Tower and Town, March 2016

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A 150-Year-Old Tragedy

Halfway down the north wall of the nave in St Mary's is a window (pictured on the front cover) that I often sit nearby, but one whose details I have never bothered to examine until they were drawn to my attention in church the other day. By an amazing coincidence, the great grand-daughter of the Thomas Manders mentioned below, Elizabeth Ward, currently worships in St Mary's.

It is a window in memory of a 14-year old boy who was drowned just over 150 years ago. The commemorative inscription tells something of the story of this tragedy:

"In memory of Alfred Henry eldest son of Captain Thomas Manders and Catherine his wife. He was drowned off Erith with nine other cadets of the officers training ship "Worcester" by the overturning of the ship's barge in the 14th year of his age on Tuesday 28th February 1865."

A few years earlier a London merchant and a local shipbuilder had the idea of establishing a training vessel on the Thames to overcome an acute shortage of certificated officers for both the merchant and the royal navies. A committee was set up to raise money for the project and within six months £1000 had been raised by subscription from merchants, ship-owners and underwriters who had the great foresight to invest in their trade. Their search for a hulk bore fruit, when the Royal Navy offered them a surplus 50-gun fourth rate Java class frigate, that had been laid up at the Nore since leaving her builders at Deptford.

In 1862 the Thames Marine Officer Training School was opened. The vessel was initially stationed at Blackwall Reach, but moved to Erith the following year where she remained until 1869 when she was moved to Greenhithe.

To mark the occasion of mooring off Ingress Abbey, the cadets fired a noisy salute from the ship's 18-pounder muzzle loading guns, which shattered the windows of a large number of houses in Greenhithe. By the 1870s the School had outgrown this ship and another was purchased - the "Frederick William" but renamed "Worcester" to maintain the link.

Quite what the occasion of the tragic events was which led to the drowning of these ten cadets in 1865 history does not (as so often!) relate. Perhaps it was a result of one of the "aquatic sports" recorded in a contemporary photograph - perhaps a rowing race in one of the ship's barges across the river caught in the cross currents of stream and tide? Or some other training accident in which these young boys were thrown into the freezing February water of the Thames?

The window depicts three Biblical textual references to rescue from drowning - the first two from the left are more familiar and from the Gospel stories of Jesus' ministry: Peter jumping out of the boat to meet Jesus walking on the water towards him, panicking "and beginning to sink he cried saying 'Lord save me'"; the disciples panicking in the midst of a storm on the Sea of Galilee and "they came and woke him saying 'Master, Master, we perish'". The right hand image is of a shipwreck illustrating a verse from Psalm 18: "he sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of the many waters."

David Du Croz