Facebook post #044 (Nov 2020)
So, I promised you disaster. (See also the Wharncliffe Woodmoor colliery explosion in post 16 and the response to sinking of the Titanic in post 40). Last week, in my family war memorial – as well as the Somme, Ypres, Gallipoli, Monte Cassino, the R.38, and the RNAZ Dakota calamity – my post included the devastating explosion of HMS Princess Irene (pic 3) at Sheerness in 1915, which killed 352, including a cousin. There had been worse.
On 4 September 1878, John Marsh of Clerkenwell was an early witness at an inquest. He formally identified his deceased mother-in-law Zillah Waddilove, my 4th great aunt. She had been on a St John’s Mission Bible outing which had gone badly wrong. It was a treat from Susannah Law, a wealthy and generous woman, who had promised the poor women in her Bible group a day out. It was to be on 5 September but on seeing what a beautiful day it was on 3 September, she declared “Today’s the Day!”
Zillah née Teager had already had a tough life. She had lost three children in 1848, probably in the cholera epidemic of that year. She lived in St Giles, a focus of infection; the area gets a mention by Charles Dickens:
How many who, amidst this compound of sickening smells, these heaps of filth, these tumbling houses with all their vile contents, animate and inanimate, slimily overflowing into the black road, would believe that they breathe this air?
The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
Zillah’s husband died in 1854; a year later, she married John Waddilove in St Giles. By 1861, John was a pork butcher; the couple lived at 17 Aylesbury St, Clerkenwell, a stone’s throw from William Larard’s shoe business. There is no known connexion between the families but William’s brother’s grandson (Ernest Larard) and John’s sister’s granddaughter (Gerty Brittain) were my gt-grandparents. They married in Birmingham in 1900. By further coincidence, my Dad worked on one adjoining street in Clerkenwell in the 1970s, and I worked on another in the 1980s. (See post #025).
Back to Zillah, forward to 1878. The vessel of choice for the day out was the smart paddle steamer pleasure-craft, the SS Princess Alice, named after Queen Victoria’s daughter. She weighed 432 tons gross. Princess Alice’s destination was Sheerness – the same port where Princess Irene met her fate. Londoners could escape to the seaside there away from the Great Stink. Some passengers alighted at the resort of Gravesend, others at the Pleasure Gardens at Rosherville. The atmosphere was happy: people were chattering about the terrible rail collision at Sittingbourne three days earlier, and glad to be on the water instead of on the rails.
Princess Alice left Rosherville at about 6:30 pm on the final leg of her return to Swan Pier, by London Bridge. A little over an hour later, there was a terrible pre-echo of the Marchioness Disaster from my time in Clerkenwell. The Princess Alice was struck amidships by a much larger vessel, the 1376 tons collier SS Bywell Castle. The smaller boat had no chance, and sank quickly, trapping many below decks. The crew of the Bywell Castle and boatmen from local factories did what they could, saving about 130 people. By the time the Princess of Alice’s sister ship arrived ten minutes later, there was no one left to save.
Some of those rescued died from ingesting the water. The miraculous Crossness Pumping Station, which had helped deliver London from Cholera, had – as usual – that day pumped 75 million gallons of decomposing raw sewage into the Thames close to the collision point. The gas works and chemical factories discharged to that stretch of the Thames, and there had been a fire that day, resulting in oil and petroleum entering the River.
There was no manifest, so it is not known how many died, but it was between 600 and 700, making this the worst disaster on British inland waterways.
(For the 1989 Marchioness Disaster, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchioness_disaster).
