I don't think they're saying that the practice of sleeping on ropes wasn't a thing, but that it has no connection to the etymology of the word "hangover". In fact, the original article even says as much:
> The term hangover is unlikely to have come specifically from this practice, it more likely refers to the lasting after effects of alcohol felt the next day. However the two-penny hangovers remained a grim reality of Victorian England regardless of the tenuous link to the etymology of alcohol. Particularly as ‘two-penny hangovers’ have also been mentioned in Paris, and the French for ‘hangover’ is ‘gueule de bois’ which is literally ‘mouth of wood’ so nothing to do with ‘hanging over’ at all. But a fairly accurate description of how your mouth feels after a night drinking gin!
I did some more research into this yesterday, and still am not convinced that people sleeping over a rope was a thing.
There are a large number of sites repeating the exact same story / wording - complete with the rope cutting and often with the photo from a film I mentioned in my previous post. This has the feeling of an urban legend about it.
There is one other photo that pops up [0] is variously captioned as being in the US or in Germany in the 1930s. At most this picture shows people sitting down, leaning against a rope - not hanging over it. This is akin to what George Orwell described (someone describing to him) - not people hanging over a rope.
The other quote occasionally given in reference to it is from Dickens, which if you read it describes a hammock type system.
I cannot find any other sources, but there is a lot of noise (including wikipedia edits) from last year when it was doing the rounds. I found this forum discussing it in 2008 [1] where one person claimed to try sleeping over a rope and found it impossible to do so.
> The term hangover is unlikely to have come specifically from this practice, it more likely refers to the lasting after effects of alcohol felt the next day. However the two-penny hangovers remained a grim reality of Victorian England regardless of the tenuous link to the etymology of alcohol. Particularly as ‘two-penny hangovers’ have also been mentioned in Paris, and the French for ‘hangover’ is ‘gueule de bois’ which is literally ‘mouth of wood’ so nothing to do with ‘hanging over’ at all. But a fairly accurate description of how your mouth feels after a night drinking gin!