by Joan Lock
The Woolwich surveyor gave his sampling report and the analyst’s conclusions to the Woolwich Local Board of Health on 23 October 1878. He had procured the loan of a steam launch from the Thames Conservancy Board, and ‘accompanied by Mr Wigner, your analyst’, had obtained two samples of Thames water at the places mentioned in the annexed schedule, one just below the surface and the other at about half the depth of the river and both as near to midstream as possible. Near where the wreck had been, he had taken one nearly, but not quite, at the bottom of the river. The timings taken and the grams of organic matter found in each were listed. The sewage had been running from the vicinity of the Northern Outfall sluice at 5.10 p.m., ‘and the smell of the water in the vicinity was of a very offensive character’. Even more so at the Southern Outfall. The conclusion was:
… it would not be right to say that they [the Princess Alice passengers] were absolutely poisoned by the water they imbibed; but the intolerably nauseous smell, accompanied by an equally nauseous taste, may have produced sudden vomiting, so that by this means the little strength or power they possessed … may have been lost, or in the mere act of vomiting the lungs of the unfortunate passengers might have been emptied of air and refilled with water, thus making the bodies specifically heavier and causing them to sink.
The sample of water taken between the Gasworks and the Northern Outfall.
… was simply an admixture of sewage and salt water. The microscope showed the presence of muscular tissue, cotton filaments in large quantity, many hairs, both animal and vegetable, and fragments of cooked farinaceous food.
Clearly, the report claimed, a source of contamination.6
Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the Metropolitan Board of Works chief engineer and the designer of the sewage system, fought back by presenting a report questioning the statement that the Thames water where the accident happened was poisonous and its taste and smell was something impossible to describe. He admitted he was not able to report on what it was like as no reliable observations were made at that time but he pointed out several alternative suspects.
Apparently a fire had broken out at Price and Co.’s oil works at 3.45 p.m. ‘and for some hours afterwards large quantities of vegetable and animal oils ran into the river … the bulk of these deleterious oils would have been passing the wreck at the time of the collision’. The condition of the surface of the river at the time and place may, therefore have been exceptionally bad.
In addition, the Woolwich Local Board ‘without the knowledge of this board’ had, in 1872, done a deal with the East Ham Board (which was beyond the metropolitan area) that allowed them, on payment of a fee, to bring sewage into the Woolwich Board’s outlet, which more than doubled their usual quantity.
Then there was the fact that the Beckton Gasworks had an iron pipe, about three feet in diameter, which discharged gas refuse and sewage (‘a dark, strong-smelling liquid’) nearly opposite the position of the Princess Alice wreck for about three hours on the flood tide.
Bazalgette also argued that the Victoria Dock extension works, currently in progress, were causing an additional quantity of mud to flow into the river and that the smells erroneously attributed to the sewage arose from the surrounding chemical and artificial manure works. In any case, the lower reaches of the Thames were not perceptively impure, considering it as a navigable river and not a source of drinking water, and its banks were cleaner and freer from muddy deposits than they had been in previous years. Before deciding on large and expensive deodorising works or other local remedies, Sir Joseph suggested that members of the board go down the river in a steamer with their professional advisers, taking samples and the evidence of their own senses.7
Notes
1. The Grosser Kurfürst was a German Navy ironclad that collided with the König Wilhelm on 31 May 1878, whilst they were sailing in formation in the Strait of Dover, with the loss of 284 lives. The Times could not resist reporting that it had happened in broad daylight and on dead smooth water and adding that it could not have happened to British naval ships due to their different system of fleet sailing. (Apparently, the Germans ships were sailing too close together.)
2. The Times, 2 October 1878, published the inaugural addresses of each of the schools attached to the London Metropolitan Hospitals (which did not include St Bartholomew’s or Guys).
3. The Times, 28 September 1878.
4. Sir Joseph William Bazelgette, the engineer who had designed and constructed London’s drainage system.
5. He explained that Coventry’s daily supply of sewage amounted to 2,000,000 gallons but was rendered especially foul by the dye works for which the city had long been famous. However, for the last three years the sewage had been purified by a chemical process costing £2,000 annually and the corporation was ‘well satisfied with its sanitary success’ (The Times, 5 October 1878).
6. The Times, 24 October 1878.
7. The Times, 23 November 1878.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Unfit for Service?
Just before the Woolwich inquest was adjourned until 18 October, Mr Carttar sent out a select party of marine experts to examine the wreck of the Princess Alice. He wanted them to give the jury their opinions on the construction, stability and seaworthiness of the pleasure steamer at the time of the accident. Rather difficult, one would imagine, considering what she had been through since.
Their opinions did not turn out to be good news for those representing the Princess Alice and her owners, the London Steamship Company. Shipwright John Morday thought the Princess Alice was of very slight construction. Her plates were not thick enough and her frames were too far apart. Altogether, she was too slight for passenger traffic on the river, certainly not the number of passengers that she had carried, and that almost anything that touched her would have gone through her.
