Many naval historians believe the tradition began in 1852, with the sinking of the HMS Birkenhead, which ran aground off the coast of South Africa. The captain stayed to direct the evacuation, and the soldiers gave priority to women and children, letting them board the limited lifeboats first. Only 193 of the 643 people on board survived. Still, the officers and sailors were hailed as heroes: Rudyard Kipling wrote that courage in battle was less impressive than the self-restraint of “the Birkenhead drill.” Shortly afterwards, the phrase “women and children first!” was coined in a novel by W.D. O’Connor, a friend of Walt Whitman’s.
George Bernard Shaw, ever the skeptic, thought the romance of “the Birkenhead drill” the height of childish myth-making. Disgusted by the melodramatic, wildly inaccurate reporting that emerged after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, Shaw wrote a takedown of the drill for England’s Daily News and Leader. “Why is it,” he wrote, “that the effect of a sensational catastrophe on a modern nation is to cast it into transports, not of weeping, not of prayer, not of sympathy with the bereaved...but [into] an explosion of outrageous romantic lying?” The whole captain-goes-down-with-his-ship, women-and-children-first schtick, Shaw argued, was just an indulgent fairy tale:
All the men must be heroes (except the foreigners, who must all be shot by stern British officers in attempting to rush the boats over the bodies of the women and children), the Captain must be a superhero, a magnificent seaman, cool, brave, delighting in death and danger, and a living guarantee that the wreck was nobody’s fault, but, on the contrary, a triumph of British navigation.
Shipwrecks, Shaw argued, are actually senseless human tragedies, often the result of absurd stupidity and negligence--so why do we insist on turning them into cheesy melodramas?
