SS Princess Alice

More than thirty years before the shocking disaster of RMS Titanic, another maritime horror filled the front pages of London's newspaper and it occurred far closer to home. SS Princess Alice was a paddle steamer owned by the London Steamboat Company, 219.4ft long and 20.2ft wide. The Board of Trade had surveyed the ship in 1878 and decided that it could carry a maximum of 936 passengers. On 3rd September that year, SS Princess Alice left Swan Pier, close to London Bridge, and headed to Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. The return journey would call at Blackwall, North Woolwich, and the pleasure gardens at Rosherville. Tickets could be used interchangeably on any steamship owned by the company, so that those who did not wish to go all the way to Sheerness, or indeed could not afford to, had the option to make an outward journey to Rosherville on another vessel and join the Princess Alice for the return journey to Swan Pier; this journey cost as little as 2 shillings. As such, most of the passengers on board were working class people, spending a small sum on what must surely have been a particularly exciting day out.

Royal Museums Greenwich

The journey was advertised as the 'Moonlight Trip', by virtue of the return journey being an evening one, and the Princess Alice left Rosherville at around 6.30pm to make the final leg of the journey. At Gravesend, the ship's captain, William R.H. Grinstead, allowed his helmsman to remain on land and replaced him with a passenger who, though a seaman, was not experienced on the Thames. At around the same time that the ship left Rosherville, a sewage pumping station further down the river made one of its twice-daily releases of raw sewage into the Thames. 75 million imperial gallons of the stuff was poured into the water, described later by a chemist as 'two continuous columns of decomposed fermenting sewage, hissing like soda-water with baneful gases, so black that the water is stained for miles and discharging a corrupt charnel-house odour'. 

Captain William R.H Grinstead

Near to Gallion's Reach (today's Thamesmead), Princess Alice approached a coal-ship, the Bywell Castle, 254.2ft long and 32ft wide, whose Captain was a man named Thomas Harrison. The ship travelled down the river keeping to the middle. As Princess Alice came nearer, the pilot of the Bywell Castle saw her red port light, indicating that the smaller vessel would pass starboard of the larger one. Grinstead, however, followed the common watermen's practice of seeking slack water on the south side of the river, as the Princess Alice was travelling against the tide. He altered the ship's course to do exactly that. Now, Princess Alice was directly in the path of Bywell Castle, making collision suddenly impossible to avoid. Grinstead began shouting

"Where are you coming to! Good God! Where are you coming to!"

Bywell Castle's pilot tried to place the engines in reverse and alter his ships course but there was nothing that could be done. Bywell Castle rammed into the starboard side of Princess Alice. Princess Alice broke into two pieces. Within four minutes, the ship had sunk into the Thames.

Harper's Weekly, 12th October 1878

The crew of Bywell Castle launched their lifeboat and were able to rescue fourteen people from the water. Nearby boats were launched and also managed to retrieve some of the people in the water, but most could not swim and their clothing was extremely heavy, especially that of the women, and they quickly sank. Around one hundred and thirty people were pulled from the water alive, but many of those died later from ingesting the foul water. By terrible misfortune, the ship sank in the exact same area where the raw sewage had been released only a short while before. 

The Illustrated Police News, 14th September 1878

As the evening wore on and into the night, crowds of anxious relatives and other onlookers gathered at Woolwich or at the offices of the London Steamboat Co which was near Blackfriars. As the bodies were washed up all along the river, as far away as Limehouse in one direction and Erith in the other, relatives were forced to trek between different locations searching for their loved ones. Watermen had to be hired to search for bodies, paid by the corpse which reportedly resulted in fights over bodies. An inquest opened and began the process of identifying those who had died. It was not known how many had been on board as no passenger list was kept, but by the 9th the Northern Echo was reporting a death toll of 460 people; the true number was likely much higher. 

The next task was to attempt to work out just what had caused the collision, which the inquest began to do from the 16th. Testimony was quite confusing, especially that relating to the path SS Princess Alice had taken in the immediate minutes before the crash. It seemed that when the ship had first approached she had been pushed by the currents into the centre of the river and had ended up in the path of Bywell Castle when attempting to turn to port and keep close to the south bank. The witnesses included other masters of other ships who were nearby at the time. The chief mate of SS Princess Alice, a lucky survivor of the disaster, refused to admit that the ship had changed direction. 

The conclusion of the inquest was as follows

'that the Bywell Castle did not take the necessary precaution of easing, stopping and reversing her engines in time and that the Princess Alice contributed to the collision by not stopping and going astern; that all collisions in the opinion of the jury might in future be avoided if proper and stringent rules and regulations were laid down for all steam navigation on the River Thames.

Addenda:

We consider that the Princess Alice was, on the third of September, seaworthy.

We think the Princess Alice was not properly and sufficiently manned.

We think the number of persons onboard the Princess Alice was more than prudent.

We think the means of saving life onboard the Princess Alice were insufficient for a vessel of her class

At the same time as the inquest was being held, the Board of Trade launched their own investigation into the disaster. Their findings differed from those of the inquest; they found that the rules stated that ships heading towards each other ought to pass on the port side and that, as SS Princess Alice had failed to do this, she was to blame and not Bywell Castle. Subsequently, the owners of the two respective ships sued one another; after two weeks, the judgement was made that both vessels had in fact been to blame for what happened. 

Attributing blame is always difficult in cases such as these; the criminal justice system was not designed to navigate such complicated issues of liability. Who was more to blame, the captain who allowed his experienced helmsman to leave the ship and who replaced him with a man of inferior ability? Or the company official who made a decision regarding the number of lifeboats each pleasure steamer ought to carry? And what of the fact that raw sewage was regularly poured into a river that wound its arterial route through a heavily populated city? Without a doubt, the death toll was higher than it might otherwise have been thanks to the condition of the water - surely, then, some blame lies away from the shipping companies? Finally, could there have been better oversight of the river traffic, to ensure that rules were complied with before disaster struck? Similar questions of liability are raised every time a case of white collar crime goes before a court, the most obvious recent example being Grenfell Tower. 

The final death toll of SS Princess Alice is estimated to be somewhere in the region of 650 people. I can't testify to the reliability of this source, but there seems to be a list of known victims here - people with a London family background may find it worth checking out the list of surnames. Many more bodies remained unidentified and on 9th September 1878, one hundred and twenty of them were buried in a mass grave in Woolwich Cemetery. Some may well have had relatives missing them who were unable to afford to make the journey in order to identify them. Twenty-three thousand people contributed to a sixpenny subscription to erect a memorial for these unnamed souls.