The Princess Alice Disaster

by Joan Lock

The people of Eastbourne, which the Princess and her family had so recently visited, were particularly touched and a collection was launched for the erection of a memorial. Soon this held sufficient cash for a more suitable memorial, a small hospital. In 1881, Alice’s niece, Princess Helena, laid the foundation stone for the Princess Alice Memorial Hospital and it was opened, in 1883, by the Prince and Princess of Wales. They had been particularly affected by her death. He had declared her his favourite sister: ‘So good, so kind, so clever. We had gone through so much together’.8 In fact, they had rather clung to each other when children in the shadow of their clever older sister, Victoria.

  The Sussex Advertiser, however, did not lose the opportunity for a little German bashing, pointing out that they had heard rumours about the bad state of drainage in the old palace at Darmstadt, ‘for we have an idea that in many cases this form of illness is brought on by defective sanitary arrangements and, like Typhoid fever, is infectious, whatever may have been the opinion of savants hitherto’.9

  The Times noted that only the family had been infected; none of the sixty-strong household, including nurses and physicians, had caught the disease. ‘It is, therefore, clear that all the cases have been produced by direct infection, doubtless by kisses.’10 Whilst they felt the drainage of the New Palace (built in 1804) was not suspect, they did think the sanitation in the town of Darmstadt was not very satisfactory. So the dual suspects were kisses and bad sanitation.

  Princess Alice was given a splendid funeral in Darmstadt and a recumbent statue of her with her little daughter May in her arms was placed in the mausoleum. A Princess Alice (Darmstadt) Memorial Fund was launched in support of the institute for training nurses at her hospital in Darmstadt, while the German Ambassador, on opening the Home for German Governesses in London, suggested that English ladies who desired to honour the memory of Princess Alice could not do so better than by supporting an institution in which that beloved lady had taken a warm interest.

  Some of Alice’s children came to even more tragic ends. Her second daughter, Elizabeth, married Sergius Alexandrovitch, Grand Duke of Russia and, in 1918, the Bolsheviks threw her (alive) down a mine shaft in Siberia. Alexy married the last Russian Czar, Nicholas II, and was assassinated with him and her family at Yekaterinburg. However, her eldest daughter, Victoria, married Louis Prince Battenberg, from which, under its new name Mountbatten, Earl Mountbatten of Burma and Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Prince Philip came. Princess Alice is Prince Philip’s great great grandmother.

  In his foreword to Gerard Noel’s book Princess Alice: Queen Victoria’s Forgotten Daughter, Lord Mountbatten recalled being brought up on tales of his grandmother, ‘the most remarkable of Queen Victoria’s remarkable children’. He had often been told that his mother, Princess Victoria, took after her ‘in progressive thought and ceaselessly taking the lead in discussions and conversations’.

  In 1967 Lord Louis spoke to a large gathering at the centenary celebrations of the Alice Frauenverein (Alice’s Women’s Union) at Darmstadt. ‘From the other speeches’, he said, ‘it was clear how strongly the impact of this high-minded, practical princess was still felt in Hesse.’11

  It was to be seven months before the final judicial judgement was heard on who was to blame for the Princess Alice and Bywell Castle collision. It was given at the Court of Appeal where the owners of the Bywell Castle were seeking a reverse of the decision that they were also to blame. On 15 July 1879, Lord Justices James, Brett and Cotton gave their judgements. Lord Justice James pointed out that, on the evidence, they could not overrule the finding of blame with regard to the Princess Alice. But as to the question of the last minute manoeuvre of the Bywell Castle (going hard a-port), which their assessors agreed was a wrong manoeuvre, they held that it could not have had the slightest appreciable effect on the collision. Lord Justice James clearly felt this was an action that should not have been taken, saying he wanted to add his own view, ‘that a ship has no right by its own misconduct to put another ship in a position of extreme peril and then charge that other ship with misconduct’. His opinion was that:

  … if in a moment of extreme peril and difficulty, if such other ship happened to do something wrong, so as to be liable for a contribution to the mischief, that would not render her liable for damages, inasmuch as perfect presence of mind, accurate judgement and promptitude under all circumstances are not to be expected. You have no right to expect men to be something more than ordinary men. I am therefore of the opinion that the finding of the court below that the Bywell Castle was, for purposes of the suit, to blame, must be overruled and the Princess Alice was alone to blame.12

  The other two justices, while adding more observations, concurred: the Princess Alice alone was to blame.

