On the evening of September

26 On the evening of September 3 1878 the overloaded pleasure steamer the Princess Alice was on the return journey from Sheerness to London. The weather had been fine and her passengers had enjoyed a day’s pleasure trip to the Kent coast, a popular pastime at this period. Some children were asleep and the band was playing on the main deck. As the vessel entered Galleons Reach near today’s Docklands at around 19.30 hours she crossed a larger vessel, the Bywell Castle. On board the Bywell Castle, Christopher Dix, her pilot, shouted: ‘My God, that man is starboarding his helm. Stop her. Hard a-port. Reverse the engines full speed” but it was too late and she hit and sunk the Princess Alice. As steam billowed from the gash in the vessel’s side, she broke in twoand an estimated 700 men, women and children went into the filthy, polluted water which had just received 75 million gallons of raw sewage from nearby Barking Reach. The exact number of passengers on board during that fatal voyage is unknown as there was no passenger log but it is thought that around 640 people drowned, making this Britain’s worst inland waterway disaster. Despite being a largely forgotten tragedy at the time it had a profound effect on the policing of the river and pollution control as well as largely ending the golden age of the pleasure steamer as railways and buses became seen as safer alternatives. Both an inquest and a Board of Trade inquiry were held. A majority verdict by the inquest jury apportioned blame to both vessels. The Bywell Castle, it said, had contributed to the collision by not acting quickly enough to ease, stop and reverse her engines, and ‘the Princess Alice contributed to the collision by not stopping and THE WRECK OF THE PRINCESS ALICE Artists invoke the memory of a disaster on the Thames nearly 150 years ago which claimed at least 640 lives ARTWORK: left to right sculptor Vincenzo Muratore and artist Christopher Mick collaborated to create a memorial painting