The Princess Alice Disaster

by Joan Lock

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Déjà Vu

  When the railways began to take London pleasure seekers down to coastal resorts, the pleasure gardens, such as Rosherville, suffered. By 1880 the well-known Cremorne and Vauxhall Gardens and the lesser known Highbury Barn in Islington and Surrey Zoological Gardens had all closed. Times changed for Rosherville as well. The fine statues in the Grecian Garden had begun to show their age and where once there had been wild animals there were now performing dogs and goats. The bear had grown weary of his pit and the taunts of onlookers and seized the arm of a gentleman who had incautiously put it through the bars of the cage. Damages granted amounted to a serious £500.

  In 1877 a considerable sum of money had been spent on a new pavilion, dancing platform and steam roundabout, but to no avail. In September, 1881, the owner was declared bankrupt. Rosherville limped on under various other ownerships and in 1901 there was a suggestion that, since the gardens had brought so much local pleasure and income, they might be purchased by Gravesend local authority. But it came to nothing and the gardens fell into decay. In 1930 they were auctioned off as a factory site.

  The Crossness sewage pumping station, which had been one of the more attractive sights for the Princess Alice’s passengers but added to their misery shortly after, was decommissioned in the 1950s and fell into disrepair. It was rescued in 1987 by the Crossness Engines Trust, set up to oversee the restoration project which is still in progress and is supported by Heritage Lottery and other funds.

  The pumping station’s interior is made much of not only due to its huge rotative beam engines (named Prince Consort, Victoria, Albert Edward and Alexandra) but also its spectacular ornamental ironwork. Nikolaus Pevsner, a noted authority on British architecture, referred to Crossness as ‘a Victorian cathedral of ironwork’. The building was used extensively for the BBC production of The Crimson Petal and the White doubling as both a cosmetic factory and the interior of a London train station.

  The Moorish chimneys of Abbey Mills Pumping Station, Crossness’s Byzantine twin across the water, were demolished in 1941 for fear that a bomb strike might topple them onto the pumping station. The remains of the buildings are Grade II listed and a modern pumping station now operates nearby. The old Abbey Mills Pumping Station has also been used as a film location, representing Arkham Asylum in the 2005 film Batman Begins.

  The Beckton Gasworks, described as ‘the largest such plant in the world’1 and which manufactured gas for most of London north of the Thames, closed in 1969 after the discovery of North Sea gas rendered manufactured gas uncompetitive. Spoil heaps from the works, that were reduced and landscaped, became known locally as Beckton Alps. The Beckton Gasworks’ site has been used in a number of films. The opening scene of the 1981 James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only (in which Bond attempts to gain control of a helicopter operated with remote control by his nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofield) was shot there. The site also doubled for the Vietnamese city of Hue in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket during which much of the gasworks were selectively demolished before the platoon went in to clear it of the Viet Cong. Virtually no trace of the old gasworks now remains.

  The town of Woolwich was in Kent but became part of Greater London in 1889 and is now in the newly created Royal Borough of Greenwich. The Royal Arsenal saw a massive expansion during the Great War but during the Second World War the site was considered too vulnerable to bombing and much of its ordnance production was moved away. Nonetheless, 30,000 people continued to work there during the war and quite a number were killed by bombs, flying bombs and rockets.

  But the town was already in decline at the time of the Princess Alice disaster due to the closure of the docks and this continued into the twentieth century.2 The closure of the Sieman’s factory in 1968 and the scaling back of the Royal Arsenal, which finally closed in 1994, brought further decay.3 As the town centre of Woolwich declined, cinemas closed and the main street became home to discount stores and charity shops. The redevelopment of the sprawling Royal Arsenal site, on which were built the new town of Thamesmead, Belmarsh high-security prison and new-build apartments, brought some improvement, as have conversions of listed Royal Arsenal buildings for residential use, a Royal Artillery Museum and the Greenwich Heritage Centre. An Arts Centre has been opened, further improvements are planned and the town was a venue for the shooting events at the recent Olympics.

