Relatives of victims, rescuers and supporters are raising funds to deep-clean the forgotten memorial to the 'Princess Alice' Thames Disaster, at the site of the mass grave for 120 of its unidentified victims. Woolwich Cemetery has given permission for a much needed public-funded, professional, deep-clean needing, at the very least, two full days of work and lots(!) of costly specialist masonry cleaner to remove years of grime and neglect.

Image: the mass grave burial of 120 unidentified people at the site where the memorial was later erected.

The Princess Alice Disaster on the Thames - 3rd September 1878 - the WORST inland-waters disaster in British maritime history.

In a matter of minutes children were orphaned, husbands and wives widowed, entire families were wiped out and communities impacted across all the country as well as Londoners.

About 7.40pm on this dark night, as the Princess Alice steamed towards its dock at North Woolwich a huge coal-carrier ship, the Bywell Castle, sliced through the packed little steamer. Within minutes, hundreds - at least 650 - men, women and children died in the Thames, within sight of horrified onlookers on the shore.

They drowned in sewage. Just before the fateful collision, 75 million gallons of London's raw sewage had been discharged into the Thames here. Even people rescued alive died in the following days and weeks, in part from complications from swallowing the putrid water.

There's no precise death toll. The little steamer was licensed to carry 899 people but there wasn't a passenger list. Unknown numbers of bodies were washed away down the Thames, out into the North Sea. Crowds of excited children weren't even counted as they and parents, the majority of them the children's mothers, boarded the Princess Alice.

In 1878, “The Nation Wept”. Nearly 150 years later, it's a forgotten “working class tragedy" which killed multiple generations of the same families. Only 150 people were accounted for as saved. . Yet, we the families and descendants have never forgotten the catastrophic scale of deaths of 100s of people in our own families, or the nameless people with no surviving relatives to identify or mourn them.

LEGACY - in the aftermath of the Princess Alice Disaster and outcries about the horrific scale of the tragedy, lead to significant changes in navigation safety rules and adoption of ships using navigation lights on the Thames.

After the nightmare of over 600 decaying corpses washing up for weeks along the Thames (between Limehouse and Erith, Kent) which were conveyed to chaotically-disorganised temporary morgues on either side of the Thames hampering any efforts to identify them - decisions were enacted as to how and which Thames-side authorities would be responsible for future victims of the Thames.

In the decade after the disaster, thanks to engineer Joseph Bazalgette's well-known efforts, London's raw untreated sewage finally ceased being discharged into the Thames.

In an era in which swimming was not widely taught, particularly to women one positive outcome of the disaster is it sparked a change in this attitude.

"800 people were on board...", a newspaper report two days after the disaster.

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VISIT SS Princess Alice Facebook page

SEE BBC News report about the Thames disaster

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Image: BBC / (c) Hulton Archive / Getty Images