The Princess Alice Disaster

by Joan Lock

  Once the dreadful disaster had occurred a famous name added his voice to the clamour. Captain Webb,8 the first man to swim the English Channel, commented:

  A simple easy movement of the limbs enabled me to swim from Woolwich to Gravesend and back; and yet, because so few take the trouble to learn this movement, they perish within a couple of hundred yards from the shore.9

  The ‘Directions for Restoring the Apparently Drowned’, offered in the post-accident booklet, The Wreck of the Princess Alice, explained, ‘to imitate breathing’ one first should try to ‘excite the nostrils with snuff, hartshorn,10 and smelling salts, or tickle the throat with a feather, etc., if they are at hand’.

  As for the artificial respiration these were an amalgam of the principles of the late Dr Marshall Hall and those of Dr H.R. Silvestre. One was advised to begin with Dr Marshall’s method, which amounted to placing ‘the patient’ on his face, then on his side, then turned back onto his face, back and forth about fifteen times a minute. Should that not work in about five minutes then recourse to Dr Silvestre’s method was advised. For this, one placed the patient on a tilted surface with head and shoulders supported on a small firm cushion or ‘a folded article of dress’ and kept his tongue projecting beyond his lips with an elastic band or a piece of string or tape over it and under the chin. The rescuer then stood at the patient’s head, grasped his arms just above the elbows, raised them up and kept them stretched for two seconds then put them down again pressing them against the sides of his chest for two seconds.

  More than a dozen local Islington children had drowned in the Princess Alice disaster, most of them girls, and even more adults. As a consequence, in their issue of 11 September 1878, the Islington Gazette went for their vestry’s jugular. While conceding that most vestries had not taken advantage of the Public Baths and Washhouses Act,11 they accused Islington’s of having shown something like a prejudice against the measure and even stooping to misrepresentation of the facts.

  One of the reasons for Islington ‘burking the baths and washhouses question’, the Islington Gazette claimed, was that free libraries had also been proposed and the strong prejudices against the free libraries doubtless influenced their decision. To put through Baths and Washhouses would be the thin end of the wedge ‘allowing for the adoption of further permissive acts’.

  Not so St Pancras, a parish similar in character to Islington, ‘but with less pretensions among the administration to refinement and intelligence’. They had taken to it in a most liberal spirit.

  It was scarcely necessary for the Islington Gazette to hammer home the suffering of people in Islington due, in part, to their inability to swim. The evidence lay alongside their leader column in the endless inquest and funeral reports.

  Other drowning accidents were now featured in the newspapers. There had been several during the past week, reported the Illustrated London News on 7 September 1878. One accident had occurred when three young ladies went rowing on a lake adjoining Brymston House in Somerset, the seat of the de Vesci family. The boat capsized, two of the young ladies were saved, but the other, 18-year-old Miss Ellen Ponsonby, third daughter of the Honourable Spencer Ponsonby Fane, had drowned.

  Notes

  1. The Times, 7 September 1878.

  2. The Times, 11 September 1878.

  3. Ibid.

  4. The HMS Eurydice was a very fast, 26-gun Royal Navy Corvette, refitted in 1877 as a seagoing training ship. The sinking is considered to be one of Britain’s worst peacetime naval disasters and is commemorated in the poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’.

  5. Islington Gazette, 4 September 1878.

  6. ‘Rinking’ is roller-skating at specially built rinks.

  7. The Wreck of the Princess Alice (ed.) Edwin Guest, pp.110–11.

  8. Captain Matthew Webb swam from Dover to Calais in twenty-one and three quarter hours on 24–5 August 1875. He was drowned in 1883 while attempting to swim the Niagara Falls.

  9. Quoted in The Wreck of the Princess Alice, p.109.

  10. ‘Hartshorn’ are shavings from the horn of the red deer.

  11. The Public Baths & Washhouses Act, 1846, allowed local parishes to raise money to provide public baths and washhouses where the labouring classes could cleanse themselves and their clothing. The act was amended in May 1878, to allow for the construction of covered swimming pools.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  What Are They Hiding?

  On Tuesday 10 September, after carrying out their usual task of viewing the bodies recovered the previous day, the Woolwich coroner and his jury trooped back to the town hall, where he opened the day’s proceedings with one of his statements. This one included a rather curious plea to the press.

  Mr Carttar was still preoccupied with the problem of ascertaining the exact number that had been onboard the Princess Alice. Understandably so, since he needed to know when these long days of listening only to identification evidence were going to end. Then they would be able to begin looking at what had caused the accident, who was to blame and exactly how and why all these people had died. In estimating how many had been onboard, he now complained that he was ‘not receiving as much assistance as he ought to do from the survivors.’ The next day, The Times reported his surprising plea:

  It would materially aid him in forming his estimate if all those who had been saved came forward to say so, but from some false delicacy, as he supposed, on their part, many of them seemed ashamed to avow that they had been near the vessel at all. Why it should be so, he could not tell, but he hoped that the sentiment would no longer be allowed to stand in the way of the public interest, and that all of those, without exception, who had been saved would acquaint him with the fact.

