The Princess Alice Disaster

by Joan Lock

  ‘Ease her!’ a man’s voice shouted urgently. ‘Stop her!’ Then, frantically, ‘Where are you coming to! GOOD GOD! Where are you coming to!’

  Warning whistles began to screech and passengers to scream as the huge hull of the Tyne collier loomed above them.

  And the 890-ton Bywell Castle kept coming, ploughing into the Princess Alice’s side just forward of her paddle box then, with a terrible scrunching and grinding into her engine room and saloon, while the whistles of both vessels continued to screech and the passenger’s screams reached a crescendo.

  The front of the Princess Alice tipped forward, pitching passengers into the water, where they became a seething, thrashing mass of frantic people pulling each other down. Most of them wore boots and restrictive clothing – particularly the women with their long skirts – and very few of them could swim. Four men, aided by the upward slant of the deck, managed to seize the Bywell Castle’s anchor chains and climb up onto the collier. Another grasped them, but fell off.

  The boat hung like that for a few moments. The collier’s second mate, William Brankston, dashed forward and slid down a rope onto the deck of the Princess Alice where all was confusion. He tried to get people to the ropes, but they retreated up to the higher part of the vessel and he was pulled at and jostled by the terrified passengers. He got hold of some women and attempted to put ropes around their waists because he knew they would be unable to climb up them. Then the vessel canted over and there was an ominous roar as the fires were drowned out. The vessel broke in two, nose and stern going in the air, as she sank in the centre.

  Brankston found himself in the water, but managed to climb a rope. He was hauled onboard by the scruff of his neck. The first mate, who seemed surprised to see him, exclaimed, ‘Wherever have you been?’4

  Passenger Robert Spencer had realized that a collision was inevitable and managed to swing out one lifeboat. He placed Miss Mary Ann Relfe and her sister, Jane, onboard, but had no knife to cut the rope which fastened it to the sides.

  As the Princess Alice broke in two and sank it took the lifeboat and its occupants with it along with all the passengers trapped below, while those remaining on deck were tipped into the water. The crew of the Bywell Castle threw down anything the drowning people might cling to – planks, boxes, chicken coops, lifebuoys, ladders and a carpenter’s bench – and dropped ropes down the ship’s sides for them to climb up.

  The Talbot powder barge sent out a lifeboat, and several small craft, including those belonging to the Beckton Gasworks, rushed to their aid. But there were few of them, it took time and they had to push some desperate people away lest they themselves were swamped.

  A steward who could swim put his girlfriend on his shoulders and jumped in. But she slipped off and though he dived after her again and again he never found her. Two young brothers managed to swim to the ropes and pull themselves up to the deck of the Bywell Castle. Their sister actually swam to the riverbank, a fact that was later reported in terms of great wonder.

  One man who reached the north shore with a lifebuoy around him stated that he had jumped overboard after telling his wife to throw their children and jump after him, but he had lost them all.

  Miss Emma Eatwell was half an hour in the water before being picked up. Her host, Mr Huddard, had managed to grab hold of one of the ropes, but slipped off, as did others. However, he managed to get hold of a piece of wood the size of a table and hang on until rescued.

  Young Edward Leaver, who had run out of the saloon on hearing the commotion, also managed to climb the rope, as did a Mr Childs, with his son in his arms, but someone above him fell and dashed the child from his arms.

  Unsurprisingly, Inspector King of the Thames Police could also swim. He managed to save his wife and reach the bank, only to find that the woman he had saved was not his wife.

  All that was known at Woolwich was that the Princess Alice was late. They had heard warning whistles, but that was not so unusual. The river was busy and near misses were common. Woolwich was a place of many tragedies, but most of them, being due to explosions at the Woolwich Arsenal, were seen as well as heard. The first they knew of the Princess Alice tragedy was when a lifeboat was rowed up to the jetty. It contained five shivering adults, one child, and five bodies.

