The Princess Alice Disaster

by Joan Lock

  Mr Harrington, the jury foreman, spoke up to announce that after the previous day’s adjournment, in compliance with instructions, he and Inspector Dawkins had taken a steamboat down to Erith to collect the fourteen bodies left there. He reported, ‘I am sorry to say they [the bodies] have been treated in a different manner from what has been the case at Woolwich’.

  In fact, some of the bodies at Erith were rather more damaged than those landing elsewhere – possibly due to buffeting when carried a long distance downstream. More disturbingly, some had been undressed, which, said The Times, ‘somewhat retarded their identification’.3

  By the reopening of the inquest on Friday, 6 September, it all seemed to be getting a little too much for Mr Carttar. Three days of viewing bodies of men, women and children and listening to a relentless succession of bereft relatives giving their tearful evidence of identification, were obviously taking their toll. As he spoke of the magnitude of the disaster and the dreadful loss of life, and praised the military, the people of Woolwich and others for their assistance, he was suddenly overcome and covered his face with his hands. When he recovered, the sad procedure continued. But, upset or no, Carttar was not going to let any dubious witnesses go unchallenged.

  Thomas Gray, who claimed a body to be that of his wife’s niece, Harriett Gurr, aged forty, admitted that he had no real reason to assume that she had been onboard the Princess Alice. He knew nothing of her movements apart from the fact that she had gone to Gravesend on the Monday. It was only when he heard of the accident that he had become concerned. His wife, however, had had ‘a presentment’ and had ordered him down to Woolwich where, he claimed, he had seen her niece among the dead. He had no doubt about her identity.

  The coroner was not satisfied and urged Mr Gray to consider that a mistake was possible.

  Mr Gray was not happy: ‘I have no doubt about the identity of my niece’.

  But Mr Carttar persisted. ‘You are, I doubt not, speaking as you believe, but I should like some better evidence.’ He went on to describe a case ‘not long ago’ in which sixteen persons had sworn most positively to the identity of a body of a man. There had been a public subscription for the widow and her dead baby had been buried in the same coffin with the corpse. Three months later, the husband suddenly appeared alive and in good health. Therefore, Carttar insisted, it was necessary to be particular.

  ‘Mr Gray could not see the argument,’ reported the Standard, ‘and lost his temper. He had been sent to recognize his wife’s niece and he had done so’.

  However, in answer to a question from the jury foreman he admitted that had there been no accident they would not have inquired for some days longer.

  It was revealed that the niece usually wore a hunting watch so Mr Gray was sent off to examine her property.

  Next came a surgeon, Mr Arthur William Kempe, who presented an erroneous death certificate which, he said, had been issued for the body of his surgeon-dentist father. A fellow surgeon had identified him as Arthur William Kempe, but in fact his name was William Hussey Bloomfield Kempe. ‘This mistake was most serious, pointed out the Daily News, ‘as the deceased had insured his life; the name was corrected, of course’.

  When William John Anchorn identified his father and mother to the court’s satisfaction ‘a spectator’ stood up to declare that the mother’s name had been wrongly given as Ellen Elizabeth when it should be Ellen Flin. He knew that because she was his sister. The son said he had never heard the name Flin connected with his family or his mother. The objector was called forward to explain ‘that property might be at stake’. Since he had no proof of his claim he was told that the name could be changed if some was brought.

  ‘A lady, who indeed had no close interest in the remains she claimed’, reported the Standard, ‘was painfully anxious about “the property” – a wedding ring, a keeper ring with two emeralds and a small diamond, silver earrings and suchlike. The police eased her mind by the assurance that these things were safe, and she departed happy.’

  It seemed that Carttar and Williams Lewis had been right to ensure proper identification. The vultures appeared to be gathering.

  Mr Gray reappeared complaining that he had been unable to find the official charged with keeping his niece’s things, but someone spoke up to say he had just left Inspector Ford in his proper place, whereupon Mr Gray found he had been looking in the wrong direction. ‘This gentleman’, commented the Standard, ‘evidently thought himself a public benefactor in identifying his wife’s niece, and declared aloud, on setting out once more to find Inspector Ford, that if this search was not successful he would go home’.

