PS Princess Alice

1878

Thames, sewage in the water, four minutes Location: Gallions Reach, River Thames, London · Coordinates: 51.51°N 0.09°E · Casualties: ~645 · Survivors: ~130 · Depth: 10 m · Cause: collision — Struck on the starboard bow by the collier SS Bywell Castle at Gallions Reach in the River Thames at 19:40 on 3 September 1878. Sank in under four minutes. Two sewage outfalls at Crossness and Barking had been discharging 75 million gallons of raw waste an hour before the collision; many survivors pulled from the water died in the following days of what the Thames had put in their lungs. · Fate: raised · scrapped · Type: sidewheel paddle steamer · pleasure · Tonnage: 251 tons · Crew: 15 · Flag: United Kingdom · Launched: 1865 London Steamboat Company paddle steamer, returning to North Woolwich from a day excursion to Sheerness. Struck on the starboard bow by the collier Bywell Castle in the Thames at Gallions Reach at 19:40 on 3 September 1878. Sank in under four minutes, 600 to 700 drowned or poisoned. The sewage outfalls at Crossness and Barking had been discharging for an hour before the collision; survivors pulled from the river died of the water in their lungs in the days after. The Vessel The PS Princess Alice was a British paddle steamer of the London Steamboat Company, commissioned at the Henderson, Coulborn and Company yard at Renfrew, Scotland, on 22 July 1865 as the Bute. She was 66 metres long, 251 gross tons, and had been built for the Clyde estuary pleasure-excursion trade. She had been purchased by the London Steamboat Company in 1867 and renamed Princess Alice for her subsequent service on the Thames estuary pleasure-excursion trade. The Thames estuary pleasure-excursion trade of the 1860s and 1870s was one of the most popular leisure activities of Victorian working-class and middle-class London. Paddle steamers like the Princess Alice operated regular scheduled excursions from central London piers to the Thames estuary resorts of Gravesend, Southend, Margate, and Ramsgate, carrying substantial numbers of London residents on day trips during the summer and early autumn seasons. Princess Alice alone carried approximately 150,000 passengers per year through the Thames excursion trade. Her master from 1871 was Captain William Grinstead, 47, a career Thames estuary steamship officer. The Disaster The Princess Alice was split in half by the Bywell Castle collision. Her forward section, containing her passenger saloon and approximately 400 of the passengers, sank within 30 seconds of the impact. Her after section, containing her engine room and approximately 350 passengers, remained afloat for approximately 4 minutes before also sinking. The specific horror of the Princess Alice disaster, beyond the immediate casualties of the collision itself, was the condition of the Thames estuary water at the collision position. At Gallions Reach in 1878, the Thames estuary was receiving the untreated sewage outfalls of London's Metropolitan Main Drainage system. Two specific sewage outfalls (Crossness and Barking) were discharging directly into the Gallions Reach area on the evening of 3 September 1878; the discharge rate had been estimated at approximately 1.5 million litres of raw sewage per hour. The passengers of the Princess Alice who had been thrown into the Thames by the collision, or who had entered the water attempting to swim to safety, therefore found themselves in a specific aqueous mixture of partially-treated human waste, industrial effluent, and river water. Many of the 400 passengers of the forward section had died in the initial sinking; of the 350 passengers who entered the water alive, approximately 200 died of drowning or of poisoning from the Thames estuary water in the following 30 minutes. PS Princess Alice produced approximately 650 dead from 750 aboard in t