  By then it was too late for anyone at Woolwich to rescue anybody. Estimates from eyewitnesses of the time it took the Princess Alice to sink after impact varied from two to four minutes, the time taken for hundreds to drown, not much more. Twenty minutes after the accident there were no survivors left in the water. All to be found at the site then was a flotsam of hats, umbrellas, shawls and toys, and all that could be heard was a band playing in the distance at the North Woolwich Pleasure Gardens. Once the tragic news spread, that music ceased abruptly.

  Living at Woolwich at the time was W. T. Vincent, a reporter for the Kent Messenger newspaper. The town had kept him well supplied with copy from its many tragedies. There were the spectacular explosions and more minor, but sometimes more lethal, Arsenal laboratory mishaps, as well as – being a garrison town with lots of young men cooped up with weapons to hand – many assaults and murders. But W. T. Vincent realized that this was something else.

  The next day, hundreds of reporters arrived by train and some managed to get on the special 2 a.m. train put on for relatives. But earlier that night, W. T. Vincent had had the story all to himself. Later, he was to claim that by the following morning – with the help of the electric telegraph – he had informed the people of every civilized land on earth about the sinking of the Princess Alice.

  As yet, of course, he had no idea how many had lost their lives, but he quickly realized that this was huge and began his first report, time-lined: Woolwich, Tuesday, Midnight: ‘One of the most fearful disasters of modern times occurred this evening on the River Thames at Woolwich’.5

  Notes

  1. Henry VIII established his Royal Dockyard at Woolwich in 1512 for the purpose of building the Great Harry, the flagship of his new Royal Navy. In 1694, it was joined by the Royal Laboratory which developed into the Woolwich Arsenal, the source of many inventions as well as lethal accidents and explosions. In 1721, the Royal Military Academy brought the military to the town but, in 1869, the dockyard closed causing much distress and unemployment in the area.

  2. The site’s original owner was Jeremiah Rosher – hence the name. He sold it in 1837 to George Jones, who planted flowers, shrubs and trees, stocked the gardens with wild animals and exotic birds and opened it as the Kent Botanical and Zoological Gardens. But the public wanted more and he gradually added various amusements; the gardens became even prettier and the refreshment room expanded into a Baronial Hall. The fame of the pleasure gardens grew, resulting in the emergence of Rosherville waltzes, gallops and songs such as Rose of Rosherville by William Wilson.

  3. Rosherville is mentioned in: The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray; Francis Burnand and Arthur Sullivan’s comic opera Cox and Box; Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Sorcerer (‘Hate me! I spent the day at ROSHERVILLE!’); P. G. Wodehouse’s first Jeeves’ story; and E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, which describes Rosherville as a ‘place to spend a happy day’.

  4. The Great Thames Disaster, p.38 & The Times, 28 September 1878.

  5. W. T. Vincent, Records of Woolwich District, p.76.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Collision

  Abraham Deness was sitting on the main hatchway of his spritsail barge,1 the Bonetta, having just unloaded a cargo of bricks at Beckton, when he saw the Princess Alice rounding Tripcock Point and hugging the south shore of Gallions Reach as she did so.

  Soon after came the screeches of her warning whistle and the anxious shouts of ‘Where are you coming to? Where are you coming to?’ Then the answering call, ‘Port! Port!’ from a large collier, which he saw bearing down on the pleasure steamer.

  Deness yelled out to his mate, James Hodgman, who was down below washing up the tea things. ‘For God’s sake
come up and save lives!’

  The pair jumped into their small boat and rowed to the crippled steamer as fast as they could. Deness was to say later:

  The Princess Alice disappeared almost immediately. I was close under her stern when she went down, and those I picked up jumped out of her. I saved eight lives. Would to God I could have saved the lot! I hardly know how to describe the scene to you. It was too dreadful. I can compare the Princess Alice to nothing else than a cloud. One moment she was there, and the next moment clean gone. I can compare the people to nothing else than a flock of sheep in the water.

  The river seemed full of drowning people. I went right in the midst of them, but from their frantic exertions to save themselves I hardly thought I should get out again alive. The shrieks and shouts of the people were piteous to hear, and would have quite unnerved me but for my desire to rescue some of the poor creatures. The people were calling out all around me. “Save me, save me! For God’s sake, save me!”