  The Standard continued its graphic descriptions but mostly in a somewhat kinder tone:

  The testimony of Henry Beadle had touches of extreme pathos. A gaunt and dirty old man deposed to the finding of his wife, and the coroner’s close questioning could do no more than raise a quiver of his unshorn lip, and a dogged repetition, ‘Oh I know her – oh I know her, sir!’

  Mary Jones gave her evidence firmly until it came to the point when her husband went ‘for a ramble with a friend’ after doing his work. Here she broke down suddenly and piteously, but in a few seconds her firmness returned. The companion of this sad ramble had escaped and he stepped up to the table. In that dry and husky voice that belongs to the street poor of London, with odd starts and bursts, and sudden stoppages he told how the pair went to Deptford, then to Gravesend, and thence the one to death and the other to do a battle with the stream.

  Louisa Boddington, an interesting young girl, claimed a burial certificate for her mother, who had gone upon the pleasure trip of the Cowcross Mission. As a lady explained, this child is left without a sixpence to support four little brothers and sisters. Mr Catlin, who was seeking his own dead at the riverside, is willing to bury Louisa’s mother if the corpse can be brought to him, and the exertions of the military and steam-boat authorities have provided for such a case.4

  Poor old Fanny Robert, a spinster from Luton in Bedfordshire, who identified the body of her cousin, had been kindly looking after this cousin’s seven children while she and her husband went on the Princess Alice to Sheerness. The husband was still missing and Fanny had been left holding the babies, all seven of them.

  There came further evidence of whole families being wiped out. George Hunt, an office fitter from Kingsland in Hackney, identified the body of his 22-year-old son. His wife and four other children, two boys and two girls, were also lost.

  And so it went on: sons and daughters identifying parents, parents identifying children, husbands identifying wives and wives identifying husbands, with occasional variations.

  George Quinton, a cooper, identified Emily, the 10-year-old daughter of his employer, William Davies. William Davies himself, his wife, and five other children were all lost.

  ‘The mother reached the shore alive,’ reported The Times, ‘but died thirty-six hours afterwards from exposure and exhaustion. She was perfectly conscious to the last and knew that all her family were lost. Her husband at the moment of collision said to her, “It’s all over this time.” The newspaper did not explain what Mr Davies had meant by ‘this time’.5

  Mrs Davies was not the only survivor to die quite soon after rescue. Sixty-one-year-old Mrs Emma Standish, who had been recovering in the infirmary, died on the Friday morning from ‘chronic bronchitis accelerated by shock and immersion’.6 Mrs Davis of Limehouse ‘succumbed to her injuries in the presence of her friends’ in one of the Creekmouth cottages7 while Mr Vachel, ‘a gentleman from Surbiton’ died on Friday night at the house of a friend, Dr Lacey of Plumstead ‘whither he was taken from the wreck at his own request’.8

  Other departures from the norm of family identifications occurred when Royal Artillery Sergeant Major Richard Sleet identified Farrier Sergeant James Burton and when Police Inspector William Jenkins identified the body of PC Cornelius Briscoe, ‘N’ Division’s local hero who had rescued a drowning person from the Regent’s Canal. His wif
e and children were still missing.

  At nearly one o’clock the coroner decided to adjourn ‘for dinner’ but Mr Hughes, on the behalf of the London Steamboat Company, asked if he might summarize a statement of his which demonstrated how they had arrived at the number who were onboard at the time of the collision. This explained that, at various boarding points, a tally of passengers was taken by the pier-master, for the purpose of charging dues, giving a pretty accurate return and thus answering the burning question of how many might have drowned and how many more bodies they might expect to surface.

  It was known that the Princess Alice was licensed to carry 936 passengers on the ‘smooth water voyage’, that is as far as Gravesend, but beyond that, in the estuary where the Thames began to open out to the sea, only 486 in the summer and 336 in the winter.