  The Thames Division of the Metropolitan Police is now the Marine Support Unit; it has responsibility for policing the 36 miles of river between Dartford Creek and Hampton Court. They began life in 1798 as the Marine Police Force, founded largely to prevent theft and corruption in the Port of London. When amalgamated with the new Metropolitan Police in 1839 they became the Thames Division and operated out of three riverside police stations: Wapping, Waterloo and Blackwall. Today, the Marine Support Unit fights crime and prevents disorder and drug importation. It also has four specialist teams: terrorism and crime; intelligence; tactical response (which targets crime hotspots, often focussing on other London waterways) and the underwater and confined space search team (which also carries out searches of canals, ponds, lakes and reservoirs). The unit is not a statutory search and rescue organization, but with the growth of leisure activities on the Thames, they do spend a lot of time assisting and advising private boat owners and recovering bodies. Over fifty people a year lose their lives in the Thames, about eighty per cent of these are deaths by suicide and these bodies are retrieved and identified by the Marine Support Unit.

  Now and then down the years the terrible story of the Princess Alice has been remembered but, considering the scale of the accident, one might have expected it to attract more attention. Perhaps the horrors of two world wars have put it in the shade. However, the internet and the current popularity of family research have sparked off interest in the subject as a number of people discover that their ancestors were either victims or survivors of the disaster. There is even a Facebook meeting place for relatives or those otherwise interested.

  David Ellen, who had been researching the subject for some time, discovered that his ancestor was Henry Drew, the unfortunate man who had lost three daughters in the accident after which his survivor wife died. It is heartening to know that Henry did manage to find happiness again by marrying and becoming father to seven more children. One of these, Clara, was to become David’s mother.

  Quite a number of pub landlords were onboard the fated ship that day and another victim’s descendant, Lisa Grace Smith, told me that it was mentioned in her family that the outing ‘had been regarded as the publican’s equivalent of a beano’. Her ancestor was the brother of Disney Perou, beer seller of the Rising Sun Tavern in Sidney Street, Stepney, and the Brittania Beer House in Mile End. Disney’s body was found washed up at Barking Creek three days after the accident. Lisa had traced the family back to a Huguenot couple, Pierre Priou and his wife, who came over to England in 1645. Indeed, Disney’s father was a weaver, as was Disney on his marriage to Martha Pratt in 1843. Disney left a long and explicit will, drawn up in 1874. One of its chief beneficiaries was his daughter, Mary Ann, who was left the beer house lock, stock and barrel. She had been and was, the will explained, very useful to him in his business.

  Other publicans who perished were Peter H. Moore of the Alfred Tavern in Islington, Alexander Mouflet, licensee at the Metropolitan Meat Market, plus his wife and two children; Thomas Fuller, of the Adam and Eve Tavern at Aldersgate in Kent, and his son, George Hughes of the Control Arms, Porters Green; Caroline Adelaide Dyble of the Rose and Crown off Fleet Street; and licensed victualler Sophia Finnett, of the Queen Victoria, Bromley, who had intended to board another boat but was persuaded onto the Princess Alice by four friends ‘who were also lost’.4 It was not reported whether her friends were also licensees or barmen and barwomen, of whom there were several. Edmund Wool, landlord of the Granby Arms in Hampstead, did not go on the outing, but six of his family did and all perished, from his wife, Annie, to their
16-month-old baby, Kate. Publican Edmund Relfe suffered a similar bereavement. He had not been on the day out either, but his three daughters, aged twenty, sixteen and thirteen, had and he was obliged to identify their bodies.

  Another publican surfaced during the family research of Maureen Nicholls. Her mother had told her that her aunt, Mary Ball, had died in a Thames accident between the Princess Alice and the Bible Castle. ‘My first lesson’, says Maureen, ‘in names being slightly altered over the years.’ Mary Ball was in service and, it seems that her mother, Bridget, had not realized that she was missing until her friends came to see her to tell her that Mary had gone out on her day off ‘with a licensed victualler who was married’. The pair had chosen to go on the boat trip because they would be less likely to meet people they knew. Being off duty, Mary had worn her hair long and free and, Maureen relates, ‘apparently when the boat went down and they were flung into the water Mary’s man-friend grabbed her hair and swam for the shore; unfortunately when he reached the shore he found he had rescued the wrong woman’.5 The man’s name had not been passed down with the family story.

