The Princess Alice Disaster

by Joan Lock

  ‘Such a calamity’, commented the Daily News, ‘should have been attended with loss of life’, and indeed, the terrified passengers, some in their nightgowns and shouting for help, clearly imagined this was the Princess Alice all over again.6 Most of them were taken onboard the Vesta, which then managed to edge the City of London on to the mud of Barking Reach, where she stayed. Their captain claimed that the City of London had suddenly turned south into her path. Déjà vu all over again.

  Not only did this accident occur quite near where the Princess Alice had sunk, it was also close to the site of the Metis and Wentworth collision eleven years earlier. What becomes more and more clear is that there was, in fact, nothing unusual about the Princess Alice collision – apart from the huge loss of life. As we have seen, ships were forever colliding with each other, even out on the open sea, where one would imagine they had enough room to avoid each other. Also, that that particular spot on the River Thames was lethal.

  The Board of Trade investigation was almost a mirror of the previous one. Were there sufficient lookouts on the Vesta and the City of London? What lights were shown and seen at each critical moment? Had they obeyed the Rules of the Road? And so on. The blame in this instance was laid at the door of the Vesta, and its pilot for not having ported his helm when the lights of the other ship were first seen.

  On 12 March, 1880, the Morning Post reported that C. J. Carttar was ‘seriously ill from the fatigue and anxiety’ as a result of conducting the inquest upon the bodies in the Princess Alice disaster. He had, revealed the Lancaster Gazette on 17 March, been confined to his room for the last six weeks. A few days later there was a flurry of countrywide newspaper reports announcing the death of Mr Charles Carttar, coroner for west Kent. They cited a lingering illness, opined that he was ‘another victim of the Princess Alice disaster’, never having recovered from the immense strain of his duties and regretted that he was not relieved of at least a portion of them. Cause of death was given as heart disease (mitral and aortic valves), two years; dyspepsia and oedema, one year.

  Carttar was, of course, famous not only for the Princess Alice inquest, but also for the Staunton case and (reminded the London Standard) for the inquest on the body of ‘Robert Cocking, the aeronaut, who fell from a parachute in 1838, and lies buried in Lee churchyard’.7

  The Carttars were clearly keen to maintain their position as coroners for the Greenwich or West Kent Division. Alongside the funeral announcement, the Evening News, Portsmouth, said, ‘we understand that Mr Arundel Carttar, son of the deceased, will announce himself as a candidate for the vacant office at the end of the week’. Less than two months after Charles Carttar’s passing his son, Edward Arundel Carttar, was nominated for the post. Interestingly, the qualifications of the other three nominees (one of whom, Mr G. Collier, had been Charles Carttar’s deputy) were stated after their names, but in Arundel Carttar’s case all that was deemed necessary was ‘son of the late coroner’. An overwhelming show of hands favoured him and the result was greeted with loud applause but the nominator of surgeon, Dr Maxwell, demanded a poll. The result was 698 votes for Arundel, 157 more than his nearest rival, Dr Maxwell. Charles Carttar had been elected to the post in 1832 at the age of twenty-one in succession to his father who had held it for twenty-one years. Small wonder he had had begun to make up his own coroner’s rules.

  Arundel’s task could have proved easier than that of his father as there was a proposal before the Kent magistrates that the late coroner’s district should be divided into three: Greenwich, Bromley and Dartford. But Arundel himself opposed the move.

  The returns required for Captain Pim’s parliamentary address were still causing problems. On 7 June 1880, Arundel wrote to the Home Secretary saying there were no funds available at present to meet the extra expenses entailed in acquiring these returns, but by 30 June he had deposited the return with the librarian of the House of Commons.