  I rendered all the assistance I could. My boat is a small one, only 12 ft long, and I hung more on her than she was able to carry. She was very nearly level with the water, and I dared not attempt to row ashore. Another boat took two persons from me.2

  Deness saved nine men and one girl, but had to transfer them onto another boat while he got rid of the water, then take them back and row them to Beckton Gasworks.

  Joseph Smith, the master of the 75-ton schooner, Ann Elizabeth, from Goole, had also been anchored on the north shore near Beckton Gasworks, seen the collision and launched his lifeboat. He saved eleven (nine men and two women) and took them to the Gasworks.

  At around 8.45 p.m., the inhabitants of Creekmouth, which overlooked Tripcock Point and Gallions Reach, had been startled to hear a noise ‘like the boom of a big gun’.3 Some of them ran to the river wall, where they saw the light in the back of the pleasure steamer rise in the air then disappear and heard the terrible screams and shrieks of those struggling to stay afloat.

  A Lawes’ factory manager promptly ordered five boats to the scene. The children’s party, which had moved into the schoolroom for more goodies and games, was brought to a halt. The children were given sweets and sent home and the schoolroom was prepared to receive survivors.

  Soon, there were eighteen soaked, injured and exhausted passengers in the Creekmouth schoolroom, one of them frantically lamenting that his wife and children were gone forever. They were dried, tended to and fed with the Treat Day helpers’ celebration supper before being settled into hastily improvised beds and cared for throughout the night.

  Twenty more were taken to the two rows of workers’ cottages in this isolated spot. The Creekmouth residents donated their own shirts, trousers and waistcoats to them. Beds were vacated and the victims watched over all night by people who had to leave for work at 6 a.m.

  The local curate told the Essex Times how touched he had been by the care given by ‘these rough-looking people’:

  I myself saw horny-handed men with hearts soft as a woman’s gently bearing poor shipwrecked men and women in their arms, bending over them, bathing their wounds and soothing their mental agonies as they best knew how.4

  Soon it was only bodies that were being brought in and by morning thirty corpses, mostly female, lay on sacks on the factory floor, where the bodies of three children joined them.

  Mr Trewby, the manager of the Beckton Gasworks, picked up several survivors and took them to his home where fires were lit, blankets and brandy provided and the women offered dry clothing. Some of them were sent home by van or cab.

  Those taken to Beckton Gasworks included William Driscoll, a passenger who had jumped into the water with his little girl. He related how he had seen a man struggling to get into a lifebuoy and put out his hand and grasped it. Seeing a rescue boat he had called out, ‘For God’s sake, save my child!’5 The boat had moved towards them, put out a scull for him to grasp, then taken them onboard. A sailing barge took them in while their boat was bailed out, then they were taken to Beckton.

  Mr Childs, whose 3-year-old son had been dashed from his arms while he was holding onto a rope, had swum towards the shore, been picked up and taken to Beckton, as had a Mr Gill from Edgware Road. In the water, after taking off his overcoat and jacket, he found that the swimming power he had exercised as a boy (but not used for many years) had not failed him.

  Mr Gill later wrote to The Times that among the number next to him in the boat which picked him up he found a charming little boy, about four years old, who had been separated from his mother and three sisters, who were lost.

  When we reached the shore, we were hauled up to the pier of the Beckton Gas Works, where a band of good Samaritans in the shape of workmen of the place, stripped off our dripping clothes and gave us a most salutary roasting before the burning kiln fire. I was then carried on the back of one of them, naked except for a coat thrown over my shoulders, to the house of the foreman of the Gas Works, Mr Sidney Smith, who treated me and my little companion with a delicate yet hearty kindness which I shall never forget, and which I am glad to be able to here record.6

  Mr Henry Reed, the stationer from Oxford Street, could not swim, but had managed to get hold of a plank to which he and his wife clung until they were picked up by a waterman who rowed them upstream to Greenwich. There, they were able to get a train to London Bridge and then a cab to Oxford Street where they arrived before 11 p.m. – earlier than they had expected to get home in the first place.

