SEVERAL hours after the liner Drummond Castle sank .... a Breton fisherman recovered the body of a three-year-old English girl named Alice Reid. Alice, from Dalton-in-Furness, Cumbria, was to become the best remembered of the 243 passengers and crew who died. After she was taken to a cottage, laid in a cradle and dressed in a ceremonial Breton costume, the scene was recorded by the French artist Charles Cottet for a picture which hangs in the Petit Palais, Paris.

Hundreds of newspaper articles in France and Britain were devoted to the disaster and the reaction of the local islanders, who received letters and medals from Queen Victoria. She was moved by the care given to the scores of bodies which floated to the Atlantic islands, two hours sailing from the Breton mainland.

Many dead were washed ashore naked or in pyjamas. The islanders dressed them in their own ceremonial costumes kept for solemn rituals, while hundreds of people attended ecumenical burials by the parish priest.

Donations from the shipping firm and British public subscriptions were used to build a spire for Ushant's church and provide a clock for the church clock at Molene. The island was also endowed with a reservoir for fresh water that is still its main supply.

The two crewmen and one passenger who survived said the ship went down in minutes after being brought to a juddering halt as she travelled at about 12 knots through a misty night. Many passengers drowned in their cabins. But most were on deck, along with the 104 crewmen preparing to launch lifeboats, and were flung into the sea.

The only passenger to escape from the Drummond Castle, Charlie Marquardt, grabbed a piece of floating wood and spent most of the night and the following morning in the water. He was picked up by a boat rowed by a retired fisherman, Joseph Berthele, who also recovered Alice Reid's body, and later became a hero in the British press as the 'grand old man of Ushant'.

Attempts to trace Mr Marquardt's descendants and those of the two surviving crewmen, Charles Wood, the quartermaster, and William Godbolt, a seaman, have been unsuccessful. They escaped together on a piece of wreckage and were picked up by chance by a Molene fishing boat the following afternoon.

They were the first to report the disaster, which meant that the news was not flashed to London by telegraph from Ushant's Creac'h lighthouse until 3.15pm - 16 hours after the Drummond Castle had disappeared beneath the waves.

Descendants of the families who rescued three survivors will recall the terrible work of pulling scores of bodies from the sea, and the emotional response of the British public to sacrifices made by one of France's poorest communities. But Ushant's mayor, Denis Palluel, has not had a response to appeals for British representatives and descendants of the victims' families to attend the ceremony and visit two exhibitions devoted to the 3,700-ton Glasgow-built liner, which sank on the last night of her 18-day run from Cape Town to London.

'This is an episode deeply engraved in the minds of the local people,' he said. 'There have been hundreds of wrecks around the Ouessant (Ushant) archipelago, but none has left such a mark as the Drummond Castle, particularly as there are many graves in our churchyard and along the Breton coast.

'We would like the British to see how well we remember and still care for their dead. We thought the centenary was important enough to invite the Queen, but Buckingham Palace is one of the institutions which has not replied to our invitation.'