On the same day as the jury put their signatures to the Princess Alice inquest report, the hearing of the London Steamboat Company’s claim for damages against the Bywell Castle began at the Court of Admiralty at Trinity House.
The day before, as though to ram home the dangers of poor navigation, yet another serious shipping collision had occurred between the Welsh sailing ship, Moel Eilian, and German passenger steamer Pommerania, this time just off Folkestone in the English Channel. The 3,382-ton Pommerania, which plied between Hamburg and New York, had landed a number of passengers at Plymouth, some more at Cherbourg, and was taking the remaining 109 passengers on to Hamburg, when she was rammed by the much smaller craft. She might have been small but the (1,100-ton) Welsh barque proved lethal. She made a large hole in the Pommerania’s hull through which water poured. She began to sink. Two of her lifeboats had been crushed and a third was swamped as it was launched. Forty lives were lost including, it was originally thought, that of the captain, although it later transpired he had been picked up by a Dutch steamer. Although badly damaged the Welsh ship survived.
The Times claimed this showed the value of watertight compartments and that the structure of the great ocean-going steamers was generally an element of insecurity rather than of safety: ‘their hulls are for the most part fatally vulnerable and can be pierced by a blow of no astonishing force’. So it seems that the man who declared that even then Great Eastern could not have withstood the blow from the Bywell Castle, was probably right.
The baiting of Germany on the subject of their naval skills seems to have been something of a national sport, for the newspaper pointed out that what the accident also showed was that the German transatlantic passengers ships of recent years had been particularly unfortunate, for example, the wreck of the Schiller1 (which has since been dubbed the ‘Victorian Titanic’) and the ss Deutschland.2 They suggested that perhaps what was needed was an inquiry by their authorities as searching and severe as that had been carried out by the Board of Trade in the case of the Princess Alice. A note in The Times at the end of December said cryptically: ‘The captain and officers of the Pommerania, whose responsibility for the recent collision was inquired into in Berlin, have been acquitted’.
But the British had no cause to crow because, on the very same day, another fatal collision occurred on the Mersey. In a thick, early-morning fog, the passenger ferry Gem, whose passengers were largely businessmen en route from Seacombe to Liverpool, collided with the steamer, Bowfell, which was lying at anchor. The Times reported:
The blow had hardly been struck when there was a general rush from the cabins below, and several passengers, probably fearing a repetition of the Princess Alice disaster, immediately jumped overboard.
By then, four passengers were known to have drowned and another fourteen were still missing.
Inevitably, the evidence before the Court of Admiralty in the Princess Alice case was more or less a replay of the inquest and Board of Trade hearings. On 11 December Sir R. Phillimore gave his judgement on the action by the London Steamboat Company against the Bywell Castle:
It appears to us that when the Princess Alice was on a parallel course with the Bywell Castle, red light to red light, if their courses had been continued they would have safely passed. But when a very short distance (100 to 400 yd) intervened the Princess Alice went hard a-starboard bringing her athwart the Bywell Castle. It is impossible to ascertain her motive for doing this. It appears to us, moreover, that the Princess Alice was navigated in a careless and reckless manner without due observance of regulations as to lookout and speed. In our opinion the Princess Alice is to blame for this collision.
It remains to decide whether the Bywell Castle contributed. It appears she was navigated with due care and skill till within a very short time of the collision. But it is certain that having seen the Princess Alice’s green light she ported into it. Not only the wrong manoeuvre but the worst she could have executed.
The only defence is that it happened so short a time before the collision. There have been several cases in this court where it has been held that a wrong manoeuvre at the last moment really had no effect on the collision. I have consulted with the Elder Brethren whether this wrong action could be placed in this category. They think if ‘hard a-port’ had not been given, though the Princess Alice might have received some injury, she would not have sunk. I am bound therefore to hold both vessels to blame for this collision.3
So now we have one judgement blaming the Bywell Castle, one blaming the Princess Alice and a third blaming them both. The case went to the Court of Appeal, which was to take its time in reporting.
In London, the ‘state of the Thames water’ remained a topic of concern. At the end of November, members of the Board of Works and several scientists made two trips down the Thames on a steamer taking specimens of water at various points, as suggested by Sir Joseph Bazalgette in his report to them on 22 November. He accompanied them.
