The Great Gorbals Distillery Disaster
The Great Gorbals Distillery Disaster
Iain Russell
In 1993 Jamie Walker founded the Adelphi Distillery Company, an independent specialist whisky and whiskey bottler. Jamie took the name from the Loch Katrine Adelphi Distillery, once owned by his great-grandfather. The distillery, in Scotland’s industrial capital, Glasgow, had a chequered history …
It was the worst Scotch whisky distillery disaster of the early twentieth century, and came close to drowning one of Glasgow’s most densely-populated neighbourhoods in a flood of sticky brown alcoholic liquor. Miraculously there was only one fatality. But the shocking damage to property and the terrifying accounts of the survivors, brought home to the Scottish public the grave dangers of siting whisky distilleries in busy city-centre locations.
The scene of the disaster was the Gorbals district of Glasgow, in a bustling and overcrowded industrial area on the south bank of the River Clyde. The Loch Katrine Adelphi Distillery had opened there in 1824 and was subsequently acquired by Archibald Walker & Co. When the journalist Alfred Barnard visited during the 1880s, he found a range of brick buildings covering nearly two acres on both sides of Muirhead Street, including extensive barley lofts, malting floors and bonded warehouses. There were two still houses, one containing a Coffey still for producing grain whisky, and the other with four pot stills to produce single malt whisky.
Barnard noticed on his visit that work was proceeding on a lofty two-storey extension to the malt whisky distillery. A huge tank was installed on the ground floor to store draff – the soggy grain left over when the mashing of malted barley and hot water was completed in the mash tuns. Draff is rich in nutrients, and it was sold to local farmers for use as cattle feed. The second floor of the new building held two wash chargers, each with a capacity of 45,000 gallons, which stored and then fed the wash stills with the beery alcohol brewed in the washbacks. In 1897 the building had two elevated platforms installed above the ground floor, on which were placed two large washbacks to add to the ten which Barnard had noticed in the adjacent building more than a decade earlier.
The distillery’s large grain whisky-making capacity attracted the Distillers’ Company Ltd, Scotland’s biggest whisky company, which purchased the plant in 1902. Unfortunately, it appears that the company may subsequently have neglected the care and maintenance of the malt distillery buildings. In November 1906, the ramshackle arrangement of the draffhouse resulted in a fatal structural failure.
Only two of the Loch Katrine Adelphi’s one hundred distillery workers were present in the draffhouse at 10 o’clock one Wednesday morning in November 1906. However, a queue of more than twenty horses and carts had formed outside the door of the building, as farm servants waited patiently to load up their share of at least 80 tons of spent grains stored in the draff tank. A farm servant, John Muirhead, was backing his horse into the building when there was a loud report, which he described as sounding like a cannon shot. One of the large wash chargers had toppled from the iron pillars that supported it. The charger and 45,000 gallons of hot wash came tumbling down from over 60 feet above ground level, upsetting the two full washbacks on the platform below. A cascade of wash, bricks, broken timbers and twisted iron crashed onto the draff tank on the ground floor, smashing it to smithereens.
According to one estimate, as much as 200,000 gallons of hot wash tipped into the confined space of the draffhouse, mixing with the spilled grain from the shattered draff tank and then rushing out of the door and into the street. The two draffhouse workers, William O’Hara and David Lorimer, were caught in the deluge. They described later how their clothes were torn from their bodies by the raging tide, which carried them along through the door and dashed them against the wall of the granary opposite. With them went John Muirhead and the farm labourer waiting behind him, James Ballantyne, along with their horses and carts. Another queuing farmworker, Daniel Cavin, told pressmen that he was swept along with frightened men and horses, before crashing against a wall 60 feet further down the street. He saw a horse and cart hurled violently against the stout timber door of the granary, which shattered on the impact.
The amazing accounts given by witnesses of the scale and force of the tidal wave were to be confirmed the following day. The brown tide mark on the draffhouse wall was found to be 20 feet above floor level and reached more than 10 feet above street level on the granary wall outside. Behind the distillery, the roof of Whitelaw’s Bakehouse collapsed under the weight of falling masonry and timbers. Wash poured through and flooded the premises, with such force that a dough-making machine weighing more than half a ton was carried for twenty feet across the floor. One baker recounted later that he had to swim to safety, and an external stairway was swept away when the tide rushed out through the bakehouse and into a narrow alley outside.
At the front of the building, what a local newspaper described as “a boiling torrent” of wash and spent grains raced along adjoining streets in the direction of Gorbals Cross, flooding shops and alarming the shop owners. Meanwhile the police, distillery workers and ambulance men arrived in Muirhead Street to a scene of utter carnage. Men were struggling to free themselves from the debris of the collapsed building, still knee-deep in filthy liquid. Horses lay struggling on the roadway, kicking like fury as they attempted to get up from the slippery cobbles. James Ballantyne sat stunned on a pile of wood, his head in his hands, muttering “I’m dead, I’m dead”. Of the eleven men caught up in the flood, nine were carted off to hospital with cuts, bruises and, in three cases, broken bones. The unfortunate Ballantyne, suffering from shock and severe internal injuries, died a few hours later.
The dirty tide subsided shortly after the accident, as the liquid found its way into street sewers, but the surrounding streets and buildings were left stained an ugly brown. A fatal accident inquiry failed to establish the cause of the building’s collapse. Some experts blamed the collapse of the charger on a failure of the building’s foundations or of the walls, claiming they had not been designed to carry the weight of the platform and heavy tanks that were added in 1897. Others disagreed, but were at a loss to explain the collapse.
Whatever the cause, the management of DCL was clearly shaken by the incident. It seems that the malt whisky distillery was closed down soon afterwards, although the Coffey still continued to operate until 1932. The remaining bonded warehouses and other buildings were finally torn down in the early 1970s, and a mosque was built on the site in 1984.
The Adelphi tidal wave was not the first to race along Muirhead Street. Many years earlier, a local mill had persistently discharged hot waste water into the gutters. As a result, the local people already had a nickname for Muirhead Street: “Warm Water Street”. After 1906, that seemed a wee bit of an understatement!
© 1999 Iain Russell