Edward Brown Barnard, a naval architect and marine engineer who had built steamers for use on the River Nile, in Egypt, and the River Minho, in Portugal, confirmed these conclusions ‘on every point’. He thought the Princess Alice would have been ‘uncomfortable’ carrying 600 passengers. Indeed, he agreed, should she do so, she would be likely to ‘quaver’.1 She might just be fit for service to Gravesend, but she was certainly not fit to go on to Sheerness.
When asked by Mr Hughes, counsel for the Princess Alice, about her Board of Trade certificate he said, ‘If a Board of Trade inspector spent four or five days surveying her he must have been hard up for a job. If I had been a surveyor appointed by the Board of Trade to survey the Princess Alice I should have considered myself guilty of culpable blame if I had given her a certificate to ply to Sheerness and Southend, having regard to her build and condition’.2
Marine surveyor, Charles Laing, declared that, knowing her construction as he did now, he certainly would not have ventured down the river on her when she had 600 people onboard and would have been ‘very sorry’ to be one of the 400 going on to Sheerness. Her saloon deck would make her unstable. However, he was also of the opinion that no ship could have resisted the Bywell Castle’s blow.
‘Practical engineer’ Captain Samuel Pether who was experienced with upriver boats that plied the quieter, more rural, part of the Thames, thought the Princess Alice ‘unfit to work the Pool’, where she came into contact with all kinds of vessels, and was too weak to withstand blows. He usually put a piece of timber 14 in deep and 4 in thick all round his boats for protection against bumping into piers and other boats.3
And so it went on. Mr Hughes, counsel for the Princess Alice, declared that he proposed to call witnesses to refute all of these opinions but Mr Carttar called a halt. The Board of Trade inquiry had begun the day before and, he felt, this matter would fall within their remit. Of course, he might have thought of this earlier and so saved time in this seemingly endless inquest. He then adjourned the inquest, yet again, for another ten days while the Board of Trade inquiry got under way.4
The most important thing to discover about the ship’s construction was why sh
e sank so quickly, since this had been the main reason for such a huge and rapid loss of life – there had been so little time for anyone to mount an effective rescue.
At the resumed inquest back in the Woolwich Town Hall on 29 October 1878, two Millwall dockmasters swore to Dix’s sobriety on the pertinent afternoon while a dockmaster’s assistant claimed he had known Dix for twenty years, seen him take out the largest steamers, but never seen him drunk.
Police Inspector Payne of Woolwich produced a list of fourteen bodies that had still not been identified: two men of about forty and fifty-eight; a boy aged five; two girls aged six and ten; and eight women seemingly aged twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-eight and forty-five and one woman with no age stated.
Mr Carttar was surprised that so many people could have disappeared from their homes for so long without inquiries being made about them, but he understood more remained unidentified.
To add to the mystery, Police Inspector Phillips of Greenwich told him that there was a good deal of superior quality jewellery among the effects that had evidently been the property of people who had occupied a good position in life. The inference here being that their absence would be more likely to be noticed and, given that better-off people tended to have servants, this was not an odd assumption.
Then the inquest tackled the unpleasant matter of sewage in the water, its effect on the bodies and the likelihood that it may have hastened death.
Dr Harry Leach, Medical Officer of Health for the Port of London, said that the bodies had a kind of slime on them that you would not find if they had been immersed in clean water, but death had definitely been due to drowning. It was true that decomposition of the bodies had occurred earlier than usual and that the foulness of the water and the warm weather accounted for this. In answer to Captain Bedford Pim he said that sewage in the water would not poison a person but if they swallowed much of it, it would make them vomit. In reply to a question from Mr Hutchinson for the families he said, ‘I think I could swim and vomit at the same time but I have not tried it’.5
Dr James Louttit, formerly a demonstrator of chemistry at Edinburgh, thought that some of the passengers appeared to have died of shock prior to immersion and some from asphyxia, and that even a good swimmer’s chances of survival after imbibing a considerable quantity of foetid water would be diminished. He went on a good deal about the amount of sulphuretted hydrogen produced which, in high concentrations, could be lethal.
But medical knowledge was still very limited then, the science of bacteriology little known, and the fact that no post mortems had been carried out meant that this medical evidence could only be of limited use. Basically, it was all just supposition.
From then on it was back to those who had seen the disaster or were experienced in the ways of the river and ships that sailed upon her. This reverted to contradictory evidence about which moves each vessel had made; what moves they should have made; and, ultimately, which of them was therefore responsible for the tragedy.
An interesting addition to all this porting and starboarding and which lights had been shown and seen or not seen by each vessel was the point made by Ellis James Smith, captain of the Conservator steamer in the service of the Thames Conservancy. He said that Gallions Reach, where the collision took place, was very troublesome to navigators at night due to the lights of Beckton Gasworks and Woolwich Arsenal.
Then, at last, began the winding up of the Woolwich inquest. Carttar congratulated the jury on reaching the home stretch and pointed out that matters had to be gone into in such detail due to the enormous number of lives that had been lost.
