Women and children first

. . . to die.  Today is the centenary of the sinking of RMS Empress of Ireland.  Rammed amidships by the Norwegian collier Storstad in a fogbank in the mouth of the Gulf of St Lawrence, the Empress sank in 40m of water within 15 minutes for being holed. The Storstad was considerably smaller than the Empress but drove her bows into the larger vessel below the waterline. Storstad (R) survived on the surface with damaged bows. Only 465 people were saved from a complement of 1477, making this the worst maritime disaster in Canadian waters. In those far-off Edwardian days, there was a code of chivalry which maintained that men would endeavour to save women and children in such emergencies.

This idea stems from another collision at 0200hrs in 1852, when paddle-wheel troopship HMS Birkenhead struck an uncharted rock, broke in two a sank two miles off the shore of South Africa. There were not enough servicable boats to save all aboard and the women and children were loaded into the boats that did get away.  As the ship finally slipped under the waves. the senior army officer present, Colonel Seton of the 74th Royal Highland Fusiliers, ordered the soldiers to remain on deck rather than head for the already over-loaded lifeboats.  Only 193 people were saved out of 640 on board, including 7 women and 13 children.  The ship's manifest went down with the hull, so it's not clear if four handfuls of The Weak was a good outcome proportionately. But the idea had been sown and propagated The Birkenhead Drill by Kipling in his tribute to The Royal Marines Soldier an' Sailor too.  I have a lot of time for Kipling, who had a poets ear for language and accent, but it is tedious to read his bloomin' 'orrible malapompoms in poems such as this - you can drown in apostrophes.

Mais revenons nous a nos estuaires Québécois; There are data from the Empress of Ireland disaster that we can consult to see if Women and Children First actually did better than Survival of the Fittest/Biggest/Richest as expected.  The null hypothesis here is that there was proportionately equal chance of death among the various classes into which those on board can be grouped. Here's some breakdowns:

Group	Lost	Saved	% saved
Crew	172	248	59%
Passengers	840	217	21%
N=1477	1012	465	31%

You can do a ChiSq test on the data which shows that the crew survived significantly better than the passengers.  ChiSq = 206.7; 1df; p < 0.00001. Here's another way of looking at the passenger casualties:

Group	Lost	Saved	% saved
1st Class	51	36	41%
2nd/3rd class	789	181	21%
N=1057	840	217	21%

ChiSq = 25.3; 1 df; p< 0.000001. So your chance of survival was much better if you could afford a first class ticket, possibly because the staterooms were higher up in the hull and those in steerage cabins nearer the waterline drowned as water flooded through the port-holes when the ship took a list to starboard.  The port-holes of course should not have been open but it was so bloomin' 'ot dahn there. And here's the verdict on the most vulnerable:

Group	Lost	Saved	% saved
Childer	134	4	3%
Adults	706	213	23%
N=1057	840	217	21%

ChiSq = 30.0; 1 df; p< 0.000001. So the poor weans had virtually no chance, possibly because they were disproportionately down in the bowels of the ship with their working class parents.  And finally:

Group	Lost	Saved	% saved
Women	269	41	13%
Men	437	172	28%
N=919	706	213	23%

ChiSq = 26.0 1 df; p< 0.000001.When push comes to shove at sea, there isn't a lot of sweeping your cloak across a puddle so that a lady can cross without getting her feet wet.

On 2nd October 1942, RMS Queen Mary, an enormous ship carrying a division of US Infantry to the European theatre of WWII, was zig-zagging across the Atlantic trying to avoid U-boats.  She zigged when her escort HMS Curacoa zagged and the latter was run over and cut in two by the Queen Mary which was nearly 20x the tonnage.  Curacoa, a large vessel 140m long, 4000 tons, was nevertheless sliced through as if made of tin-foil.  The front of a ship looks like and can act remarkably like the business end of an axe.