The Princess Alice Disaster

by Joan Lock

  At the close of Purcell’s evidence, Mr Moss, one of the many lawyers now appearing for relatives, commented, ‘It will be necessary to have the Erith people here.’

  ‘They will be sent for,’ Carttar assured him.1

  And on they came. George Thomas Harris, the confectioner, related how he had given Purcell a coat, a piece of cake and a ginger beer. The stoker appeared to have been drinking but was getting sober. In answer to Harris’s question about what had caused the collision, Purcell had said, ‘It is all on account of the booze’. To illustrate his point, the stoker had told Harris how, when they had picked up a female passenger who was still quite warm, he had asked the captain for some brandy to give her. But Captain Harrison had said he had none. ‘And with very good reason. He and the pilot had been boozing all afternoon.’ Purcell had gone on to declare that all the crew had been drunk, including himself. At the Yacht Tavern, when the stoker had repeated his claims, his mates had tried to shut him up. ‘From the tone in which he spoke,’ said Harris, ‘I am quite sure he knew what he was saying.’2

  William Lee, the Yacht Tavern keeper, agreed with Harris’s statement and added that, shortly after entering, Purcell had declared, ‘The beasts were drunk’ – meaning the captain and the pilot – and had added, ‘in fact we all were.’ Later, in the back kitchen, he had burst into tears and said, ‘S’help my God, I mean to tell the truth.’3

  One of the customers, fly proprietor James Coshall, gave evidence of hearing Purcell say, ‘We shall get into trouble. It was our fault,’ and that one of his companions had told him to hold his noise.4

  William Pope, a general dealer, saw Purcell ‘three parts intoxicated’ make the same claims about the drunkenness of the crew. ‘At this time,’ Pope insisted, ‘Purcell seemed to know perfectly well what he was talking about.’5

  Dimelow, the Bywell Castle’s chief engineer, described Purcell’s condition when he had come onboard that day:

  Purcell was like the generality of firemen. He was rather the worse for drink, but not so bad that he could not take his watch, his duties were purely mechanical. I saw him at half past four o’clock the next morning – he was lying on top of the stoke hole cover and I could not wake him up. The chief engineer came and complained he could not get him to take his watch; in fact he was dead drunk. I had not the slightest suspicion that Captain Harrison was not sober. I have made about seven voyages with Captain Harrison and have always found him a sober man and as steady a man as I was ever with in my life. I saw the other officers about and there is no ground whatever for the suggestion that they were not sober.6

  Bywell Castle crew member, Henry Gribben, did rather let the side down at the inquest. He had given evidence earlier in the proceedings and Mr Hughes asked that he might be recalled. However, as The Times reported, ‘it appeared that, although this witness was in the precincts of the court, he had had been drinking too much to be in a fit state to be examined’.7

  George William Linnecar, Superintendent of the People’s Mission Hall at Peckham, who had been a passenger on the Princess Alice, thought he had been the first to climb up onto the Bywell Castle. He told the court he was certain nobody there was under the influence of drink.

  Yet another waterman witness, Walter Campfield, who had been rowing a dumb barge8 down river just before the collision, gave evidence in favour of the Bywell Castle, saying that the Princess Alice must have starboarded very suddenly. This led to some tart questions from the Princess Alice side as to just how much he was receiving for this evidence.

  ‘How much have I received? I consider it a very paltry sum,’ Campfield replied.

  ‘How much?’ asked Mr Hughes.

  ‘I have only received ten shillings towards my expenses. I have incurred a lot of expenses.’9

  Mr Myburgh said he should ask how many days this witness had been hanging about and that it would be a far manlier thing for Mr Hughes to say at once that he really did mean to insinuate that his clients were tampering with the witness.

  Mr Hughes replied that he thought there had been plenty of grounds.

