The Princess Alice #2
I stood in the queue at the till, which got longer as more people splattered in, stamping their dripping feet on the mat and shaking umbrellas out the door.
I noticed the same thin girl from the market, tracing her name on the window, and wondered why she didn’t come in out of the wet.
By the time I’d paid for my coffee and found a seat, she’d gone and the letters were smudged.
I hadn’t paid attention to the last few books I’d bought, so I stuck my hand into the carrier bag and pulled out the one on the top.
I didn’t remember the look of it at all or picking it up, but it looked interesting.
Not even a book, instead it was a diary.
Or, rather, a record of events. Thin spidery writing, a few dates, all cramped up as if the writer didn’t think she’d ever have enough paper to finish.
This is the private property of Miss Alice Sarah Livett,
Glaisher Street, Deptford, S.E.
If lost please return to rightful owner.
I smiled, intrigued by the coincidence of the address, then started to flick through the journal.
The back pages were filled with columns, the weekly housekeeping accounts of everything required for the household in Glaisher Street, I assumed.
Cloth, firewood, coal, horsemeat, wax, rum – I screwed up my eyes to decipher the tiny letters – and, next to each entry, the cost.
I flicked back to the beginning and found a list of birthdays and important events. Different colours of ink and subtle changes in the handwriting gave the impression that the list had been built up over many years.
15th May 1870. Robert William Livett to Isobel Grace Harris. Married St Paul’s Church, Deptford.
18th June 1871. Alice Sarah. Born Glaisher Street.
20th June 1873. Nancy Grace. Born Glaisher Street.
24th May 1874. Hilda Eugenie. Born Glaisher Street.
17th February 1878. Florence Isobel. Born Glaisher Street.
3rd September 1878. Princess Alice.
19th September 1903. R. W. Livett to Mary Chalker. Married St Paul’s Church, Deptford.
20th May 1904. Grace Charlotte. Born Evelyn Street.
The calendar filled several pages. It contained few references to anything outside Alice’s immediate circle of family and neighbours and royalty.
Day trips, visits to and from Glaisher Street, local events.
The death of Queen Victoria was recorded, as was the Jubilee of King George V in 1935, but most national and world events went unremarked.
Even the First and Second World Wars did not appear.
I glanced at the final entry.
25th November 1944. Woolworth’s with G.
There was no explanation as to why Alice had suddenly stopped writing.
It was raining harder than ever so I looked to the counter, hoping the queue had died down so I could get another coffee. There were more people, though, so I kept reading and hoped no one would ask me to move.
By skimming backwards and forwards between the dates at the front and the diary entries themselves, I began to build up a picture of Alice’s life.
She was the eldest of four daughters – the other three didn’t appear in the journal except at the beginning, and her mother was never mentioned, though her father was from time to time.
At the age of fourteen, Alice was apprenticed to a local dressmaker, but continued living with her father in Glaisher Street and was still there when he remarried in 1903.
There was no more than a handful of references to the second Mrs Livett, and the care of Grace, the child of that remarriage, in the Evelyn Street house, seemed to have fallen to Alice.
It was an odd experience reading about places I knew, or was starting to, and though things had changed hugely in a hundred years, I could still imagine Alice walking these same streets.
I could picture the tramlines and the big shops in Lewisham and New Cross, could imagine the gentle, confined pace of Alice’s life lived in and around Deptford.
From the journal, it seemed neither Alice nor her younger half-sister Grace ever married, but both were regular church goers and members of various Bible groups who met in the Wesleyan Hall round the back of Sayes Court.
Day trips with local schoolchildren to the seaside in 1925.
Not Margate or Southend, but upriver to the mudflats by Tower Bridge to make mud-and-sand pies in the sunshine.
The second Mrs Livett died in 1925 and, after a long illness, Alice’s father followed her a year later. And there, in Alice’s diary entry for the day before his death, was the record of a conversation between father and daughter. The only personal entry of any kind.
It sent me back to the beginning and the list of dates.
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.