  A notice in The Times of 22 June announced that the Kent County Magistrates had decided to pay £250 to the representatives of the late coroner, Mr C. J. Carttar, ‘for special services in conducting the inquests in connection with the Princess Alice steamboat disaster. The inquests lasted over thirty-seven days, and £40 of the amount awarded has been spent in respect of documents required by the government’. All too late to have assuaged Carttar’s worries

  As for Captain Pim, who had caused Carttar all that anxiety, he died aged sixty-one, in October 1886, at the end of a remarkably active and varied life8 having been promoted to rear admiral on the retired list the year before. ‘Seaman, surveyor, explorer, fighter, engineer, financier, politician, journalist, author, savant and lawyer’, said the Standard of 5 October 1886, but noted that:

  … in the latter parts which he essayed, the bluff sailor did not, indeed, distinguish himself. As a seafaring man he did really good work: but on shore he was the victim of sharper men than himself, it would have been better for his memory if his record had ended when he came home thirty years ago, badly wounded, from the Chinese War.

  Notes

  1. Thames Police: History of the Princess Alice Disaster, ‘Thames Divison Officer on Board’ (5): www.thamespolicemuseum.org.uk/h_alice_5.html.

  2. The Great Indian Famine of 1877–8 affected the south and south west of the subcontinent and spread northwards in its second year. Estimates of total famine-related deaths varied from 5.5 million to 8.2 million.

  3. The Times, 15 October 1878.

  4. The shorthand writers.

  5. As quoted by Gavin Thurston, The Great Thames Disaster, p.171.

  6. Daily News, 15 August 1879.

  7. In fact, artist and inventor, Mr Robert Cocking, was killed in July 1837, after plummeting to the ground from a height of around 8,000 ft after jumping from a balloon with only his homemade parachute to support him. A surgeon opined that it had not been the speed that had killed Mr Cocking. Indeed, people had travelled on the railroad at 60 miles an hour without loss of life. It was the impact. The incident caused a sensation, not least because the landlord of the Tiger’s Head, the scene of the inquest, had exhibited Cocker’s body and parachute at sixpence a head. Young Carttar voiced his strong disapproval and warned anyone else who might contemplate anything similar.

  8. One of Bedford Pim’s more spectacular exploits was a twenty-eight-day trek across the ice to rescue the crew of HMS Investigator which had been ice-bound for three years in a bay just off the Bering Strait. He displayed similar determination in his attempts to become an MP having stood twice, and failed, for Totnes, before finally making it in 1874, as MP for more the navy-friendly Greenwich.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Perils of Kissing

  On the same day as the jury put their signatures to the Princess Alice inquest report, the hearing of the London Steamboat Company’s claim for damages against the Bywell Castle began at the Court of Admiralty at Trinity House.

  The day before, as though to ram home the dangers of poor navigation, yet another serious shipping collision had occurred between the Welsh sailing ship, Moel Eilian, and German passenger steamer Pommerania, this time just off Folkestone in the English Channel. The 3,382-ton Pommerania, which plied between Hamburg and New York, had landed a number of passengers at Plymouth, some more at Cherbourg, and was taking the remaining 109 passengers on to Hamburg, when she was rammed by the much smaller craft. She might have been small but the (1,100-ton) Welsh barque proved lethal. She made a large hole in the Pommerania’s hull through which water poured. She began to sink. Two of her lifeboats had been crushed and a third was swamped as it was launched. Forty lives were lost including, it was originally thought, that of the captain, although it later transpired he had been picked up by a Dutch steamer. Although badly damaged the Welsh ship survived.

  The Times claimed this showed the value of watertight compartments and that the structure of the great ocean-going steamers was generally an element of insecurity rather than of safety: ‘their hulls are for the most part fatally v
ulnerable and can be pierced by a blow of no astonishing force’. So it seems that the man who declared that even then Great Eastern could not have withstood the blow from the Bywell Castle, was probably right.