  Constables Lewis and Briscoe were not the only police victims. Superintendent Aslat from the East India Dock Police and PC Robert Ginn from Cambridge Police also died, as did the two nieces Ginn had brought with him.

  The three largest groups of working people onboard were shopkeepers and their assistants, artisans and servants. The servants ranged from butlers to grooms, cooks, ladies’ maids and nursemaids, the latter mostly accompanying their employers for the purpose of looking after the children. Carpenters, plumbers, potters, stonemasons, gas fitters and compositors made up most of the artisans although there was occasional confusion over some of their job descriptions. One, noted as a ‘tin plate worker’, appeared elsewhere as a ‘zinc worker’. Also quite numerous were the clerks (clerks to solicitors, publishers, stockbrokers, merchants, the civil service, builders and printers) and transport workers (cabbies, carriers, drovers, coachmen and railwaymen). Among the rest were half a dozen teachers (including a professor of music), a couple of dentists, an accountant, an organist, a shipwright, three hairdressers, three commercial travellers, two coffee-house keepers, a theology student, a brace and belt manufacturer, and one or two more ‘gentlemen’.

  There has long been a suggestion that Elizabeth Stride, one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, had been a passenger on the Princess Alice and/or had lost her husband and two children in the accident. But Ripper-ologists have assured me that the claim does not hold water, for various reasons. Swedish-born Elisabeth Gustafsdottor was already a prostitute when she arrived in London where, in 1869, she married John Thomas Stride. The marriage broke down and, later, Elizabeth began telling the Princess Alice story, seemingly as a way of reinventing her past. Elizabeth’s estranged husband, John Stride, died in a workhouse in 1884.

  On 20 May, 1966, the Wandsworth Borough News, interviewed the last survivor of the Princess Alice disaster, 91-year-old Mrs Mabel Elizabeth Foster. When she was four years old, Mabel (whose maiden-name was Ogbourne) had spent a holiday with her aunt in Sheerness and was returning home on the Princess Alice. The aunt perished but, Mabel told the reporter, she still had the telegram which her grandfather had sent to her widowed mother on 4 September 1878. It said simply ‘The child is saved’. The experience, said Mabel, had left her with a horror of water.

  Ultimately, what actually caused the Princess Alice disaster on the Thames all those years ago was the same thing that caused all the other collisions: an overcrowded waterway, lack of discipline by those using it, lack of obedience of the rules of the road and lack of the sophisticated navigational aids we now have. The accidents not only kept happening but they increased and many of them involved Tyne colliers. They collided with each other in the Thames, the English Channel, the North Sea and the River Tyne.6 Of course, the sheer number of them may account for this prominence.

  In recent years large and handsome boats taking in the sights of London from Westminster Pier to Tower Bridge or Greenwich and the Thames Barrier have become very popular, as have smaller craft, often hired by groups of friends or office workers for cruise parties. One such was the Marchioness, a 46-ton pleasure craft that, one warm August evening in 1989, carried a group of 130 friends celebrating the twenty-sixth birthday of one of their party, Antonio de Vasconcellos. Some knew each other from their time at Cambridge University, others through their work in the fashion industry. Without warning, as the craft neared Cannon Street Railway Bridge, the Marchioness was rammed by a 1,880-ton dredger, the Bowbelle. It cut through the side of the small pleasure craft, which rolled over and quickly filled with water as it was pushed under. Complete immersion was estimated to have taken about thirty seconds. The majority of the seventy-four survivors had been on the upper decks. Twenty-four were recovered from the sunken hull.

  Although the Thames was, by then, a much less-frequented highway than it had been at the time of the Princess Alice sinking, and this particular accident occurred much further up river and later at night, there were some echoes down the years: the rapid sinking of the smaller vessel; accusations on both sides of a failure to keep proper lookout; inebriation of one of the captains (it was found that the Bowbelle’s captain had sunk five to six pints of lager that afternoon); the loss of the captains of both sunken boats; and some victims being trapped in the lower saloons. And there was a similar aftermath, the larger vessel itself being later lost when the Bowbelle split in two and sunk off Madeira in March 1996. Another similarity was the lack of river-safety warning bells, as was noted by The Times of 24 March 2001. They reported that, back in 1983, after a series of collisions on the Thames, a Department of Transport official had warned that it was ‘not a case of “IF” a serious accident occurs but “WHEN”’.

