th December 2015
‘45,000 Gallons of Vinegar Flooded Their Homes’, Daily Mirror 29th December 1956 p5
Ibid, Birmingham Mail 28th December 2015
‘Affairs: Record Year for H.P. Sauce: Increased Dividend’ Birmingham Daily Post, Friday 12 April 1957 p20