  Gavin Thurston, author of the 1965 book The Great Thames Disaster (Allen and Unwin), blames Carttar for allowing these attempts to turn the inquest hearing into a legal action or at least doing very little to restrain them. Thurston also criticizes the huge number of witnesses, many with little to add, which the coroner allowed to parade before the jury. Carttar had, at one point, gone into the history of coroners’ courts ‘very inaccurately’, had even given wrong directions to the jury as well as allowed himself to get into undignified exchanges with them and the counsel. Thurston’s criticisms were informed. He was a coroner for Westminster himself and as such had dealt with several high-profile inquests, such as those on Judy Garland and Jimi Hendrix.

  One witness who did have some startling new evidence to add to the Princess Alice inquest appeared towards the end of proceedings on Tuesday, 8 October. He was Samuel Smith, a ship’s painter, of 9 Byng Street in Millwall. Smith, an old sailor, told the court that he had seen the pilot, Dix, at about 2 p.m. on the afternoon of the collision near the Anchor and Hope public house in Millwall when, Smith was sorry to say, Dix had been the worse for drink. ‘Knowing that he had once been in difficulty through drinking,’ said Smith, ‘I thought it a bad job that he should be drunk again.’

  What made him think Dix was drunk?

  ‘The way in which he carried himself and swung about his cigar. Besides, his face was red.’

  ‘Now, be certain about what you are saying,’ warned the coroner. ‘It is a very serious matter. When did you come to the conclusion that Dix had been drinking?’

  ‘I mentioned it to an acquaintance of mine the next day. I am very sorry I did now, for I did not want to have to come here.’

  He and Dix had known each other for about twenty-three years, claimed Smith, and were friends until he (Smith) had become a total abstainer. After that, they had not seen each other as before because, ‘when a man turns away from drink his friends don’t like him. I thought,’ Smith added lethally, ‘that after a little misfortune he had had some time ago he would have abstained from drink as I did.’

  The ‘little misfortune’ turned out to be ‘losing his licence through drink’. Nonetheless, Smith thought no more skilful man could be found to take charge of a ship. ‘Drinking was his only weakness.’ He had been surprised to see him in drink that day because he had heard that, like him, Dix had become a total abstainer. Dix’s companion at the time had been a man who looked like a captain: ‘He wore a sealskin cap.’

  Dix had been staggering, claimed Smith, although not necessarily so much that anybody else might see he was drunk. Then there was his face: ‘Dix is generally a pale man, but his face gets red when he is in drink.’

  Did he consider then that the pilot was in a fit state to take charge of a vessel, asked barrister Mr John Proctor, who was watching proceedings on behalf of the widow of Charles Curtis, a Princess Alice crew member.

  ‘I have known him do so, and be very clever when he had had just a drop.’

  ‘Am I to understand that he was better able to take a ship down the river when in a state of semi-drunkenness than when sober?’

  ‘I don’t know. He has been very fortunate; he has never had an accident while I have been with him.’10

  Several other witnesses deposed as to Dix’s sobriety that day but, after Smith’s ringing endorsement of the man’s capability when drunk, it was hardly surprising that Mr Nelson, Dix’s counsel, chose to reserve his cross-examination of the witness until after consultation with his client. This would be somewhat delayed because the inquest was about to be adjourned for ten days. Therefore the accusations would have time to simmer and develop, while rebuttals would have time to be garnered.

  Despite the forthcoming adjournment there was time for some more damaging revelations. One of the Bywell Castle’s crew members recalled the collision in Millwall Dock before they had set out that day and a mishap earlie
r that year when Dix had ‘not got his anchor down quickly enough and had carried away a vessel’s jibbon’.11

  This late news about the barge collision in the dock inferred, said The Times the next day, that the Bywell Castle had been navigated with a want of skill throughout. They also suggested that the captain had given his evidence ‘with an absence of candour’ or, as modern parlance would have it, Harrison had been economical with the truth.

  Captain Harrison was recalled to insist that he did not remember being asked about the barge accident but the damage, if any, had been very slight. It had been a trifling affair and probably the reason it had not been mentioned in his log was, he supposed, that he had forgotten it in the light of the greater calamity. And, no, he had not walked out with Dix that afternoon and although he had worn a hat that day, it was not a sealskin cap.