Their conclusions were that the water was made much murkier by solids mixed from the soil that had been washed from the eroding riverbanks, particularly where the banks were not maintained by wharfs, walls or stone ‘pitching’, than by sewage solids which were ‘highly decomposable’. While not denying that there was some ‘offensive water’ near the sewage outlets, it was far worse in front of the London Telegraph Works at East Greenwich and, more particularly, at Lawes Chemical Works at Barking Creek. This emitted an odour of sulphuric acid and the river there was pervaded by a tarry scum thought to come from the tar works 3 miles up the creek. ‘The water was thicker here, than at the outfall, and the spot altogether had a very unsavoury character about it’, reported the Standard on 30 November. ‘Some of them were bold enough to swallow large draughts of it,’ the Graphic told its readers, ‘and though no very severe condemnation was expressed, we do not hear that anyone arranged for a supply to be sent home for his private use’.
Which was just as well, since the return of deaths in London for the previous week included eighteen from enteric or typhoid fever, which can be caused by faecal matter in the water. There were also seventeen enteric fever sufferers lying in the London Fever Hospital at that time. Deaths from diarrhoea (fifteen) were counted separately. Although declining a little, the other infectious diseases continued to take their toll; seven from smallpox, eighteen from measles, fifty-four from scarlet fever, eleven from diphtheria, thirty-one from whooping cough and twenty-four from different forms of fever. Lung diseases also saw off 428 that week. Even fractures could be the death of you, but at least, unlike Spain where the disease was suspected, leprosy was not a threat. Diphtheria was, of course, a particularly dreadful disease that caused death either by suffocation from the rogue membrane growing in the throat and nasal passages or cardiac arrest due to the bacilli. Although more prevalent in poorer districts, the infectious diseases had no respect for rank or class. A cryptic note in the Morning Post on 26 November 1878, announced that Lady Hatterly of the Red House in Norwich had just died from ‘a sharp attack of diphtheria’.
The real Princess Alice was already very much aware of the suffering diphtheria could cause. On 5 November, Princess Alice’s first born, the tomboyish but kind 16-year-old Princess Victoria, complained of a stiff neck, which her mother suspected might be mumps. She remarked on how comical it would be if the whole household caught it. Next morning, young Victoria was diagnosed with the dreaded diphtheria. Five days later, 6-year-old Princess Alice (‘Alicky’) went down with it. The next to catch it was the youngest (and thus a particular pet of her mother’s since the death of her son Frittie), 4-year-old Princess Marie, known as May. During the next three days, 12-year-old Princess Irene, 10-year-old Ernst Ludwig and the Grand Duke himself also succumbed. Their mother helped nurse them, but the 4-year-old May became very ill with the worst form of the disease (laryngeal). Alice wrote in distress to Queen Victoria at Balmoral, agonizing as to whether her ‘sweet little May’ would get through it. She didn’t. The telegram to Queen Victoria the next day even had the granite-like former gillie, John Brown, ‘crying like a child’, so she knew when he delivered it to her what news it contained.4
Rather oddly, The Times commented on the fact that, although she had twenty-eight grandchildren, Queen Victoria had lost only five of them:
According to ‘Lodge’s Peerage; the list of these deaths is as follows:
1st, Prince Francis Frederick Sigismund, son of the Imperial Prince and Princess of Germany, died June, 1866, aged two;
2nd, Prince Frederick William Augustus Victor Leopold Louis, son of Princess Alice and of the Grand Duke of Hesse, accidentally killed by a fall in May, 1873, aged two and a half;
3rd, Prince Frederick Christian Augustus Victor Leopold Edward Harold, son of the Princess Helena and Prince Christian, died May, 1876, aged one week;
4th, Prince Alexander John Charles Albert, son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, died in April, 1871, aged one day;
5th, the Princess Marie of Hesse, aged 4.5
Alice had to keep the news of May’s death from the rest of her sick children, who kept asking for their little sister and sending her books and toys. They all began to recover, apart from the sensitive only son Ernst (Ernie). Eventually, when Ernie too was out of danger, she told him about the death of his little sister to whom he was especially attached. He was so upset that she broke the golden rule of no physical contact (the disease is passed on via physical contact or from the breath of the victim) and hugged and kissed him, possibly imagining that, not having caught it after all this exposure, she was immune.
Now they all seemed to be out of the woods, Alice began to feel a little more cheerful, and in a letter to her mother on 7 December talked about repapering the nurseries and going on a trip to Heidelberg. But she was not immune. A few days after comforting Ernie she fell ill and, despite the Queen sending over Sir William Jenner,6 one of her own doctors, Princess Alice died on 14 December. This was the same date on which her beloved father had died all those years earlier.
The response to the sad news in Britain and the colonies was unrestrained: black-edged columns in newspapers relating the sequence of events in detail; flags flown at half mast on public buildings; and church bells tolling mournfully. The regret appeared genuine. The public seem to have appreciated that here was a royal of some social conscience, not just a drain on the public purse.7
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
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.