  Mr Hughes’s statement revealed that on Tuesday 3 September 1878, there had been 491 passengers onboard the Princess Alice when she arrived at Sheerness. Four had left there, leaving 487. Eighty-one of these had landed at Gravesend, reducing the total to 406, but seventy-nine people had then boarded at Gravesend, bringing the total back up to 485. At Rosherville, 138 had boarded, raising it to 623. To be added to that were twenty-nine crew and stewards, bringing the total up 652. And, to this, ‘a few’ needed to be added for the band. However, very young children were not counted nor were children in arms.

  A juryman commented that, in fact, children up to the age of six or seven were not counted. The coroner disagreed saying that, in his experience, two children above the age of two were counted as one passenger, which meant that if 150 of the single tickets represented two people, this would raise the 652 total they had been given, to 802.

  A juryman suggested that an aggregate might be obtained by taking the numbers of the parties, as stated by the witnesses. But the jury foreman said that very few tickets had been found on the bodies, so it seemed there must have been a number onboard without tickets. Another juryman pointed out that this might be accounted for by one member of a party having retained all the tickets and therefore some bodies might be found with several tickets on them.

  In the end, it seemed that Mr Hughes’s statement had not taken them much further forward except to convince them that, as feared, the number onboard had been very large, and therefore there were many more bodies yet to come.

  Meanwhile, as Mr Carttar and his jury adjourned for their dinner, the Grand Duke and Duchess of Hesse (the real Princess Alice) were lunching at Clarence House, in the company of the Prince and Princess of Wales and the King and Queen of Denmark, prior to their departure that afternoon for Antwerp and thence home to Darmstadt.

  Notes

  1. Standard, 6 September 1878.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Standard and The Times, 6 September 1878.

  With regard to the naked bodies it had been remarked that, should you have committed a murder and wished to get rid of the body, this was a good time and place to do it. An idea which I confess I made use of in my historical crime novel, Dead Born (Hale, 2001) which I based around the Princess Alice disaster.

  4. Standard, 7 September 1878.

  5. The Times, 7 September 1878.

  6. The Times, 7 September 1878, and the Standard, 6 September 1878.

  7. Standard, 6 September 1878.

  8. The Times, 7 September 1878.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Serious Accusations

  Meanwhile, the Bywell Castle remained anchored off Deptford where she had moved from Barking Creek on the instruction of the owners. Captain Harrison and his wife, who had been a passenger, went back to their home in Hackney to await developments.

  The unenviable situation of Captain Harrison had not been helped by an accusation from his own stoker, Purcell, that at the time of the collision the crew of the Bywell Castle had all been drunk. Purcell had first made his accusation on the night of the disaster. He had climbed onboard the Bywell Castle’s cutter with other crew members plus three of the saved from the Princess Alice. They had been hoping to rescue as many as forty, even though the boat was meant to carry only thirty. In the event, only five living survivors remained to be saved, but they took them, along with four dead bodies, downriver to Erith to avoid the heavy pull needed to go upstream. Purcell certainly appeared drunk. He proved a garrulous nuisance whilst onboard. But when he reached Erith he began shouting his accusations.

  PC30 ‘R’ of Erith Division had joined the crowd gathering at Erith’s moonlit landing place and took the names and addresses of the survivors. After he finished, Purcell asked him insolently, ‘Well, are you going to get me some brandy?’

  When the constable said ‘No,’ Purcell asked where there was a pub.

  ‘Just at the top,’ said the PC.

  ‘I will bloody well go and get some myself then,’ Purcell said.

  While the others helped move the bodies Purcell stayed at the pub where a local confectioner, named Harris, befriended him, took him home and gave him a jacket, as he was still in shirt sleeves.

  ‘This is a sad affair,’ Harris had murmured.

  ‘By God it is, Guvnor,’ Purcell agreed.

  ‘How do you account for it?’

  ‘It’s the bloody booze.’

  ‘You do not mean that?’

  ‘I do, by God,’ exclaimed the stoker.

  Purcell had gone on to claim that that the Captain and the pilot had been boozing, ‘all the bloody afternoon,’ but he blamed the collision squarely on the second mate whom he had heard say, ‘I’ll see if I can handle this bugger,’ before striding off.