  The baiting of Germany on the subject of their naval skills seems to have been something of a national sport, for the newspaper pointed out that what the accident also showed was that the German transatlantic passengers ships of recent years had been particularly unfortunate, for example, the wreck of the Schiller1 (which has since been dubbed the ‘Victorian Titanic’) and the ss Deutschland.2 They suggested that perhaps what was needed was an inquiry by their authorities as searching and severe as that had been carried out by the Board of Trade in the case of the Princess Alice. A note in The Times at the end of December said cryptically: ‘The captain and officers of the Pommerania, whose responsibility for the recent collision was inquired into in Berlin, have been acquitted’.

  But the British had no cause to crow because, on the very same day, another fatal collision occurred on the Mersey. In a thick, early-morning fog, the passenger ferry Gem, whose passengers were largely businessmen en route from Seacombe to Liverpool, collided with the steamer, Bowfell, which was lying at anchor. The Times reported:

  The blow had hardly been struck when there was a general rush from the cabins below, and several passengers, probably fearing a repetition of the Princess Alice disaster, immediately jumped overboard.

  By then, four passengers were known to have drowned and another fourteen were still missing.

  Inevitably, the evidence before the Court of Admiralty in the Princess Alice case was more or less a replay of the inquest and Board of Trade hearings. On 11 December Sir R. Phillimore gave his judgement on the action by the London Steamboat Company against the Bywell Castle:

  It appears to us that when the Princess Alice was on a parallel course with the Bywell Castle, red light to red light, if their courses had been continued they would have safely passed. But when a very short distance (100 to 400 yd) intervened the Princess Alice went hard a-starboard bringing her athwart the Bywell Castle. It is impossible to ascertain her motive for doing this. It appears to us, moreover, that the Princess Alice was navigated in a careless and reckless manner without due observance of regulations as to lookout and speed. In our opinion the Princess Alice is to blame for this collision.

  It remains to decide whether the Bywell Castle contributed. It appears she was navigated with due care and skill till within a very short time of the collision. But it is certain that having seen the Princess Alice’s green light she ported into it. Not only the wrong manoeuvre but the worst she could have executed.

  The only defence is that it happened so short a time before the collision. There have been several cases in this court where it has been held that a wrong manoeuvre at the last moment really had no effect on the collision. I have consulted with the Elder Brethren whether this wrong action could be placed in this category. They think if ‘hard a-port’ had not been given, though the Princess Alice might have received some injury, she would not have sunk. I am bound therefore to hold both vessels to blame for this collision.3

  So now we have one judgement blaming the Bywell Castle, one blaming the Princess Alice and a third blaming them both. The case went to the Court of Appeal, which was to take its time in reporting.

  In London, the ‘state of the Thames water’ remained a topic of concern. At the end of November, members of the Board of Works and several scientists made two trips down the Thames on a steamer taking specimens of water at various points, as suggested by Sir Joseph Bazalgette in his report to them on 22 November. He accompanied them.

  Their conclusions were that the water was made much murkier by solids mixed from the soil that had been washed from the eroding riverbanks, particularly where the banks were not maintained by wharfs, walls or stone ‘pitching’, than by sewage solids which were ‘highly decomposable’. While not denying that there was some ‘offensive water’ near the sewage outlets, it was far worse in front of the London Telegraph Works at East Greenwich and, more particularly, at Lawes Chemical Works at Barking Creek. This emitted an odour of sulphuric acid and the river there was pervaded by a tarry scum thought to come from the tar works 3 miles up the creek. ‘The water was thicker here, than at the outfall, and the spot altogether had a very unsavoury character about it’, reported the Standard on 30 November. ‘Some of them were bold enough to swallow large draughts of it,’ the Graphic told its readers, ‘and though no very severe condemnation was expressed, we do not hear that anyone arranged for a supply to be sent home for his private use’.