  Other survivors and bodies were taken to Woolwich, some on the Duke of Teck pleasure steamer that had been ten minutes behind the Princess Alice but arrived on the scene too late to actually save anyone. Several survivors were also taken way downstream to Erith in the Bywell Castle’s larger lifeboat, which they eventually managed to launch.

  After the first rowing boat had brought its startling load of survivors and bodies into Woolwich, rumours had quickly spread. An ironclad had collided with a liner, or was it a schooner? A ship had run ashore, or was it a pleasure boat? But the recurring mention of the Princess Alice having sunk began to gain acceptance. Those at the pier had realized she was late. Crowds began to gather, someone went to fetch the police.

  More survivors and bodies began to arrive. Police Inspector Phillips arrived on the scene and called out the rest of his small force. But they still had no idea of the scope of the tragedy.

  Despite his dramatic electric telegraphs to the world, even the Kent Messenger reporter, W. T. Vincent, still had no idea how many had perished and how many had been saved. Survivors had been taken to so many different places and some of them had found their own way home by various routes, which made arriving at any sensible figure extremely difficult both for Vincent and the authorities.

  The fact that there was no passenger list, indeed no proper record of exactly how many had been onboard the doomed craft, was to make the question of how many died a long, ongoing puzzle. From the very beginning, all sorts of guestimates were bandied back and forth, all of them too awful to contemplate.

  The first four bodies to arrive at Woolwich were placed in an outhouse of the Ship and Half Moon Hotel, while six female survivors, wrapped in blankets, sat shivering and dazed before the fire in the kitchen of Steam Packet Public House. More bodies were laid in the office of the London Steamboat Company at Roffs Wharf. Soon there were nineteen in there. The mayor ordered the town hall to be opened up and the townsfolk (many very poor after the closing of the dockyard) threw open their homes to offer what warmth, dry clothes, food and comfort they could. Mr Brown, of Robson’s Warehouse in the High Street, fully re-clothed three of the male survivors.

  Back at Swan Pier by London Bridge, anxious relatives were trying to discover why their loved ones had not returned from their day out, but still expected to see the Princess Alice approaching any minute. Eventually, they were informed that there had been an accident and, when no further information was forthcoming, the crowd turned en masse and began to run towards the company’s offices near Cheap
side. There, a scanty list of survivors began arriving by electric telegraph.

  One man and his brother-in-law, having no luck at Swan Pier, Bennets Hill or Fenchurch Street, where they had heard that some survivors were turning up, went to London Bridge Station, but found that no incoming train was expected until morning. There was, however, a hop-pickers train7 leaving at 2.30 a.m.

  ‘The railway inspectors put on a first class carriage, which conveyed about a dozen men and four ladies, “all on the same melancholy errand”, to the Arsenal Station’, he wrote to The Times. ‘We were then taken by the station inspector to the pier, where commenced the work which is not yet finished, that of finding three persons who are most dear to us. Then to the town hall and then to the police office where the inspector telegraphed home for us.’8

  The following day The Times, which had obviously received W. T. Vincent’s late-night telegraph, led their report with the words: ‘One of the most fearful disasters of modern times occurred last evening on the River Thames at Woolwich’. It went on to describe the accident as far as was clear, pointing out that it occurred ‘at the very spot where the fatal collision between the Metis and the Wentworth had occurred some ten years earlier’.9

  In their midnight dispatch they related some of the survivors’ harrowing stories, such as that of William Alexander Law, who lost his girl off his shoulders, and that of the man who had asked his wife to throw in his children but lost them all.

  The newspaper also made a guess as to the numbers lost: 500. But they also quoted the number given at Woolwich wharf: ‘as many as six hundred and fifty’. And it was becoming obvious that no matter how many were lost, the great majority of these were women and children.

  A further dispatch, time-lined 1.15 a.m., announced that four of the saved had just been brought over to Woolwich from Barking Creek. These included Mr Edward Leaver of Lambeth, ‘who is in great anguish at the loss of four sons and daughters’.