The little town of Woolwich, ‘somewhat dull and grimy at all seasons’ was now, ‘indescribably hushed’, reported the Standard of 5 September 1878. ‘The people stand in groups upon the pavement, discussing the calamity which befell last night.’
Every train brought more frantically anxious relatives and friends in search of their loved ones and more sightseers and reporters. Apparently, one could tell which was which by the faces among them that were ‘drawn with anxiety, swollen with prescient grief’. Frantic crowds gathered at the town hall and the office of the London Steamboat Company where the bodies lay and at the pier where more were being brought in. Inspector Phillips tried to control the emotional crowds around the little round house at the foot of the pier that contained thirty bodies. The police were kind, but they might have managed better, commented the Standard.
Round the door there was an ugly squeeze, and when parties came out they had a struggle to make way. One elderly woman asked again and again with pitiful simplicity and earnestness, “Is there a stout female in there about 40-years-old?” Half a dozen times I heard a patient inspector reply that no such person lay inside but the old woman asked again, always in the same words, of those who came out.
According to that newspaper, the arrangements were much worse at the town hall, even though police from Woolwich Arsenal had been brought in to assist. Indeed, the situation was simply scandalous.
Childish common sense might have prepared a better system for meeting the emergency … the street was thronged but no policeman tried to keep a passage. Two powerful constables stood before the door, resisting by main force the rush of people who tried to enter but no way aiding those who came out.
Only five or six were let in at a time and it took them twenty minutes to examine the bodies. ‘We have been here three hours, and there are fifty people before us yet!’ complained one tearful woman and, it was alleged, policemen even began losing their tempers and assaulting those trying to get in.1
The Daily News and Morning Post were more understanding of the police problems saying that it was no easy task repressing ‘the ardour inspired by grief and despair among those engaged in the dismal duty of traversing rooms full of corpses in the hope of recognising the one they might claim’.
The melancholy search for loved ones was made more harrowing by the fact that the bodies were so scattered. After trying Woolwich Town Hall, the couple who had come down by the hop-pickers train at 2.30 a.m. crossed to North Woolwich, continued along to Beckton Gasworks, went from there to Creekmouth, then on to Rainham and Erith by boat. ‘At all those places the same result, many corpses but not those we sought … Our search is not over yet’. they told The Times. ‘No better father and mother sat on that boat than those we mourn.’2
The two-mile trek from North Woolwich to Beckton and Creekmouth was particularly unpleasant. The area was ugly and the terrain difficult. The first pathway through the marshes was a narrow causeway. On one side there were poor and weedy fields strewn with watercourses and bits of broken railway. On the other, a muddy stream. Beyond, on the other side of the Thames, were the outskirts of the town of Woolwich, half-hidden under a smoky haze.
On the river itself, steamers stood waiting to collect the next load of bodies dragged up from the depths by the watermen or gathered from the riverbanks. Many London watermen had come down to drag for bodies, each of which would earn them at least five shillings, and they could make even more by taking sightseers to the supposed site of the accident.
The steamers also brought in some of the flotsam of hats, bonnets and shawls which still floated on the surface of the river.
Beckton Gasworks was surrounded by a coal-blackened labyrinth of sidings, tramways, rails and sheds through which, after viewing the bodies held there, the anxious relatives were guided by watchful overseers, to another causeway. Twenty minutes later they reached Barking Creek, through which the River Roding, a slough of mud and water, emptied into the Thames. There, speculative boatmen awaited them, loaded their crafts to the gunwales and ferried them across to the little village of Creekmouth and the Lawes Patent Manure Factory. Here, at the far end of a dark and murky shed, a large room had been set aside for bodies, half of them still unclaimed.
Four survivors still remained at Creekmouth, including Mrs Gollifer, who was too weak to be moved, and a Mr Hagger, who had saved her. He had a terrible gash behind his ear, but no idea how he had received it, and wounds and bruises all over his body. There were also two unclaimed small boys, one of whom seemed to the Standard reporter to be ‘dull with terror and grief’, and could only say that if he was taken to Kensington he would find his aunt. This, a ‘good natured workman’ was about to do.3
After Creekmouth, the many searchers, driven on by anxiety and dread, were obliged to carry on downriver to Rainham, a quiet little village isolated among the marshes on the north side of the Thames and only reachable by a long, circuitous walk or by boat. Then it was on to Erith on the south side. To make matters worse, more bodies were beginning to wash up elsewhere along the Thames as far upriver as Limehouse.
Searchers became more and more confused and overwrought, not knowing where to go next. More than one person began to recognize the same body that had in any case become more similar as a result of increasing decomposition and the state of their clothes. Still they came. ‘At an early hour of the morning’, reported the Standard, ‘the Factory of Messrs Lawes was again besieged’.4
A few survivors remained in the Plumstead Infirmary where Dr Rice, Mr Makie and the matron, Miss Wilkinson, had been up all night after the accident, preparing beds to receive as many as a hundred.
‘Unfortunately’, reported the Morning Post, ‘only a very few of them found occupants’. Sixteen had arrived however. Among them were: Benjamin Smith, who had a bandaged face due to an injury to his nose, received when he surfaced through the wreckage; the very poorly Mrs Emma Standish and a Mrs Child, whom the Daily News had reported dead along with her 2-year-old son and who were now miraculously alive.
Despite the fact that her husband and two other children had been missing, Emma Childs had acted ‘with exemplary patience’ throughout the night, said the Morning Post, and had not given way until the morning, ‘when her husband was found to be alive’.