  Notes

  1. (Purcell’s evidence and examination): The Times, 4 October 1878 and Coroners’ Records COR/PA/13 & 22.

  2. (Harris’s evidence): Ibid.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid.

  5. The Times, 4 October 1878 and Coroners’ Records COR/PA/13 & 22.

  6. The Times, 5 October 1878 and Coroners’ Records COR/PA/14 & 22.

  7. The Times, 4 October 1878.

  8. A ‘dumb barge’ is a long, flat-bottomed barge for carrying cargo, in tow of a tug.

  9. (Campfield’s evidence and examination): The Times, 5 October 1878 and Coroners’ Records COR/PA/14 & 22.

  10. (Smith’s evidence and examination): The Times, 9 October 1878 and Coroners’ Records COR/PA/15 & 22.

  11. A ‘jibbon’ is a boom on which the jib (a triangular sail stretched in front of the foremast of the ship) is spread.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In Context

  The loss of women’s lives when the Princess Alice sank was as nothing, claimed Dr Arthur W. Edis, in comparison with their sad mortality in childbirth. Indeed, the total number of lives lost due to the terrible accidents on the Princess Alice, the Eurydice and the Grosser Kurfürst1 did not amount to a third of the women who died annually in childbirth. During 1876, Dr Edis continued, no fewer than 4,142 mothers had succumbed and this did not include the 1,034 who had died from various diseases after giving birth. This obstetric physician made these pronouncements in his inaugural address at the Medical Session of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School.2 The number of maternity deaths at the time was certainly startling and it was clever of Dr Edis to use dramatic, high-profile, mass fatalities to bring home his point.

  Of course the Princess Alice disaster and the Welsh mining disaster were by no means the only tragedies in 1878. Accidents great and small were frequent from gas explosions, steam explosions, railway accidents, fires, shipping accidents and collisions. The most dangerous place to be was at sea around Britain’s shores. More lives were lost in wrecks around Britain’s coastline in the year 1877 (776) than in the Princess Alice disaster. Shipping accidents on Britain’s rivers caused another fifteen deaths in a year.

  According to the Annual Wreck Register for 1877, the east coast, which the Tyne colliers so regularly traversed, was the most dangerous section of all. Its 1,100 wrecks (excluding collisions) were more than a third of the year’s total. And a great many of these were colliers. Thus, claimed the Standard on 26 October 1878, ‘The great coal trade of England not only claims its victims in the depths of the fiery mine, but among the hapless sailors who man the colliers of the Tyne and Wear’.

  Looking on the brighter side, the newspaper applauded the growing number of National Lifeboat Institute stations that now dotted these dangerous coasts. They pointed out that, although nearly 800 mariners’ lives had been lost in a year, not short of 5,000 had been brought safely ashore by the lifeboats.

  On 23 October 1878, while the two Princess Alice inquiries were in full swing, The Times’ list of wrecks and casualties included three collisions, one of them of involving a Tyne collier, the schooner Inconstant, which had been carrying coal to Trouville when it was rammed by Agnes and Louise and sustained serious damage.

  Collisions on rivers also occurred quite frequently and during the lead up to the Princess Alice disaster Tyne colliers had been involved in several collisions, in some of which they had collided with each other.

  Of course, in the autumn of 1878 the collision that remained at the forefront of the news was that of the Princess Alice. It had even begun to pop up in various forms among those cryptic personal notices in the columns of The Times. For example, the following appeared on 24 October 1878:

  DAVID ECKLEY, of Boston, United States, left No. 79 York Street, Westminster, on 3 September last (the day of the Princess Alice disaster) and has not since been heard of. Letters and money wait for him, an important business requires his immediate presence in London. If dead, £5 reward will be paid for Evidence of the fact. If living he will greatly oblige by communicating with Messrs Doveton, Smyth and Bristow, Solicitors, No. 82 Rochester Row, Westminster.