Carttar complained that their freedom of judgement had been interfered with by two actions. Firstly, the publishing of the statements given to the Commissioners of Wrecks. These had confused the witnesses, made them contradict themselves and, indeed, some had changed their minds after reading the statements of others. Secondly, the holding of the Board of Trade inquiry before the inquest had been completed (in fact, their findings had already been published). It would, he said, have been more courteous, as well as conducive to the administration of justice, for it to have been withheld until they had finished.
Once Carttar had got that off his chest he proceeded to overreach himself by giving judgement on various elements rather than merely presenting the jury with cogent and unbiased views of the facts for their guidance in coming to their verdict.
Instead, he launched into an all-out attack on the defective manning of the Princess Alice, which he found deplorable, and its provisions for safety, which were perfectly inadequate. He went on:
The captain was undoubtedly a good man; he, poor fellow, is unable to tell his own story. The mate says, ‘It was no part of my duty to place anybody on the lookout.’ An extraordinary statement!
Carttar admitted you could not expect two men to be at the wheel from London to Sheerness and back again, so there were two who were off steering duty.
And who do we find them to be? A boy and an apprentice! The first mate admits he is a little defective in his eyesight! And when it comes to the matter of necessity, owing to the absence of one man of his asking for a holiday in the middle of a voyage, a man is engaged who is a perfect stranger to the captain and who, although he may have been a perfectly good sailor able to do the work, was still a stranger to the captain and the ship, and stranger to her mode of steering and everything else.
He took very strongly against the lookouts (the resting steerers) being a mere boy of eighteen and a young man of twenty-one. He thought it needed a practised eye. They were only looking out for dummies and small boats, and would be tired after a long day, and there would be music and dancing and singing, which were very likely to attract a boy of eighteen. ‘When I was a young lad, I was more amused by music and dancing and singing than inclined to attend to any work that might be deputed to me.’
As for the second mate, Wilkinson, he was an extraordinary character who steered from London Bridge to North Woolwich and there knocked off. Then he only attended to the ropes for the gangway. If the whistle sounded, he did not care, if the vessel stopped it did not attach to him, because vessels so often stop for small boats.
Unsurprisingly, Carttar’s outburst brought protest from Mr Hughes, counsel for the Princess Alice. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you have omitted the name of one man who was on the lookout you refer to.’
He was talking about Young, the foremast hand, who claimed to have gone forward in case of any small boats or other craft being in the way.
‘He made no report,’ said Carttar. ‘He had only been onboard three days; he was on lookout but he made no report.’ Besides, at the time, he had gone down to get his coat. And the point Carttar was making was the casualness of it all – the fact that the lookout was so intermittent and was performed in the laxest possible manner.
The Bywell Castle was a different story. The crew were efficient and the runners looked upon as the steadiest and most trustworthy seamen in the Port of London. There was, however, the question as to whether one lookout was sufficient.
He warned the jury not to rely too much on statements about time and distance, for there was no subject, in his experience, on which witnesses were so little able to form an accurate opinion.
As to the collision, the prime cause was the employment of the man Eyres at the wheel of the Princess Alice. He had probably allowed her to be swung by the tide off Tripcock Point towards midstream, and there was a mass of evidence to show that she did get near midstream, notwithstanding an apparent intention on the part of the captain to take her up the south shore.
The question arose whether the Bywell Castle, having seen the Princess Alice’s red light, and knowing that it was the practice of passenger steamers to go over to the north shore at that point, was justified in porting, and also whether the captain of the Princess Alice, finding himself in the position stated, ought not to have adopted a port helm, instead of continuing to fight for
the south shore. It ought also to be considered whether the Bywell Castle, in the circumstances, ought not to have shown more caution by easing or stopping and reversing.
After a four hour summing up and a pained reference to the apparent ignorance of so many experienced men of the rules of the Thames Conservancy he gave the jury a list of questions he wanted them to answer:
Which vessel was to blame?
Whether the cause originated in criminal, culpable or gross negligence, or whether it was accidental?
Whether the other vessel contributed to the collision by any omission of a criminal, culpable, or accidental nature?6
The jury retired to consider their verdict at 5 p.m. and there was a stampede of reporters to the telegraph office.
As the room emptied, Sydney Harrington produced a parcel of sandwiches, remarking loudly that they were for his supper. ‘If you feel like that, Sydney,’ said a fellow juror, ‘some of us have pocket pistols too.’7 Coroner’s Officer Gilham found Carttar a small office where he settled down to a sandwich and some brandy and water.
It was later disclosed to the press that almost the first thing the jury did was to vote on the question of blame. Six voted against the Princess Alice, eleven against the Bywell Castle and two against both. Of course, local loyalty may have swayed their opinions in favour of the Princess Alice.
At 8.30 p.m. Carttar went in to answer their queries and advised them he could accept a majority verdict of twelve.
At 2 a.m. The Times’ Woolwich correspondent telegraphed his paper to say that the coroner was closeted with the jury but the prospect of a verdict was remote. ‘A majority of twelve will be accepted, but it is understood that the nineteen jurymen are nearly equally divided in opinion. They have repeatedly asked to be discharged, but the coroner refuses to liberate them without a verdict.’8