  One can only agree with Lord Justice James that it was a rather strange claim for the Princess Alice’s owners to have made in the circumstances and it can only have added to the financial difficulties of the London Steamboat Company. One can only assume that they may have been ill-advised by their lawyers who, of course, would be the ones to gain. The judgment was to be the knell of doom for the company. By the middle of 1884 it was on its knees but, extraordinarily, something that helped keep it afloat, at least for a while, was yet another collision in the Thames to the scene of which they ferried 80,000 sightseers.

  As for the on-going problem of untreated sewage in the river, this was somewhat abated by Bazelgette who, in 1887, came up with the idea of extracting solid waste materials from the cesspools that fed the outfalls and carting it out to sea in ‘sludge boats’. This marine dumping did not cease until 1998.13

  Notes

  1. The ss Schiller was an ocean-going passenger liner which plied between Hamburg and New York until 7 May 1875, when, in a heavy fog, she hit the Retarrier Ledges off the Isles of Scilly and sank with the loss of 335 lives.

  2. The emigrant passenger ship the ss Deutschland was en route from Bremerhaven to New York via Southampton when, on 5 December 1875, she ran aground on the Kentish Knock, a shoal off Harwich. Seventy-eight people died. Due to the delay in assistance from other vessels and accusations of negligence and looting, the British Board of Trade held an inquiry, unusual in the case of a foreign-registered vessel wrecked outside the 3-mile limit. The German authorities did not investigate.

  3. The Times, 12 December 1878 and Gavin Thurston, The Great Thames Disaster, p.162.

  4. Gerard Noel, Princess Alice: Queen Victoria’s Forgotten Daughter, p.237.

  5. The Times, 19 November 1878.

  6. Not to be confused with Sir Edward Jenner who pioneered vaccination. Sir William Jenner established the difference between typhus and typhoid and tended to both Prince Albert and the Prince of Wales when they became ill with typhoid. His brother was the founder of Jenners, the famous Edinburgh drapers.

  7. Queen Victoria’s daughters were not sent penniless to their new homes overseas in marriage, they were given dowries and annuities. Parliament awarded Princess Alice a dowry of £30,000 and an annuity of £6,000, about which Prince Albert commented, ‘she will not be able to do great things with that’.

  8. Gerard Noel, Princess Alice: Queen Victoria’s Forgotten Daughter, p.240.

  9. Sussex Advertiser, 17 December 1878.

  10. The Times, 12 December 1878.

  11. Gerard Noel (as above), p.11.

  12. The Times, 16 July 1879 and Gavin Thurston The Great Thames Disaster, p.163.

  13. Jonathan Schneer, The Thames: England’s River, p.159 and note 36, Chapter 7.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  What Rule?

  The navigation of the River Thames remained a hot topic. In response to all the criticism the Board of Trade appointed a special committee to inquire into it. A myriad of experts, from admirals to the secretary of the Steamship Owners Association, gave evidence at thirty-three meetings. Many more meetings were given over to deliberations on these. The committee’s reports were gathered into a substantial tome (complete with attractive colour
ful maps of each stretch of the river) to present to Parliament. It was, The Times later claimed, ‘a mine of useful information on the subject of the London river’.1

  In their preliminary report the committee first pointed out that the Thames had peculiarities that distinguished it from any other rivers in the United Kingdom. They went on to describe all the bends, ‘some of which are less than a right angle’, the many variations in width and depth, the river’s great length, the large number of docks and wharves and the huge coal trade carried on there. The result was ‘that the traffic of the Thames is not only peculiar in its magnitude, but in its composite character’. Their list of all the vessels using the river presents a mind-boggling picture:

  Firstly – Sea-going steamers, varying in size from the small coaster to the ships of the Peninsular and Oriental, the National and other Companies, 450 in length. Of these the largest do not go above Blackwall; but some over 1,000 tons go as high as London Bridge, and colliers of 900 tons now go as high as Vauxhall Bridge.

