The late Peter Haining
was one of many writers fascinated by
the terrible events of the evening of 3rd September 1878, when the
paddle steamer ‘Princess Alice’, laden with over 800 day trippers returning
from an excursion to Margate, was rammed by the collier Bywell Castle close to
North Woolwich. Over 630 men, women and children perished in the disaster,
which remains the worst in the history of river navigation—not just in the UK,
but in the world.
Hoping to publish a book on the subject, Peter Haining kept
clippings both from the centenary coverage of the disaster in 1978 and from
August 1989,when a much smaller vessel, the ‘Marchioness’, sank further
upstream in the Thames. He also researched a similar Victorian sinking in 1875,
when the’ Deutschland’ went down off the Kentish coast, carrying among its
passengers, five German nuns--- a disaster which prompted Gerard Manly Hopkins to compose his
famous poem The Wreck of the Deutschland.
To most historians the most intriguing aspect of the ‘Princess
Alice’ sinking wasn’t the circumstances, which are familiar to most people, but
the aftermath.
