The Birkenhead Drill

Suffer little children

On 26 February 1852, the troopship HMS Birkenhead was caught in difficulty transporting British soldiers and a number of civilians off Danger Point, Gansbaai, in the Western Cape of South Africa, and eventually sank. She’d been built in 1845 and was driven by two steam engines powering paddle wheels on either side of her beam. She measured 1,400 tons burthen. For comparison, the MV Dali, which foundered against the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore recently, is calculated at 25,284 tons burthen; the Titanic liner which foundered in 1912 was 37,650 tons burthen. So, HMS Birkenhead was about 30 times smaller than Titanic. On the fateful day in question, she bore around 643 souls and, in the efforts to evacuate her, the serviceable lifeboats she carried were sufficient only to save 193 of them. Around 450 souls perished.

When the Titanic ocean liner foundered against an iceberg in 1912, she bore roughly 2,224 souls (accounts vary), of whom 724 were saved. What links the two disasters of the Birkenhead and the Titanic, which occurred at opposite ends of the Atlantic Ocean and 60 years apart, is what is now known as the Birkenhead Drill: the “rule” that, in a disaster scenario, chivalry demands that women and children be rescued first and, even if faced with inevitable death, men should stand aside and perish with pluck. The name Birkenhead Drill stems from its famed application upon the sinking of the Birkenhead.

There is in fact no such rule, not as such. The tendency in the modern era is towards saving those who are unable to save themselves, like infants in arms, clearly, the disabled, the injured, the confused. The three who died in the 1988 Habsheim Air France Flight 296Q disaster were a female passenger who re-entered the blazing wreckage to rescue a disabled boy and a small girl—none of them re-emerged. When all hope is lost (as when Napoleon’s army realised its inevitable fate at the end of the Battle of Waterloo), a cry goes out “Save your skins!” or, in French, “Sauve qui peut !” The Imperial Guard at Waterloo stood its ground and refused to surrender, for which they paid the price of summary execution.

In connection with the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise off the port of Zeebrugge in 1987, reports emerged that some passengers who had secured a post of safety turned and mocked those being consigned to the watery deep. That’s what the newspapers wrote at the time but, if some folk had saved their skins and were in any event just awaiting rescue and unable to render aid to others, what difference did it make if they found the flailing of their fellow man to be but a matter of sport for their amusement? After all, we go to the cinema to watch disaster and horror movies; these are things that entertain us, are they not? If we’re unable to help others in their plight, and we find their plight amusing, what is to hinder us from taking our amusement?

Many years ago, probably before having a double-figure age, I remember sitting watching an old movie on television with my brother. I can vaguely remember who was in it (David Tomlinson—of Mr Banks fame in Mary Poppins) and what it was about, but the name long since escaped me. At a certain juncture, my brother and I had howled in laughter at a line that was delivered in response to a very maternalistic elderly lady. The lady played the character of a holidaymaker who just happened to be the ex-nanny of one of two men confined to the attic of an alpine hotel for having caught chicken pox during their ski holiday. The nanny dons a nurse’s uniform to look after the two men, who are somewhat reluctant to submit to her matronly ministrations.

With the line that had caused such merriment back in our youths still ringing in my mind 50 years later, I decided to trace the film as best I could, and eventually located it. It is called All For Mary and it can be viewed in its unexpurgated trope-ist fullness on YouTube, for the curious:

It includes a scene in which the star, Nigel Patrick, sneaks out of his quarantine (something many of us would come to take a very dim view of in recent times) to disguise himself as a waiter and fetch some whisky and cigarettes for his confinement pleasure. A young whippersnapper of a boy spots him and the following exchange ensues:  

Boy (played by Robin Brown): “Garçon, garçon!”

Patrick: “Oui, monsieur.”

Brown: “I want an ice-cream soda.”

- “Oui, monsieur.”

“I want a raspberry one.”

- “Oui, monsieur.”

“And I want a double portion of ice-cream in it.”

- “Oui monsieur.”

“And I want it quick.”

- “You want your bottom smacked, that’s what you want.”

It’s something you could say in a film in 1955, but I’m not sure you could say it now. The boy’s two female mentors look up at the lippy waiter with regards of consternation. Quite honestly, there’s an argument that they should at least have given the boy a verbal smack on the bottom themselves, the cheek of the lad, instead of the waiter having to pass the kid a lesson on manners.

Later, at the hotel’s Saturday night fancy-dress party, the two malades véritables sneak down again, this time disguised as Arabs. Patrick conspiratorially jokes to Tomlinson: “’Allo, captain, filthy pictures?” More tropes, and this one slightly more uncomfortable, especially for me, coming as it does from a film made six years before my own grand entrance on the world stage.

However, it is the line (delivered by the suave, good-looking Nigel Patrick to the firm but kindly Kathleen Harrison) at which my brother had so heartily guffawed back in the 1960s that takes the chocolate biscuit in today’s ears.

Kathleen Harrison: “Nanny’s going down to get you a nice cup of cocoa.”

Nigel Patrick: “Well, I’m not having any of that muck.”

David Tomlinson: “No, neither am I, Nanny.”

Kathleen Harrison: “That is naughty! There’s many a starving child would be pleased to have it.”

Nigel Patrick: “Well, find one and stuff it down his throat!”

It’s delivered with perfect comic timing, with all the panache and professionalism that the great Nigel Patrick can muster. He was a stalwart of an actor, brilliant in his heroic wartime roles and dashing as a leading man. But, for its uncharitable callousness, this line simply sticks in the craw when it’s heard today, much like reports of youths mocking the drowning in a sinking ship.

They say that the Birkenhead Drill is a question of chivalry. Like jousting for the honour of a lady, like duelling with pistols at dawn. Standing aside for the gentle sex to pass first through a doorway, and, quite honestly, there is an element to this kind of gallantry that is a tad sexist. However, whether or not it is so, there is an unquestionable practical aspect to saving the women and the children before the men: the children are our future and the women are the bearers of that future. For procreation, any old man will do. The Birkenhead Drill is almost Darwinian in its logic.

If that is a logic that in any way attracts over and above considerations of gentility, then it is almost plain to see why women and children have now become such blatant targets for genocidal madness: in Ukraine, in Burma, in Palestine, in Sudan, even, yeah, even in the United States. To eradicate the Ethiopians in 1936, the Italian invaders poisoned the land with airborne spray, poisoned the wells, corrupted the very water from which life springs. Nothing in that has changed a century later: to destroy a people, it suffices to destroy where that people springs from.

If your vantage point is safe and secure, you may laugh in ribald mirth at such acts of horror. But these are not intended to entertain you. They are intended to warn you.

From All For Mary (1955). Nigel Patrick (left) assumes his Arab character in a supposed joke with David Tomlinson (right): ’Allo, captain, filthy pictures?