  Which was just as well, since the return of deaths in London for the previous week included eighteen from enteric or typhoid fever, which can be caused by faecal matter in the water. There were also seventeen enteric fever sufferers lying in the London Fever Hospital at that time. Deaths from diarrhoea (fifteen) were counted separately. Although declining a little, the other infectious diseases continued to take their toll; seven from smallpox, eighteen from measles, fifty-four from scarlet fever, eleven from diphtheria, thirty-one from whooping cough and twenty-four from different forms of fever. Lung diseases also saw off 428 that week. Even fractures could be the death of you, but at least, unlike Spain where the disease was suspected, leprosy was not a threat. Diphtheria was, of course, a particularly dreadful disease that caused death either by suffocation from the rogue membrane growing in the throat and nasal passages or cardiac arrest due to the bacilli. Although more prevalent in poorer districts, the infectious diseases had no respect for rank or class. A cryptic note in the Morning Post on 26 November 1878, announced that Lady Hatterly of the Red House in Norwich had just died from ‘a sharp attack of diphtheria’.

  The real Princess Alice was already very much aware of the suffering diphtheria could cause. On 5 November, Princess Alice’s first born, the tomboyish but kind 16-year-old Princess Victoria, complained of a stiff neck, which her mother suspected might be mumps. She remarked on how comical it would be if the whole household caught it. Next morning, young Victoria was diagnosed with the dreaded diphtheria. Five days later, 6-year-old Princess Alice (‘Alicky’) went down with it. The next to catch it was the youngest (and thus a particular pet of her mother’s since the death of her son Frittie), 4-year-old Princess Marie, known as May. During the next three days, 12-year-old Princess Irene, 10-year-old Ernst Ludwig and the Grand Duke himself also succumbed. Their mother helped nurse them, but the 4-year-old May became very ill with the worst form of the disease (laryngeal). Alice wrote in distress to Queen Victoria at Balmoral, agonizing as to whether her ‘sweet little May’ would get through it. She didn’t. The telegram to Queen Victoria the next day even had the granite-like former gillie, John Brown, ‘crying like a child’, so she knew when he delivered it to her what news it contained.4

  Rather oddly, The Times commented on the fact that, although she had twenty-eight grandchildren, Queen Victoria had lost only five of them:

  According to ‘Lodge’s Peerage; the list of these deaths is as follows:

  1st, Prince Francis Frederick Sigismund, son of the Imperial Prince and Princess of Germany, died June, 1866, aged two;

  2nd, Prince Frederick William Augustus Victor Leopold Louis, son of Princess Alice and of the Grand Duke of Hesse, accidentally killed by a fall in May, 1873, aged two and a half;

  3rd, Prince Frederick Christian Augustus Victor Leopold Edward Harold, son of the Princess Helena and Prince Christian, died May, 1876, aged one week;

  4th, Prince Alexander John Charles Albert, son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, died in April, 1871, aged one day;

  5th, the Princess Marie of Hesse, aged 4.5

  Alice had to keep the news of May’s death from the rest of her sick children, who kept asking for their little sister and sending her books and toys. They all began to recover, apart from the sensitive only son Ernst (Ernie). Eventually, when Ernie too was out of danger, she told him about the death of his little sister to
whom he was especially attached. He was so upset that she broke the golden rule of no physical contact (the disease is passed on via physical contact or from the breath of the victim) and hugged and kissed him, possibly imagining that, not having caught it after all this exposure, she was immune.

  Now they all seemed to be out of the woods, Alice began to feel a little more cheerful, and in a letter to her mother on 7 December talked about repapering the nurseries and going on a trip to Heidelberg. But she was not immune. A few days after comforting Ernie she fell ill and, despite the Queen sending over Sir William Jenner,6 one of her own doctors, Princess Alice died on 14 December. This was the same date on which her beloved father had died all those years earlier.

  The response to the sad news in Britain and the colonies was unrestrained: black-edged columns in newspapers relating the sequence of events in detail; flags flown at half mast on public buildings; and church bells tolling mournfully. The regret appeared genuine. The public seem to have appreciated that here was a royal of some social conscience, not just a drain on the public purse.7