  Where he had got this impression is not quite clear and, if it was true, why? Perhaps some of the male survivors (and, as we have noted, it was mostly men who survived) were ashamed that they had not been able to save anyone but themselves, not even their own family, even though this may well have been impossible? Or perhaps they ought not to have been onboard? Maybe they had been taking an illicit day off work? Or were they with someone they ought not to have been with?

  When author Maureen Nichols was researching the loss of her great aunt, Mary Ball, in the Princess Alice disaster, she was surprised to find that young Mary, who was in service, had been with a married man.

  Returning to the matter of the numbers onboard, a juryman pointed out that several of them had taken note of the statements of witnesses as to the size of their parties and by this means they could arrive at an approximate number of those onboard.

  ‘It is not an approximate number, it is the accurate number we want’, the coroner retorted testily.

  So began another day in which sad people paraded before the inquest jury to swear as to why they thought one of the bodies lying in the dockyard or buried unknown was a friend or dear one.

  Among those identified that day by her father was 14-year-old Ruth Elizabeth Leaver, the last of the Leaver children to be found. Rosa Hennessey, daughter of a surgeon living in India and one of the Tufnell Park school party, was identified by its surviving member, Elizabeth Mary Randall, who told the court she had been promising her pupils the trip for some months. More members of the Bible party were also recognized.

  The Times reporter found one identification ‘more than unusually touching’. That of Charlotte Sophia Nares, aged twenty-five, the wife of George Nares, the son of the polar explorer George Strong Nares. A surgeon by the name of Thomas gave the required evidence. The husband, ‘a tall, powerful young man, one of the saved,’ also endeavoured to do so, ‘but his emotion completely overcame him, and he had to be carried out of court’.

  Unsurprisingly, despite the admirable identification arrangements, errors were beginning to surface. Mrs Nares’s rings were no longer on her fingers and the rest of her jewellery was also missing, but a packet of things which did not belong to her was attached. A juryman suggested the obvious, perhaps Mrs
Nares’s jewels had been accidentally transferred to another body? The Times thought not and that one of the watermen had probably taken them. ‘A similar suspicion’, they reported, ’attaches in the case of the corpse of a wealthy man, who was found with only 6½d in his pocket on his being searched at the dockyard.’

  A baby had also been mislaid. William Samuel Page, another lone man among his party to be saved, had come to collect the already identified body of his infant son only to find it had been taken away by someone else. It was thought, the coroner was informed, the boy had been mistakenly removed by an undertaker from Barking but the police were doing their best to rectify the mistake.

  Mr Page also wanted his wife’s body but it had been ‘buried unknown’. Could he have her exhumed? The coroner was doubtful: ‘Only by obtaining permission from the Secretary of State’, Carttar told him ‘and the consent of the Bishop of the Diocese – it’s a very expensive process’. Mr Page assured him that he did not mind the expense.

  The reporter was also touched by the plight of a father, publican Edmund Wool (who had not been onboard), ‘now left alone’ after his entire family of six plus two servants had ‘been swept away’.1

  The following day, to assist identification, Mr Hinds, the Superintendent of the Dockyard Division of the Police, displayed photographs of a number of the so far unrecognized dead. They were ‘by no means pleasing pictures,’ The Times somewhat unnecessarily informed its readers, ‘only less pleasing to look upon than the wan faces of a few sorrowful women in mourning who still flit about the dockyard in the hope of finding a lost figure’.2

  At 1 p.m. the parish authorities had informed by telegraph all the friends of the identified who lay unburied that if they were not removed they would be deposited in common graves. By 6 p.m., thirty-four had been removed, including the bodies of Captain Grinstead and his brother. The photographs, along with the trinkets in the little glazed cigar boxes proved effective. Twenty-two out of the thirty-nine unclaimed bodies displayed were identified that day. Police boiled and disinfected the clothes of those remaining and when dry they were stitched together to avoid separation or mingling. Things were winding down.

  There was progress, too, on the matter of the number saved. Mr Hughes, the solicitor for the London Steamboat Company, presented Mr Carttar with a list of 130 they had drawn up saying, ‘The number can be added to, but it cannot be less’. (Except, of course by extracting the at least nine who had died since rescue.) Mr Carttar was satisfied. Along with the information from the letters from those onboard, with which he had been inundated, he said he should be able to arrive at a pretty accurate estimate of the number lost.

  There had been movement, too, on the question of exhumation. The Rector of Woolwich, Adelbert Anson, went to see the Home Secretary who promised a quick decision on the subject while the Chancellor of the Diocese of Rochester (in the absence of the Bishop) said he was willing to allow one mass disinterment to take place in a week or two, to give people the time to get in their applications. At the start of the Woolwich inquest on Friday 13 September 1878, Mr Carttar passed on the news that the Home Secretary had declared he had no power over burials in consecrated ground, so there was no hindrance from that quarter, and that the Chancellor of the Diocese had given his permission for exhumations.

  That day’s session had begun with a small spat between the coroner and Mr Harrington, the jury foreman, after Mr Harrington suggested that all future bodies should now go in the public mortuary because having numerous relatives coming and going was a serious responsibility for the dockyard store department. There wouldn’t be that many more bodies coming in now anyway, he said.

