London, 1878.
The height of the Victorian age.
The city’s rising middle class work long hours and they yearn for an escape from the dreary cobblestone streets.
A passenger steamer offers them an exciting escape.
The promise of a day’s voyage down river to Kent.
She’s a popular little vessel, and as she makes her way up river for the eenth time, people are relaxed and cheerful after a day spent picnicking in the sun.
Then there comes a sudden horrifying sight.
The bow of a big ship which plunges into their own.
People are thrown into the river.
But it’s not water they plunge into.
It’s sewage.
Industrial waste, animal carcasses, human refuse.
It’s all mixed into a sthing, slimy, hissing black ooze that coats the temp’s surface and chokes the life out of the people who call out for help.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs, and this is the terrifying true story of the ship that sank in sewage, the Princess Alice.
It was Tuesday, September 3rd, 1878, and the paddle steamer, Princess Alice, was chugging her way up the Tempame’s River.
The ship was a small excursion vessel about 220 ft long and 432 gross registered tons.
She was Scottishbuilt, originally launched in 1865 and named But she had been bought early on for operations on the river Tempames.
She was renamed Princess Alice after Queen Victoria’s daughter and by 1878 was a familiar site at ports along the river from London.
She was licensed for 930 odd passengers and would operate regular sailings from near London Bridge down the temps to sheer Kent and back with three stops along the way.
This was a popular route for sightseers because of the public Rasherville Gardens now long gone but a popular picnicking spot which had been made out of a chalk pit.
September 3rd was a bright, sunny day, so it was busier than normal when the Princess Alice departed Swan Pier in her morning outbound trip, skipped by Captain William Ginstead.
The day passed without incident with passengers getting on and off at every call.
Because Princess Alice’s operators, the London Steamboat Company, owned a number of ships, it was usual for day trippers to disembark one vessel, spend some time sightseeing, and then use their same ticket to hop aboard the next boat outbound or to return as they saw fit.
Not unlike a modern-day water-based bus.
They could just come and go as they pleased.
After a day of plugging her way downstream, Princess Alice landed at Sheerus, the end of the line, and prepared for the return voyage.
Aboard her were whole families who’d enjoyed the day away.
Hundreds of children crammed the railings to watch as the crew cast off the lines that held Princess Alice to the dock.
However, a few miles upstream, something was happening that would have dire consequences for all those hundreds of people on board.
19th century London was a grimy, bleak place, as anybody familiar with the works of Charles Dickens can agree.
It was the height of the industrial revolution.
The city was famous for its pea supers when the air became thick with soot and smog, often killing hundreds and even thousands.
Every day, vast factory chimneys poured thick black coal smoke into the air.
The slaughter houses butchered animals on an unprecedented scale, and all the byproduct of this industrial activity were washed straight into the gutters and the sewers of London.
The London sewer system until the 19th century had been a fairly basic affair, and sanitation was a real issue.
The technological change had come in the shape of enormous pumping stations armed with compound steam engines which on a daily basis would discharge millions of gallons of foul black sewage right into the temps.
As Princess Alice was preparing to leave, this is exactly what happened.
Approximately 75 million imperial gallons of this toxic soup was pumped out to float downstream and eventually out into the sea.
The Princess Alice would be sailing straight through it.
The steamer left for home at about 6:30 that night as the sun was setting.
This voyage had been built as a moonlight trip so passengers could sail out for sightseeing all day and rely on safe passage home after dusk.
Her decks were crowded with passengers, but because of the loose nature of the company’s schedule, no lists were kept of those who’d embarked.
A band played on board and they struck up the popular tune Nancy Lee.
There was a kind of festive attitude as darkness enveloped the ship and her lights blazed.
By 7:30 p.
m.
, Princess Alice was on the home stretch and her paddles were now churning through the thick black sewage as she passed Cross Pumping Station.
But then, when she was just off Wulitch, a ship was spotted ahead.
