The Princess Alice Disaster

by Joan Lock

  Notes

  1. The Times, 3 September 1879.

  2. A ‘billyboy’ is a two-masted vessel resembling an old Dutch cargo boat. Coming mostly from Goole, they were also known as Humber keels.

  3. Board of Trade Enquiry into the Navigation of the River Thames & Minutes of Evidence: The National Archives MT9/160 M1925/79.

  4. The Times, 3 September 1879.

  5. Ibid.

  6. On 17 November 1879, the Canada, an immense iron vessel of the National Line, towed by two powerful steam tugs, was passing down Gallions Reach on her way to New York when she swerved to avoid another vessel, cut off the brow of a coal hulk belonging to the London Steamboat Company, sank a barge laden with coal and crashed through and utterly demolished Woolwich steamboat pier. Only a very high tide prevented her from being grounded. Passengers waiting on the pier saw her coming and managed to run off it in time to save themselves.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In Memoriam

  Twenty-three thousand people contributed their sixpences to Reverend Adelbert Anson’s memorial fund, which paid for a handsome 16 ft white marble Celtic cross, which was erected in May, 1880, in Woolwich Cemetery where many of the victims lay buried, and a stained glass remembrance window was placed in the parish church of St Mary Magdalene in Woolwich.

  Lying alongside the flood barrier at the entrance to Barking Creek is a simple, modern (National Lottery funded), memorial plaque, which includes a tribute to the Creekmouth residents who helped with the rescue. A more colourful, modern memorial is embroidered in a corner of a panel of the magnificent Greenwich Millennium Embroideries at the Greenwich Heritage Centre in the Royal Arsenal.

  Although the general public are surprisingly unaware of the tragedy (despite its prominence as the greatest British waterways disaster), down the years an assortment of memorial songs, poems and books have appeared.

  At the time, as well as the vast newspaper coverage, various broadsheets and pamphlets recorded the event. A copy of one of the more ambitious, The Loss of the Princess Alice (four pages, eight sides), can be seen at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.1 The cover sports a dramatic, if inaccurate, illustration of the collision, before doing a big job of selling the contents. It promises (in a plethora of typefaces and sizes):

  AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE by a SURVIVOR, not hitherto published!

  HEARTRENDING DETAILS – FACTS NOT MADE PUBLIC – NOBLE EFFORTS TO SAVE LIFE

  SKETCHES BY AN EYE-WITNESS

  BEAUTIFUL POEM, specially written on the event.

  And so on. The publisher (alas, not named, although the wholesaler is) informs his readers that he felt ‘the public at large (and more especially that section of it who are sufferers by the melancholy event of which it is a record) would like to possess such a permanent record’.

  The narrative of the survivor (who is too upset to give his name) is introduced in the usual dramatic prose which has ‘the river full of drowning people, screaming in anguish, hopelessly struggling and vainly praying for help’. In his previously unpublished narrative the anonymous survivor relates how he had agreed to go on the day out despite having a new job. He describes picking up his girlfriend, Lizzie, and him chaffing her mother ‘about getting such a parcel of sandwiches for him to carry’, ‘chaffing his poor girl too, about her new fashionable hat’.

  He tells how they took along Lizzie’s little brother, Teddy, who was all wistful because he had had to stay in all the previous week due to not having any boots to wear. ‘Poor little chap! God bless his little heart! How pleased he was! We shall never see his little curly head again …’ laments the survivor.

  In the water, after the collision, he had his arm around Lizzie while holding little Teddy by the hand. But Lizzie clutched him so hard around the neck he had to let go of the boy ‘for she was choking me’. As she saw her little brother floating away she tried to go after him. Later, he saw a woman he thought was Lizzie, clutched her, and held her head above water, ‘but it was not my girl’. The girl he had held was saved, he believed, though he did not know her name.

  He searched all night and next day but found neither Lizzie nor Teddy. He would rather have gone down as well, he told the publisher/writer, but one thing he meant to do was ‘act like a son to their poor widowed mother’. An illustration, captioned ‘How They Found My Poor Girl’, depicts the body of Lizzie washed up on a shore.