They found another (unnamed) patient had not been so stoical, despite her son having identified her and brought along with him a letter from his father (content not specified). Her other children were missing and ‘the kindest assurances of their safety would not satisfy her, as she instinctively felt that they were subterfuges to hide the horrid truth from her for a little time longer’.5
Lone children had also ended up at the infirmary. These included a little girl, who could only say she had been in the boat with her Aunt Lizzie, but later revealed her name was Mabel Hepburn and that her mother kept a sweet shop in London. Then there was ‘a splendid little lad, apparently a foreigner, about four years of age, who has not spoken since his admission. I, however,’ wrote one of the Standard’s special correspondents, ‘tried him this morning with a few words in French, and the poor little fellow burst into tears, without, however, answering me’.6
The west Kent coroner, 69-year-old Charles Joseph Carttar, had been informed of the accident on the evening it occurred by a police sergeant from Greenwich Police Station who knocked on his door to announce: ‘We have word up from Woolwich, sir, of a big sinking in the river’. He added that the Woolwich inspector thought hundreds had been drowned.7
Carttar told the sergeant he would be at Woolwich early next morning.
The coroner was not a well man; he suffered from vascular heart disease, which affected his circulation and caused his legs to swell up at night. Now he was to preside over a protracted inquest on the country’s worst-ever civilian disaster with the eyes of the world upon him.
Fortunately, he was very experienced, having presided, during the previous forty-six years, over many inquests in this volatile area. Indeed, only the year before he had conducted the famous inquest into the death of a wealthy heiress, Harriett Staunton, as a result of which her husband and three others were charged and convicted of causing her death by starvation. (Although sentenced to death, they were reprieved due to disagreement among medical men, some of whom claimed that the cause of death could have been tuberculosis.)
Mr Carttar opened his inquest on Wednesday 4 September, the day after the disaster, at Alexander Hall in Woolwich. After swearing in the nineteen-man jury of shopkeepers and tradesmen, he began by pointing out that no words of his could adequately describe the intense feeling of sorrow and distress occasioned to the relatives by the dreadful calamity on which they met to inquire. They could only alleviate it by having the bodies identified as soon as possible and handed over to the relatives. The inquiry as to the cause of the accident could wait. After going into his reasoning on this at length and, his voice breaking, he finished by reiterating that their main duty was first to have the bodies identified, then to ascertain how the deplorable occurrences had come to pass by which so many human beings had been hurried into eternity.
The ever-knowing Standard had news for him there, having begun its coverage on 5 September 1878, with the words, ‘It is now clearly understood how the Princess Alice was sunk, though the cause of the disaster has yet to be investigated’.
Carttar took his jury to view the fifty-eight bodies still scattered around the various venues, then began to take formal identification evidence on seven of the eight who had been recognized.
The first to be identified was 45-year-old William Beechey, who had, perhaps, the oddest of reasons to have been on the boat: a sudden whim. He had left his workplace at a city stockbrokers at 4.30 p.m. and ‘was supposed to have taken a train to join the Princess Alice at some point on her voyage upriver as he had proposed to a fellow clerk to do so the previous day’, reported The Times.8 When he failed to return home that evening his wife, alarmed by his absence, had contacted his employees, who sent down a fellow worker to look for his body and who now identified him.
The next witness, Henry Drew, a warehouseman from Tottenham, was ‘one of the saved’. He identified the body of his 2-year-old daughter, Martha Helen, but was still looking for his other two daughters, who had been given the outing as a treat when their brothers were taken to see a cricket match at Lord’s. His wife was also ‘one of the saved’.
An 18-year-old boy, William James Elliott, from Clapham, identified his father, but was still looking for his mother and her friend. He told the coroner that he and his young sister had no money, so Carttar ordered that he be given £5 from the £19 found in his father’s pocket.
Freddie Pollard, the 18-year-old Princess Alice knife-boy, was identified by his elder brother, while boot-maker, John Marsh of Clerkenwell, swore to the identity of his 60-year-old mother-in-law, Zillah Waddilove, who had been one of the St John’s Mission’s Bible party. Two men identified their sons: mariner Matthew Mountain, from Poplar New Town, swore to his 23-year-old son, William Frederick, who had been a second steward on the doomed vessel; while Hampstead grocer Mr Hill, that of the body of his son, 22-year-old Thomas Wheeler Hill, a mathematical instrument maker who lived in South Norwood. Mr Hill had been alerted to his son’s possible plight when he received a telegram from the young man’s landlady saying he had gone for a holiday and failed to return.
The jury were taken to view the site of the collision although, as yet, nothing could be seen of the wreck. They were then instructed to reconvene on the following day at 2 p.m., this time at the smaller, but rather more comfortable and convivial, boardroom at the town hall. With its large, horseshoe-shaped windows, tasteful carpet and brass chandeliers, it was a decidedly more pleasing chamber in which to work and they were going to be there for a very long time.
As the Princess Alice body count continued to rise, the question of where to put them became ever more urgent. The person chiefly tasked with sorting this out was the London Steamboat Company’s Superintendent Towse who had, himself, lost his wife, his mother-in-law and four of his eight children.
One of Carttar’s first moves was to ask for assistance from the military that now used the dockyard buildings. They made available a large iron shed in which to place the bodies and, during the night, all those that had been found on the south shore were taken there.