3rd September 1878. Princess Alice.
The entry had stuck out the first time I’d read it because it didn’t seem to belong in the list of family birthdays and anniversaries. Now, though, from Alice’s record of the penultimate day of her father’s life, it was clear the date mattered a great deal.
Without considering the luck that had brought such a journal into my hands in the first place, never mind the coincidence of our living in the same street as the author of the diary, I packed up.
Ten minutes later I was home and sitting in front of the computer.
Beyond the window, the Thames was still shrouded in low cloud and smears of drizzle ran down the window. I typed in the date and waited for information to come up, watched the images and words roll onto the screen.
On Tuesday, 3rd September, 1878, the London Steamboat Company’s pleasure paddle steamer, the Princess Alice, sailed on a day trip to Gravesend and Sheerness. Among the seven hundred passengers were a Mrs Hawks, the owner of the Anchor and Hope pub at Charlton, a group of ‘ladies of the night’ from the Seven Dials area of London, forty women from Smithfield’s Crowcross Mission and a group from a Bible class which included Mrs Isobel Livett and three of her daughters, Florence, Nancy and Hilda, aged seven months, five and four respectively. The eldest daughter, Alice, had stayed home to look after Mr Livett, who was not well enough to join the party.
My chest tightened. I dreaded reading on, yet I couldn’t stop.
At seven-thirty in the evening, the steamer was approaching Gallion’s Reach. Many of the passengers, in good spirits from their day out, were below deck in the restaurant bar listening to the live entertainment. Accompanied by a ramshackle choir made up of the steamer’s crew, a tenor was performing Maybrick’s ballad ‘Nancy Lee’.
As the steamer rounded the bend between Crossness and Margaret Ness near Tripcock Point, she met the steam collier, Bywell Castle. The collier had just off-loaded her cargo at Millwall Dock and was returning to the South Shore.
The Princess Alice was new in 1865. It was originally licensed to carry 486 passengers, increased after a refit in 1878 to 936. The Board of Trade considered one lifeboat and one longboat to provide adequate safety precautions, despite the fact they could carry no more than sixty people apiece. The collier ploughed full steam into the Princess Alice, splitting her down the middle. There was no time to sound the alarm and no time to alter course. The stern and bows folded upwards and, within minutes, the pleasure steamer had sunk, taking almost everyone with her.
Children and women, mostly unable to swim, were pulled down by their crinolines and skirts and few made it to the shore, even though it was only three hundred yards away. Others survived, only to be swept downstream in the ebb tide to drown in the polluted waters from the Southern Outfall works near Erith.
The bodies brought ashore were taken mainly to Woolwich Dockyard and Roff’s Wharf and given numbers until they could be identified. Some corpses drifted as far as Gravesend, where they were laid for claiming in the pier waiting room. Later, a large Celtic cross was raised at Woolwich Cemetery by public subscription, 23,000 people giving sixpence each to make a grave for the 160 unclaimed victims. Others were buried by their families at St John’s Church in Lewisham and St Paul’s Church in Deptford, including four members of a well-regarded family living in Glaisher Street. The newspaper noted that when the police arrived to inform Mr Livett of the tragic accident at five past one, on the morning of the following day, he suffered a seizure and was unable to leave the house. In the absence of any other adult, his only surviving daughter – seven-year-old Alice Livett – was obliged to identify the bodies of her mother and her sisters.
I turned cold. Five minutes past one in the morning.
My mind racing, I sat back in my chair, trying to piece everything together: the timing of the police’s arrival, the collapse of Mr Livett at the news, the fact that Deptford had been badly damaged during bombing in World War II. Most of the houses on the river had been flattened. Was it possible that our block stood where once Alice Livett had lived? Could it be her cries I heard at night? Or rather, the echo of her grief? And if so, why? Because she had been forgotten? Because the story had been forgotten?
I glanced out of the window and saw the rain had stopped. I put my coat back on and left the flat. With Alice’s journal in my hand, I headed back to St Paul’s.
The sun had come out now, causing the wet grass to glint and giving the impression of everything having been washed clean and made new. There was no guide to the graves in the churchyard and the church itself was locked, so I could find no one to ask about parish registers. I walked up and down, reading each name on the headstones, tracing the faded dates with my fingers, looking for Alice and her family.