  The broadsheet’s eight-verse poem, ‘In Memorium’, is in the expected, over-wrought, style. But, for once, the passengers are not depicted as dancing about, carefree, in ignorance of their forthcoming fate.

  The earliest book on the disaster, albeit small, was The Wreck of the Princess Alice (Saloon Steamer), edited by Edwin Guest, which was published by Weldon’s Shilling Library in 1878, the profits all going to the Mansion House Fund. It opens with the statement that there was only one event with which the loss of the Princess Alice could be compared; this was the wreck of the Royal George in 1782.2 Nonetheless, Guest goes on to claim that the blackest year in British history was 1854, when 1,401 lives were lost in four great wrecks, which he lists. But these were hardly of the home-based variety, occurring as they did in the Indian Ocean, Newfoundland and on unknown seas.

  This heavy total had already been passed before the autumn equinox of 1878, by the losses in three wrecks: the Eurydice, the Princess Alice and the German ironclad, Grosser Kurfest.

  After this assortment of mixed comparisons, Guest’s book offers an interesting medley of information, mostly garnered from the newspapers of the time, including survivors’ tales, some interesting life-saving information, and the opinion that most of the passengers had been upper working class.

  Henry Drew, whom we know for certain was one of the survivors, later wrote a short essay titled ‘Thirty Years Ago: A Reminiscence’. In looking back at Henry’s ‘narrative’, as the newspapers liked to call them, I was reminded that, even given expected journalistic exaggeration, these sometimes went off into the realms of pure fancy. As Henry himself angrily pointed out in the Daily News of 7 September 1878:

  … surely the bare facts of my case, without embellishment, are sufficiently appalling to satisfy the public crave for harrowing details; and I feel, as a private individual, I have a right to expect from the press some respect for my feelings in this calamity.

  The letter demonstrates that not only was Henry intelligent and educated, but also a man of remarkable control considering he penned it only three days after the disaster. But, alas, it is the original ‘narrative’ which tends to be repeated now, the one with him afraid that someone would snatch his piece of wood from him and which I recently saw cited as an example of the ‘desperate scrimmage’.

  Henry’s ‘Reminiscence’ makes it clear that they had been sitting on the saloon deck, (not abaft the paddle box as his newspaper ‘narrative’ had claimed). The saloon deck, he pointed out, had been the joy of Londoners who had previously only known the open-decked wooden steamers. He recalls that, at the time of the collision, most of the passengers had gone down into the saloons and so were caught ‘as rats in a trap’ and how, when the Princess Alice had heeled over and lay on her side for some moments:

  … those of us who had stood upon the deck got out of the water and walked up her sides helpless, expecting to be blown up by the boiler any moment. The boiler had, in fact, gone to the bottom through the hole in her side. Gradually she settled down, and we went with her inch by inch until we were again struggling in the slimy water.

  The next morning, Henry and his wife could find the body of only one of his daughters, that of 3-year-old Miriam Ruth. It took five more days to find the other two, ‘just in time to be laid to rest with mother and sister’. (Henry’s wife having died after rescue.)

  One of the most reliable witnesses as to what happened on shore is the Kent Messenger reporter, W. T. Vincent, who was at Woolwich from the outset and knew all the local characters and the history of the place. In his Records of the Woolwich Distr
ict he recalls that it had been a warm and muggy evening. He had been weary after ‘a troublesome day’s work’ and was preparing for an early night but, on hearing there had been a collision on the river and that a big steamer had gone down, he cast off fatigue with his slippers and made all haste to reach Roff’s Pier, endeavouring to find out more en route. A few had heard ‘something’ of a wreck on the river, others ‘had heard nothing, and laughed at the “old woman’s tale”. Too soon, the matchless horror was revealed’.