  One marked difference between the Princess Alice and the Marchioness was the type of passenger. Those on the Princess Alice had been mostly mixed-age family groups and were largely upper working class, whilst those on the Marchioness were in their twenties, educated, artistic and professional, or aspiring to be. Some of the survivors felt that this fact lessened the sympathy felt for them, that it made them appear wealthy, privileged and self-indulgent, which they were not. However, the confidence their education had afforded them may well have helped them and their parents fight their long battle to win a public inquiry into the accident which was eventually held in 2000.

  The subsequent report made several recommendations for the improvement of river safety and led to a multi-agency examination of the question. A major result of the inquiry was the setting up of four permanently manned lifeboat stations on the Thames at Gravesend, Tower Pier, Chiswick Pier and Teddington. These are capable of launching a boat within one minute of being alerted and reaching any point on the river between Canvey Island in the Thames Estuary and Teddington up river within fifteen minutes. During their first year of service (2002) they were called out 850 times.

  There is a memorial plaque to the victims of the Marchioness disaster in the nave of Southwark Cathedral, not far from the scene of the accident. Let’s hope there is no longer any need for memorials to pleasure boat disasters on the Thames.

  Notes

  1. Wonders of World Engineering (ed.) C. Winchester (The Amalgamated Press, 1937), pp.309–13.

  2. Oddly, in 1974, Woolwich became the venue of the first UK branch of McDonald’s chosen, apparently, because it was then considered to be a representative English town.

  3. The famous Arsenal Football Club was founded by the Royal Arsenal workers in 1886 but moved to Highbury in north London in 1913 and dropped the prefix Woolwich.

  4. The Times, 6 September 1878.

  5. This is the fourth example of a man having saved the wrong woman. The first was Thames Police Inspector King who swam to the shore with his wife but found it wasn’t her, (as reported in the Kentish Independent and the Morning Post and mentioned on p.13 of The Wreck of the Princess Alice). Secondly, in modern times the same story h
as been linked to another Thames Police officer, John Lewis. However, Lewis was never actually on the boat with his wife and children. When identifying his wife’s body he told the inquest that he had last seen her when he saw her off at Sheerness. He had not wanted her to go home at that time but to wait until the following day. Thirdly, there is the anonymous narrator in the broadsheet (see Chapter Twenty-Three) who mentions supporting a woman he thought was his Lizzie, but later found was not. Edwin Guest also relates the story of the young son of John and Elizabeth Room of Birmingham who was ‘an excellent swimmer’. He saved a woman who, at the time, he thought was his mother but she remained missing.

  6. 1880 Returning from its first voyage, the W.J. Taylor collided with the H.P. Stephenson and sank in the mouth of the Tyne. Collier Berwick collided with a steam hopper in the Tyne.

  1884 Steamship Dione en route down the Thames collided with the steamship Camden. The Dione sank with the loss of thirteen lives.

  1887 Collier Edward Eccles collided in the Tyne with the steamer Huntingdon. Both were badly damaged.

  1891 Steam launch Mayfly and small passenger ferry John Clayton collided in the Tyne. Three people died. The schooner Pedestrian collided with Australia-bound steamship Dorunda off Dungeness. A steamer (name unknown) collided with Norwegian barque Harmonie in the mouth of the Mersey.

  1894 Collier Ellington collided with collier Bromsgrove in the Solent.

  1897 Brigantine Rokewood was rammed by the Maine steamship as she was going up the Thames. One death.

  1898 Collier Ryhope was rammed by the Edwin and sunk in the mouth of the Tyne. The collier Wallsend collided with the Elizabeth in the Thames. Collier Frederick Snowdon collided with collier Walton in the North Sea. The Frederick Snowdon put back to Tyne where it collided again (this time with the Bradford) and sank.

  1899 Steamer Edwin collided with collier Chipchase in the Tyne. Collier Bolden collided with a brigandine in the North Sea. Three deaths.