  Secondly – Large sea-going ships, now for the most part towed by steam tugs.

  Thirdly – River passenger steamers, and excursion steamers.

  Fourthly – Colliers, smacks, schooners, sloops, billyboys2 and various small sea-going sailing vessels.

  Fifthly – Sailing barges bringing hay, straw, cement, bricks and other produce from the Medway, from Essex, and other neighbouring parts of the coast, to London.

  Sixthly – Above Blackwall, the barges or lighters which collect and distribute the cargoes of the ships.

  Besides these, there are skiffs, wherries and small steam launches.

  After giving the numbers arriving in the Port of London during the previous few years they pointed out that they were such as to have ‘almost outgrown the capacity of the river’.

  The committee, however, did appear rather sanguine about the number of accidents:

  The casualties on the Thames are, as might be expected, numerous, but it must not be supposed from the terrible calamity in which the present inquiry originates, that the loss of life, or even of property, caused by these casualties is large in proportion to their number.

  Those from the Wreck Register covering June 1878 to 1879 occurring above Gravesend were 419 of which 373 were collisions and which involved 836 vessels.

  In all these cases, however, only six lives were lost. As regards property, the cases returned as total losses were only nine in number, and of the remaining casualties 121 are described as serious, and 289 of minor importance.

  This does seem quite a lot to the modern eye.

  Such collision figures were nothing new. Back in October, 1875, Mr A. H. Smee, a Times correspondent, had pointed out that in the last half of September there had been twenty-two collisions by steamers alone. Two of these had occurred in the Thames, one on the Mersey and one on the Tyne. The newspaper also reported, since the loss of the Northfleet two years earlier, a disturbing practice had grown up among steam captains that demanded severe punishment.

  … namely, after he has run a vessel down he backs his steamer clear of the wreck and then steams away in the darkness without offering assistance to the crew of the ill-fated vessel, who are thus left, too frequently, to perish; and as dead men tell no tales the owner of the steamers escapes his liability for the collision.

  Apparently, three such instances had occurred that month (see also the ss Deutschland in Chapter Twenty-One). So, in one respect, the passengers and crew of the Princess Alice had been lucky. But, of course, such hit and runs were much more likely to occur out at sea where there were few other witnesses.

  Among the Board of Trade Special Navigation Committee’s recommendations regarding pleasure steamers was ‘restrictions might well be placed on the running of these vessels after dark, or at all events not beyond one hour after sunset’. They noted that it was evident that the lookout man and the men at the wheel of the Princess Alice were surrounded by passengers and suggested that if the men at the wheel ‘could be placed at an elevation above and railed off from the passengers they would be able to do their duty in a more efficient manner’.3

  But when it came to the tricky question of how vessels should pass each other, the decision was hedged about with all manner of provisos due to the various limitations and abilities of the vessels and the twists and turns of the River Thames. They agreed that steamers approaching each other should pass each other port to port – but not in all cases. In fact, it was what The Times termed ‘an approximation of the rule’, the actual rule being supplemented by other proposed regulations, such as that steam vessels navigating against the tide at certain sharp bends and corners (like Tripcock Point) should ease their engines and wait until any vessels rounding the points with the tide (and therefore under less control) had passed clear.4 That barges managed by oars should not be allowed to drift athwart the tide, but should be kept head on. That dumb barges between London Bridge and Blackwall Reach, if they were employed on voyages which extended between the whole of those limits or beyond, should be towed. And if a steamer found it unsafe to get out of the way of a sailing vessel she might signify the same by four blasts of the steam whistle … and so on.

  The Times of 3 September 1879, exactly a year after their first report of the Princess Alice disaster, lamented that no rule of the road had yet become law. Indeed, it was remarked that two recent collisions had shown that the case of the Princess Alice had been exceptional only in the magnitude of the ruin that followed the original mistake.