What happened next would seal the fate of hundreds of people.
Out of the darkness loomed a jack staff, two anchors, and finally an entire ship’s bow cutting through the water at about 5 knots.
In a panic, Captain Ginstead shouted at the mystery ship, “Where are you coming to? Good God, where are you coming to?” But it was too late for any evasive action.
The huge mystery ship slammed straight into Princess Alice on the starboard side, just forward of her paddle box, and the smaller ship, her deck still lined with passengers, broke in half.
I was on the saloon deck aft, said Mr.
Herbert Wiler.
But looking ahead, I heard a shouting, and then I saw the huge hull of a steamer coming upon us, towering high above our saloon.
I ran down the companion ladder and got to the extreme after part of the boat.
I took off my boots, ready to dive.
The passengers were frantic, and I tried to pacify some of them, for I did not think we should sink, and I think the people got a little quieter.
But in 3 or 4 minutes, our vessel parted in the middle, and she seemed to double up.
The mystery ship was a substantial collier named Bwwell Castle.
Her captain, Thomas Harrison, was shocked at the speed with which Princess Alice came apart.
Our ship, he said, is perfectly uninjured.
A little paint is scratched off.
That is all.
The other vessel was just like an eggshell.
She broke right up when touched.
She was totally unfit for her business.
On Princess Alice, a tragic scene was playing out.
Passenger Henry Reed recalled, “My wife, who had not lost her self-possession, said,”Do not leave me.
” I took her hands to keep her by me.
I looked up at the vessel close upon us, but could see no persons in her forpart, nor could I hear any cries from her, but her great height above us would probably prevent our doing so.
The collision must have occurred at that moment, for although there was no crash, we felt the Princess Alice tremble under us, a kind of strong shivering motion.
We turned, looking after, seeking for means of safety, and I observed the captain was no longer on the paddle box.
I never saw him again.
Princess Alice had been modified so that she had five watertight compartments, but these were immediately rendered useless, and hundreds of her occupants were hurled into the brackish water as the ship sank.
Although, it wasn’t exactly water, was it? Instead, Princess Alice’s passengers found themselves neck deep in a thick soup of human sewage, dead animals, toxic and industrial waste.
and soiled water flushed from slaughterhouses, factories, and mills.
A chemist later described this 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 charl odor that will be remembered by all as being particularly depressing and sickening.
This was an era where few could swim.
And even then, the restrictive, heavywoolened clothes would become waterlogged and weigh their wearer down.
Sure enough, as hundreds of people slid into the tempames as the ship sank, they sank with her while they struggled for air at the surface before succumbing and being dragged under and into the toxic filth.
It was over in minutes.
As the crew of Bwill Castle looked on in horror, hundreds of people were drowning.
They rushed to throw ropes and anything that would float down into the water, including life boys, ladders, and planks.
Without any apparent shock, recall Henry Reed, we found ourselves, my wife and I, still holding together in the water and rose again.
We sank again, I believe, drawn down by the suction of the Princess Alice.
When we rose, my wife was black in the face and nearly insensible.
I could not swim and could scarcely hold my wife up.
She told me to keep quiet and to hold up.
A plank was close by us and going past I seized it and holding on to it, it carried us right behind the vessel which had come into collision with us.
The Princess Alice must then have been behind us.
All around were people struggling in the water, screaming and calling to the men whom we could then see looking over the bullwalks of the other vessel.
A tract published after the sinking described it like this.
The scene which followed defies description, for death has seldom assumed a more appalling shape.
The river resounded with wild shrieks of human agony, and fathers, mothers, lovers, and little children were speedily engulfed in the waters of death.
Survivors have said, and they may be readily believed, that were they to live a hundred years, they would never forget the maddening excitement which followed the vessel being struck nearly in halves.
And when hundreds were seen struggling for rescue and grasping at anything, however frail, that seemed to promise some faint chance of escape.