12 Days of Christmas Ancestors - Day 7

"The seventh day of Christmas my true love sent to me
seven swans a swimming..."

On the 24^th of April, a beautiful spring day in Bath in 1901, Alice Vivian Tait and her brother Andrew Eli Tait went boating on the Avon River with six other friends, starting in the morning at Maynard’s Boating Station and going upriver past Bathampton and around to Warleigh. 

They spent the day there and headed back to the Boating Station around 6:40 in the evening. Alice Vivian was in a boat with Mr Roberts and Mr and Mrs Pope, who got off the boat at Bathampton and walked home. They waited for the other boat holding Mary Davidson and her sister Connie, Mr Percival Cottle and Andrew Eli Tait. They passed under the bridge and Andrew’s boat got too close to the weirs and tipped over, the misses Davidson screaming for help. 

Bathampton Weirs

Mr Robert jumped out of his boat to help the girls, and Alice Vivian also jumped out and ran for help, then returned and jumped back in the river to help her brother Andrew, who was having trouble against the unusually strong currents. Mary Jane Kerr Davidson, the fiancée of Andrew Eli Tait, drowned in the water. 

There was a coroner’s inquest the next day at which Alice Vivian had to testify. Andrew was seriously ill for a while but slowly recovered. The entire Coroner's Inquest as reported in the Bath Chronicle, Thursday May 2, 1901 can be accessed here. 

When you search "boating accident bathampton" at FMP or British newspapers, there seemed to be a death at the weirs every couple of years.