  And the expected quarrels over victims’ estates soon surfaced. On 11 September a respectable-looking female told Mr Benson, the Southwark magistrate, that her daughter, her son-in-law and their child had all drowned in the Princess Alice disaster. She had claimed their bodies and paid out £2–3 for their funerals. Now the son-in-law’s brother was trying to claim all their furniture, but the key to their house had been left with her. The next day, the son-in-law, also ‘respectable looking’, turned up expressing surprise that such a statement should have been made. He claimed that the woman had not expended a farthing on the funeral – it had been done at the expense of the churchwardens and others. The magistrate told him that neither had a legal claim and advised them to sort it out among themselves.

  On 9 October 1878 came the case of Hankin and Turner at the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice. The plaintiff, who claimed to be the half-brother of Mr James Ivory (a Princess Alice victim who had died intestate) moved to block the letters of administration obtained by a man whom he claimed was merely the illegitimate son of the intestate’s mother. Eventually, the judge also decided that this was not a matter for him but the probate court and dismissed the claim with costs.

  But the current most pressing Princess Alice side issue was what the newspapers termed ‘the state of the river’. In other words, the question of just how much sewage was polluting the Thames and whether it had proved lethal to the drowning passengers.

  The subject had gained prominence after Captain Pim’s questioning of witnesses as to the smell and taste of the water in which they nearly drowned and The Times’ leader urging the investigation of the matter.

  The publicity bore fruit. At the next meeting of the Metropolitan Board of Works on 27 September 1878, a Mr Richardson moved that the subject be referred to the Works and General Purposes Committee to consider and report as to the correctness of the statements made that the water of the River Thames, where the unfortunate accident to the Princess Alice had occurred, was ‘poisonous’ and ‘it’s taste and smell something it was impossible to describe’ and whether such state of the water, if correctly described, arose from the main drainage outfalls. The motion was carried unanimously.

  This encouraged a Mr Richardson to be bolder with a motion that the committee should also consider and report on whether the sewage discharged into the river at the board’s outfalls could, at a moderate cost, be purified before its discharge so as to render it innocuous and inoffensive as well as free from solid matter. This proved to be a move too far. One board member claimed that the sewage passed into the Thames formed only about 1/7,000th part of the stream. Another, a Mr Cook, said that Richardson had made it look as if it were all down to pounds, shillings and pence. ‘But if that were so, the board had been going wrong for a long time.’ If they voted for this motion they would be condemning themselves as, by doing so, they would admit that they discharged into the river, at the outfalls, sewage that was noxious and offensive. Mr Richardson offered to dilute the proposal bu
t, commented The Times, ‘it was negatived by a majority of nineteen to seven’.3

  Next into the arena was a Mr Henry Robinson who gave a paper on ‘Purificating Sewage by Precipitation’ at the Congress of the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain held at Stafford on 4 October 1878. He was followed by Mr H.C. Burdett with a paper on ‘Thames Water: Its Impurities, Dangers and Contaminations’.

  Mr Burdett said he had been invited to give his experience as a resident on the banks of the Thames. He agreed that the foulness of the water had added materially to the horrors of the Princess Alice calamity and pointed to a report that stated that one fifth of the river was pollution which moved up and down four times daily between Gravesend and Blackwall. He reminded the congress that Sir Joseph Bazalgette4 had admitted the necessity of purification of sewage before it was allowed to enter the river. Also, that experience in Coventry5 showed that the process was not impossible nor over-costly. London could do it for £120,000 and it should be done with the least possible delay.

  The London Sanitary Committee got in on the act, urging swift action, as did the Woolwich Local Board of Health. Captain Behnna R.A., of the latter, moved that the Woolwich surveyor should be instructed to take samples of the water at the time of day and in the conditions corresponding to the circumstances when the Princess Alice sank. The motion was seconded by none other than our old friend Mr Harrington, foreman of the inquest jury, who said that the public had a right to know. A member of the Plumstead District Board of Works made the pertinent point that the Metropolitan Board of Works seemed content to have got the nuisance away from the centre of London, and had closed their eyes to the evil consequences on the districts downriver. Knives were drawn.