  Just after that, the collision occurred.

  The arrival of another crew member stopped Purcell’s mouth, for a while, but on the way back to the pub he returned to blaming the second mate who ‘ought to be bloody hung’.

  ‘Do you mean to say you were all boozed?’ asked Harris.

  ‘Every bloody bung.’

  ‘Were you drunk?’

  ‘I was, Guvnor, but by God, it brought me sober.’

  Shortly afterwards Purcell collapsed on the floor. When revived, he was taken to the bar shouting, ‘The beasts were drunk. The beasts were drunk!’

  Settled into a high-backed chair he began to cry muttering, ‘S’help me God I mean to tell the truth’.1

  The other men told him to keep quiet and said they ought to get back. As they went down the causeway Purcell was sick then fell into the boat where he was left insensible. By now, the rest of the crew were also tipsy from being ‘treated’. On their return journey they were all over the river. Fortunately, Robinson, a local man, took charge of the cutter and got them back safely.

  The following morning the Bywell Castle moved up to Deptford where Captain Harrison made up his log: the first official account of the disaster.

  Log of the steamship Bywell Castle from London towards the Tyne

  Remarks

  On Tuesday the third of September, 1878, John Hardy on the lookout on the topgallant forecastle. William Henry Haynes, Henry Gribben and William Brankston, Second Mate, at the wheel. Light air and weather a little hazy. At 7.45 p.m. proceeding at half speed down Galleon’s Reach, being about the centre of the Reach, observed an excursion steamer coming up Barking Reach shewing [sic] his red and masthead lights, when we ported our helm to keep over to Tripcock Point. As the vessels neared, observed that the other steamer had ported and immediately afterwards saw that he had starboarded and was trying to cross our bows, shewing his green light close under the port bow.

  Seeing collision inevitable stopped our engines and reversed full speed, when the two vessels collided, the bow of the Bywell Castle cutting into the other steamer which was crowded with passengers with a dreadful crash. Took immediate measures for saving life by hauling up over the bows several men of the passengers throwing ropes ends over all round the ship, throwing over four life-buoys, a hold ladder and some planks, and getting out three boats, keeping the whistle blowing loudly all the time for assistance which was rendered by several boa
ts from the shore and the boats from another steamer, the excursion steamer which turned out to be the Princess Alice turning over and sinking under the bows. Succeeded in rescuing a great many passengers and anchored for the night. About 8.30 p.m. steamer Duke of Teck came alongside and took off such passengers as had not been taken on shore in the boats.

  (Signed) Thomas Harrison, Commander

  Henry John Belding, Mate2

  This log was published in the newspapers.

  Letters kept coming in to the newspapers, some correspondents offering the benefit of their expert knowledge, others brimming with ideas, opinions, accusations, justifications and advice.

  Some had an axe to grind. John Orrell Lever, the founder of the London Steamboat Company, insisted that, while he was not desirous of imitating the owners or the captain of Bywell Castle who, by the publication of their ship’s log had, ‘in the most un-English manner’ attempted to prejudice public opinion, as far as he had been able to discover no blame whatever could be laid on the deceased captain of the Princess Alice nor on any of his crew.3

  A virtual eulogy for Captain Grinstead came from S.R. Townsend Mayer. After describing the captain’s great care of passengers, devotion to duty, calmness, skill, presence of mind in all circumstances and his seamanship, he drew a picture of the problems he daily faced.

  The difficulties of a return voyage from Gravesend to London Bridge in the evening, when the river is covered by every kind of craft, can be recalled only by those who have witnessed them. Barges, ladened, gunnel-deep, drift down the river diagonally, and being generally undermanned, they are almost helpless logs in an ebb tide, alike dangerous to their own crews and everything they meet. Scarcely has one of these been cleared, amidst such badinage and shouting of ‘Ease her’, ‘stop her’, ‘back her’, and ‘go ahead’ – and perhaps with a ‘close shave’ – then, what are far worse, sailing vessels and screw steamers unusually buoyant, because unfreighted, and all but umanageable as a their heads yaw from side to side in the strong current, have to be passed.