  The coroner, with, one suspects, some acid in his voice, told the jury that he was happy to say that he had a much more pleasing prospect to hold out ‘than your worthy foreman has done’. He knew people objected strongly to having their relatives’ bodies sent to the parish dead house. Fortunately, he had assurance that they had the use of the dockyard until the following Friday, the 20 September. ‘Ultimately, no doubt when one or two unknown bodies may drop in, some measure such as your foreman indicated may be necessary’, but in any case bodies would not be treated with any want of respect.

  ‘I am heartily glad, Mr Coroner, to hear the announcement you have made,’ said Harrington, ‘and I need hardly add that I did not intend that the bodies still to be recovered be subjected to any indignity whatever’.

  There was a chorus of ‘No. No,’ from the jury.3

  Revealed by that day’s identification came the surprising fact that Miss Jane Law, the younger of the two wealthy sisters who had arranged the Bible party outing, had been ‘buried unknown’. But now her brother, banker John Law, swore he had recognized her clothing.

  Teacher, Elizabeth Randall, performed her final identification duty by swearing to the clothing of the Tufnell Park school-girl, 17-year-old Ada Florence Farnum, daughter of a merchant in Demerara, Georgetown, Jamaica, who had been buried unknown.

  There was another suggestion of theft from a body when the brother-in-law of baker Mr Henry Belcher claimed that there had been £28 in notes and gold in the pocket of the deceased, which Mr Belcher had taken with him to pay his miller but had been too early. The money had not been found on him before he was buried unknown. The coroner referred him to the police.

  This was the final day of the first part of the inquest, the second half would commence on Monday morning, Mr Carttar announced. Therefore, he wished to thank the military authorities and the police whose conduct had been admirable. He did so in some detail, at the conclusion of which Mr Harrington butted in to endorse all he had said but pointed out that ‘some notice should also be given to the men of the Army Hospital Corps, Gilham, the Coroner’s Officer, the South Eastern Railway Company and …’

  The coroner cut him off saying these details might be better gone into at a later period. He and the jury had very many more hours to spend in the company of Mr Harrington and it was not going to get any easier.

  The progress of the Mansion House Fund was regularly revealed by the newspapers who listed the latest donations, among which were:

  The sum of £172.2s handed in from the salesmen of the London Central Meat Market in Smithfield. Messrs N. M. Rothschild and Son subscribed £100, and Mr Albert de Rothschild, on the invitation of the Lord Mayor, consented to join the committee of distribution.4

  Whilst this committee pondered what the ultimate method of distribution of these funds would be the Reverend Styleman Herring, Vicar of St Paul’s, Clerkenwell, paid regular visits to the dockyard gates to dole out emergency relief.

  The Reverend Herring, who was Chairman of the Clerkenwell Emigration Society, had some experience in these matters, having performed a similar duty on behalf of widows and orphans in January 1873 when the immigrant ship, the Northfleet, carrying 300 workers, some women and children to Tasmania to build a railway, was rammed by an unknown vessel and sunk just off Dungeness with the loss of more than 300 lives. Also, in November of the following year, when the loss of another emigrant ship, the Cospatrick, en route for New Zealand, caught fire mid-Atlantic. There were insufficient lifeboats and those there were were badly launched. Only three out of 475 onboard survived.

  But a new note was starting to be sounded in editorial musings on relief distribution; the suggestion that the families of the miners killed in the South Wales mining disaster were needier. True, the Princess Alice disaster might be much larger in scale and of much greater interest to the public in general, but in the mining disaster the bread winners had been lost, while in the Thames collision it had been the wives and little ones who had perished and the strong men who had been saved.

  Many adoption offers for the orphaned children came in but, The Times reported, ‘demand far exceeds the supply. A large number of children were on the Princess Alice but comparatively few were saved’. Indeed, children remained prominent in the lists of bodies found:

  A female child, age 6, hair light brown;
dress, white Holland (trimmed red riband round bottom, scarlet cuffs and pocket) black frock (two rows kilting, black buttons), three petticoats (one white with six rows of pleats, one serge maroon, of flannel), white drawers (flounced with embroidery), black ribbed stockings, elastic garters, high button boots, supposed marked ‘E. Haggard, 41 High-street, Putney’.

  A male child, age three months, hair light; dress, white Marcella pelisse5 (gray flowers, white buttons), cape to match, white frock (fancy work front), three petticoats (two white with ten tucks, one flannel with two tucks), woollen boots, blue riband, blue sash around waist.6

  It is touching to think that someone took the trouble to count the tucks on the baby’s dress.

  Children also remained prominent among those bodies unidentified, probably because in many cases their parents and siblings had died with them.

  There was some other news regarding the Princess Alice disaster: the London Steamboat Company was suing the owners of the Bywell Castle for the sum of £20,000.

  Notes

  1. The Times, 11 September 1878 (that day’s inquest proceedings).

  2. The Times, 12 September 1878.

  3. The Times, 14 September 1878.

  4. The Times, 13 September 1878.

  5. ‘Marcella’ is a type of cotton or linen fabric in a twill weave. ‘Pelisse’ is a young child’s overcoat.