Victoria steamboat disaster

Small passenger boats were soon operating on the river, which ran regular trips through the summer between Downtown London and Byron.

The vessels operating the London to Byron route often had a makeshift construction and lacked consideration of safety standards, having flat-bottomed, shallow hulls to better accommodate the varying depths of the river.

Several days prior, the rival company; the London and Waterworks Line, had just completed trial runs of their own vessel, the Enterprise.

[3] In November 1879, the London and Waterworks Line ferry Enterprise caught fire and sank during the winter, her burned-out hull slipping beneath the ice until the next spring when it was raised by her captain, Thomas Wastie.

[2] The Victoria, registered with Port Stanley, Ontario as her homeport, was finished with a glossy white-painted hull with royal blue and gingerbread trim.

Captain Thomas Wastie, the owner of the Victoria, transferred ownership of the vessel to the Thames Navigation Company, who owned both the Forest City and the Princess Louise.

At 9 AM local time, the Victoria departed from London on her first voyage of the busy day ahead, heading south down the river.

As the Victoria passed under the Great Western Railway bridge a mile from the city, the passengers waved at travelers aboard a Windsor-bound train.

Passengers were not worried about the vessel sitting significantly lower in the water than she should have, and many joked about the river being too shallow for any danger to occur, and noting a previous apparent event where the Victoria had been grounded attempting to pass over a tin can lying on the riverbed.

[5] John Drennan, a reporter for the London Advertiser, was standing aboard the Victoria's lower deck when he stated his concern over the rocking of the vessel as she sailed.

[5] Passengers had begun to disembark even during the voyage, some of which upon noting the dangerous rocking of the vessel, dove into the river and swam ashore.

As the Victoria passed the submerged remains of the former Griffith's Dam, located near what is today the Guy Lombardo Bridge, passengers noted that water was ankle-deep[3] on the lowest deck.

Captain Rankin understood that he was not going to be able to successfully return the Victoria to London, so refused to take on any new passengers at the wharfs at both Ward's Hotel and Woodland Cemetery.

Rankin noticed a sandbar up ahead in the river close to what is today Greenway Park, and attempted to drive the vessel onto it to stop the voyage.

Excited, passengers on both decks of the Victoria rushed to the railing of the starboard side which caused an unbalance of weight on the small riverboat.

Five minutes after the Victoria had sunk, the Princess Louise came into sight, and her captain immediately grounded her ashore and disembarked all passengers.

The Princess Louise was turned into a temporary morgue almost immediately, and her decks were quickly lined with recovered bodies from the sunken Victoria.

Artillery pieces from the London Field Battery were fired over the wreck with the belief that explosions would help break apart the vessel more to release bodies caught in the wreckage.

The London Free Press reported hackmen raising their rates, liverymen charging five dollars for one and a half hours of service, and of draymen demanding various fees from grieving relatives.

The funerals of twenty-three-year-old Willie Glass and his nineteen-year-old fiance, Fanny Cooper, were held from the separate homes but blended into one procession on the way to the cemetery.

First plans favoured a stone monument in a city park but the needs of many families whose breadwinners had died in the disaster brought an end to this.

Some months later money was raised, taken among the parents who lost children in the disaster, to erect a small brick building on the grounds of the Protestant Orphans' Home in North London.

Instead, the jury declared Captain Rankin responsible for the wreck, with partial blame being later cast to George Parish, the Victoria's engineer, who had passed the vessel as suitable for sailing at the beginning of the 1881 season.

The death of Miss Cooper was entirely ignored and it is impossible to discover whether the jury believed she perished as the result of carelessness or negligence of individuals.

Because the Waterworks was seldom used during the latter half of the 1880s, the London Free Press ran several editorials in 1887 urging the resumption of riverboat transport to the park.

May 25 would be the vessel's first voyage, however this time around and out of extreme caution in light of what befell the Victoria, Foster refused to exceed 300 passengers per trip.

One of the few reminders of the disaster is that of a blue Ontario Heritage Plaque which sits with the painted anchor of the Victoria on the south side of the river at the site of the sinking.

Most of the victims of the disaster are today buried in Mount Pleasant and Woodland Cemeteries, the latter of which just so happened to be the last port of call that the Victoria stopped at before coming to rest on the cold riverbed mere minutes later.

The Victoria Day Disaster today is a well-known event in history to many Londoners, although the individual stories of those lost in the shipwreck are mostly shrouded in mystery or lack of information.

Musicians Jury Kobayashi, Eve Thompson, and Mary Ashton performed pieces, and historical interpreter Dan Ebbs portrayed Captain Rankin.