  Vincent reprints his first report, ‘(somewhat shortened) which at early morning light was told in more than 3,000 newspapers, to the people of every civilized land throughout the earth’. He was proud that there was very little from that report representing ‘the first impressions derived from such hasty and excited narratives as a reporter could gather among the wailing and turmoil’, that he had since wished to amend and credited this to his informants. (He did, however, give the pilot’s name as Dicks.)

  In his report, he even managed an interview with William Alexander Law, Princess Alice’s second steward, who had jumped overboard with his girl on his shoulders but ‘lost her’ in the melee, and described a young woman at the workhouse who said her baby had been washed out of her arms. Also, a man who had reached the north shore with a life-buoy around him who stated that he had jumped overboard, after telling his wife to throw their children in and jump after him, ‘but he lost them all’. Some of the editors telegraphed Vincent:

  … all through the wretched night to ‘keep on wiring’ and the first train down in the morning brought an army of reporters. One ‘daily’ alone had nine special correspondents at work in Woolwich for the best part of a week, so eager was the public appetite to feed upon the caviare news.

  But what exercised Mr Vincent the most of all in his book was, why Woolwich?

  Were we not sufficiently notorious for deeds of evil – murders, explosions, fires, floods, fogs, wrecks and riots, not to speak of a reputation founded and established on the fiendish trade of war?

  His work had, of course, done much to foster that image, his newspaper reports and the Records of the Woolwich District and Warlike Woolwich, were awash with the aforementioned dreadful deeds and calamities which occurred in that volatile place.

  It wasn’t until Gavin Thurston’s, The Great Thames Disaster, that a full-length, well-researched book on the subject appeared. The collision has since been included in several modern-disaster collections and more poems and songs have emerged.

  There are also three-dimensional memorials. The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has a contemporary model of the collision (dated 1878), London Transport Museum in Covent Garden exhibits a modern model of the Princess Alice and the disaster features among the displays at the Museum of London Docklands.

  As for the real Princess Alice herself, there is a monument to her and her daughter May at the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore House in Windsor. Countrywide there are several Princess Alice pubs, residential Drives and Ways, a retail park, hospices, a rose, and even a football club. But only some of these are in memory of either the Princess Alice disaster or of that particular Princess Alice. A Princess Alice Way and a Princess Alice pub exist in Thamesmead, which overlooks the site of the Princess Alice collision, but some others carrying the name are far from the site. Given that three other ladies by the name of Princess Alice occupy quite prominent positions in British royal history it is not surprising that some confusion arises. More so, considering the similarities in their histories, characters and interests. To aid understanding I offer:

  Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone (Alice Mary Victoria, Augusta, Pauline) 1883–1981: The daughter of Queen Victoria’s youngest son, Prince Leopold, and Princess Helen of Waldech and Pymont. In 1904 she married Prince Alexander of Teck, who later became the Earl of Athlone. From 1924 her husband became successively Governor General of South Africa and then (from 1940–1946) Governor General of Canada. Alice took an interest in the women’s sections of the Canadian armed forces and became president of the nursing division of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. She was widowed in 1957 and lived at Kensington Palace until 1981, almost reaching the age of ninety-eight, which made her the longest lived Princess of the Blood Royal and the last surviving grandchild of Queen Victoria.

  Princess Alice of Battenberg (Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie) 1885–1969: The daughter of Princess Victoria (the eldest daughter of our original Princess Alice) and Prince Louis of Battenberg, she was born in Windsor Castle and spent her childhood between Darmstadt, London and Malta, where her naval officer father was occasionally stationed. Although congenitally deaf, with encouragement from her mother, Alice learned to lip-read and to speak English and German. In 1903 she married Prince Andrew of Greece and became Princess Andrew of Greece. The couple had five children: four girls and one boy. The boy was Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark who later married Britain’s Princess Elizabeth.