  However, one of The Times’ correspondents, Rear Admiral J. R. Ward, Chief Inspector of Lifeboats at the National Lifeboat Institution, did come up with a wheeze to assist two ships meeting at night if they were unsure what the other was about to do. He suggested the use of a novel signal light, recently designed by an officer in the United States Navy, Lieutenant E. W. Very, which was very simple and inexpensive.

  It consists of a brass-barrelled, breech-loading pistol of simple, but special character, from which are discharged stars or fireballs of any selected colour to a height or distance in any direction from 300 ft to 400 ft, just as similar stars are thrown up in the common firework called a ‘Roman Candle’. These stars are so brilliant and of such size that they can be seen on a clear night from a distance of 20 miles; and I have, at an official trial under the direction of Major Le Mesurier, the Inspector of Army Signalling at Aldershot, seen them at a distance of 17½ miles.

  They could be so promptly used, he went on, that no less that ten could be discharged in one minute, if required. Thus, a vessel sighting another ahead could fire green or red stars, according to whether the master had decided to go to the starboard or port side.

  These lights would be invaluable for signalling distress, ‘since they can be carried onboard the smallest merchant vessels, in which rockets would be unmanageable’, and, he added dramatically:

  … in cases where stranded vessels have quickly every light extinguished by heavy seas breaking over them, and the men have to lash themselves to the rigging with no means of making their situation known to those on the land, the master would only have to hang his pistol around his neck and buckle his belt of cartridges around him before going aloft, and he could then make signals at intervals throughout the night or until answered from the land.5

  Indeed, Very lights were adopted worldwide.

  The following year came the completion of the Albert side of Royal Victoria and Albert Docks, a vast complex which opened onto Gallions Reach, thus becoming the furthest docks downriver of the London Docks. As such, they were touted as something that would make the Thames a safer river. As The Times of 7 May 1880, reported:

  The Royal Victoria and Albert Docks bring the quays of London 3 miles and a half lower down the river than they have yet extended, and will enable great ocean steamships to avoid the dangerous and expensive towage to Blackwall. It was just at this point where the new docks are entered from the Thames that the Bywell Castle, which had swung out into the stream
some miles higher up, came into collision with the Princess Alice, and it was just above this point that the Canada, another large steamer, ran into a pier and carried it bodily away.6 The new docks will help to separate the heavy goods traffic from the light omnibus trade of the Thames, and ought to contribute greatly to the safety and cheapness of navigation on the metropolitan river.

  In 1883 the Bywell Castle went missing, not an unusual state of affairs before modern communications allowed ship-owners and other interested parties to keep fairly constant track of their vessels.

  At that time, arrivals and departures were noted at ports and telegraphed to Lloyds who advised their members and listed the ships’ movements in the newspapers. Additional information, pinpointing where the ship was last seen, came from sightings by other vessels or land-based observers. Thus, last seen in the Bay of Biscay, was a typical final word on a vessel.

  The Bywell Castle had been last seen off the Portuguese coast. The Northern Echo of 25 May 1883, on reporting on the investigation of its loss, pointed the finger of responsibility squarely at the ship’s owners for her absence from the scene:

  LOSS OF THE BYWELL CASTLE: WARNING TO SHIPOWNERS

  At the Wreck Commissioners’ Court, Westminster, yesterday, Mr Rotherey concluded the official inquiry into the circumstances attending the loss of the steamship Bywell Castle, while on a voyage from Alexandria to Hull with a large grain cargo … She was last reported off the Portuguese coast on January 20 last, since which time nothing had been heard of her. Mr Commissioner Rotherey, in giving the decision of the court, said that the Bywell Castle was in a good seaworthy condition when she left Alexandria, but she was grievously overladen. In regard to the cause of her loss, unfortunately not a single person out of twenty-two of the crew had been saved, therefore it was impossible for the court to say how she had been lost. He hoped this would be a warning to shipowners.