The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

Author:Hallie Rubenhold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Long Liz

It was nearly 8 p.m. The sky had darkened, and the moon had risen over the flat, silvery Thames. On the evening of September 3, 1878, summer was in retreat, and more than eight hundred passengers on board the Princess Alice, a pleasure cruiser filled with day-trippers and those returning from their holidays in Sheerness, were headed back to London. On deck, the ship’s band played a rousing polka, and couples gathered to dance and sing. Children chased one another across the slippery wooden decks, out of reach of their parents and nannies. Gentlemen read their newspapers and watched the passing shoreline—warehouses, docks, and factories disappearing into night’s shadow. As they approached North Woolwich Pier, it never occurred to those lulled by the gentle evening and the music that they were moving directly into the course of the Bywell Castle, an 890-ton ironclad coal freighter. By the time both ships realized that a collision was imminent, it was too late. The sharp point of the Bywell Castle’s bow plunged knifelike through the Princess Alice, tearing through the engine room and shearing the vessel in half. Within minutes, both parts of the ship were sucked into the depths of the sewage-filled Thames; panic-stricken passengers clung to its sides as it went under. The river was filled with bobbing heads, gasping for breath and crying out to loved ones across the black water. Parents held tight to their drowning children; women’s heavy skirts and metal bustles made it almost impossible for them to fight the pull of the tide. The Bywell Castle threw down ropes and lowered the few lifeboats stowed on board, but its crew was otherwise impotent to save the lives of so many.

More than 650 died in the tragedy, the greatest loss of life sustained in any Thames shipping disaster. The number of survivors was never confirmed, though estimates placed it between 69 and 170. Those who lived faced the horrific task of helping to identify the dead, who were daily pulled from the clasp of the murderous river. Entire families perished on the night of September 3. Many children, whose parents had gone off for the day, were left orphans. Wives and husbands were widowed; some had watched helplessly as a loved one swallowed water and slipped beneath the waves.

ThePrincess Alice disaster traumatized London. The story spread furiously among the communities surrounding the East End docks. Many had witnessed the events firsthand—seen the bodies, the wreckage—or listened with horror as others described what they had observed. As the impact of the tragedy was felt equally among those from Sheerness, the news of it must have landed especially hard on the Stride brothers in Poplar and Limehouse, who would have anxiously scanned the growing lists of the dead, searching for the names of family or friends and neighbors. Elisabeth took in the magnitude of the calamity with keen interest as tale after tale circulated in the newspapers and among those she knew.

By the time of the Princess Alice disaster, Elisabeth’s own life was in turmoil.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.