  During the Balkan Wars3 the Princess acted as a nurse and set up field hospitals for which, in 1913, she was awarded the Royal Red Cross. During the next few years, as various European thrones toppled, the Greek Royal family were forced into exile twice, on the second occasion rescued by a British cruiser, HMS Calypso. Her daughters married German princes and her son, Prince Philip, went to stay with his uncles Lord Louis and George Mountbatten (the name Battenberg having been dropped during the Great War). In 1938 she returned to Athens where she worked among the poor. She stayed on during the war, working for the Red Cross, helping organize soup kitchens and shelters for orphaned children and hiding Jewish widow Rachel Cohen and her five children from the Gestapo. For this act she was later honoured by Israel as being Righteous among the Nations.

  Alice attended the wedding of her son, Prince Philip, to Britain’s future queen and, in 1953, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, to which she wore the two-tone grey, nun-like habit of the order of Greek Orthodox nuns which she had founded. She finally left Greece in 1967 following the Colonel’s coup and went to live at Buckingham Palace where she died on 5 December 1969.

  Like her grandmother, Princess Alice of Great Britain and Ireland, she clearly had a keen social conscience and sufficient practical sense to put it to good use.

  Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester (Alice Christabel Montague Douglas Scott) 1901–2044: The third daughter of John Montague Douglas Scott, Scotland’s biggest landowner, and former Lady Margaret Bridgeman. She married Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, the third son of King George V. During the war the Duchess acquired several senior armed forces, Red Cross and nursing posts and became Colonel in Chief of a dozen regiments and Chancellor of Derby University. From 1945–1947 the couple lived in Canberra, her husband having become Governor General of Australia. In 1994 she moved to Kensington Palace where, on her one hundredth birthday in 2002, she became the oldest person in the history of the royal family. She died, aged 102, in 2004.

  As you will notice: more than one of these four princesses was involved with nursing or medical charities; two had husbands who became colonial Governor Generals; two were particularly long-lived; and, of course, all had German connections via marriages of Queen Victoria’s offspring.

  Obviously, the finest memorials to the Princess Alice disaster and those with the most impact and lasting benefit were the swimming pools that sprang up around London. Places like Islington, which had lost so many of its residents in the disaster and whose vestry had been heavily criticized for dragging their heels, now got moving. Indeed, as early as 16 September 1878, a letter from a Mr E. Plummer appeared in the Islington Gazette declaring that he had secured a most eligible site in the Blackstock Road for the erection of two very large swimming baths for the inhabitants of Finsbury Park, Highbury and Islington.

  The plans, &c, are now in hand; as soon as they are completed I intend calling together a meeting of such gentlemen as take an interest in this great subject – swimming, for the purpose of forming a committee to carry out the same in a first-class manner.<
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  This time the vestry acted quickly. In 1892, fourteen years after the Princess Alice disaster, two public baths and washhouses were opened and they were impressive. The first, on Caledonian Road, in the south of the borough, had two swimming baths. One was 90 x 30 ft (first class, 6d) the other 75 x 25 ft (second class, 2d). There were also forty-two private hot and cold baths for men and sixteen for women (first class hot, 6d, cold, 3d; second class hot, 2d, cold, 1d).

  The second of the new Islington baths and washhouses were on Hornsey Road (near the Blackstock Road mentioned by Mr Plummer). This one had two swimming baths for men (132 x 40 ft and 100 x 35 ft) and one for women (75 x 25 ft) plus private baths (seventy-four for men, thirty-four for women), laundry facilities and a bonnet room. The Hornsey Road Baths, although under-providing for women who had, after all, been the majority of those drowned that early September evening, was at the time the largest complex of its kind in the United Kingdom.

  A third set of public baths and washhouses was opened just off the Essex Road, halfway down the borough, in 1895. Islington had clearly learned its lesson.

  Notes

  1. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (PAD 6772 and PAD 6773).

  2. HMS Royal George, the largest warship in the world when launched, was sunk in August 1872 whilst undergoing routine maintenance work off Portsmouth with the loss of over 800 lives.

  3. The Balkan Wars (1912–13) resulted in the expulsion of Ottoman Turkey from Europe with the exception of a small area around Istanbul.