Glenn Michael Morley

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Titanic Casualty Data Table I was skimming through some Titanic websites the other day and came across a Passenger Casualty List which showed the surname - forename - age - sex and class of the victims - as is well-known now the majority of casualties were from 3rd class passengers ( 536 or 64.4% deaths ) as the 2nd ( 173 or 20.8% deaths ) and predominantly the 1st class ( 123 or 14.8% deaths ) received preference for the far too few lifeboats - however - as a historian when you see a long list of names such as this - it is sort of meaningless or lifeless and seems to have more within it to tell - the statistician in you wants to analyse it to see what else can be said - surprisingly when you do this you learn far more about the composition of those who died than just a simple figure of 832 passengers and 685 crew members who were not included in the Passenger List - Titanic legend has it that the first and in most cases the last to board the lifeboats were women and children - it is presumed that most of the deaths on board were therefore male - what does the Passenger Casualty List suggest when we analyse it for the age and sex demographics - the Data Table shows the breakdown - of the casualties a staggering 199/832 or 24.005% were under the age of 20 - of these 40 or 4.825% were under the age of 9 - almost all were 3rd class with some 1st and 2nd class passenger exceptions - another thing to notice is that the sex of the children was nearly equal - 45% F and 55% M - the youngest was 4 months - the sex split however rapidly changes as the age increases - for the 10-20 year olds we see a 22% F to 78% M - the majority who perished 559/832 or 67% were between the ages of 21 to 50 - the split for ages 21 to 30 was 14.6% F and 85.3% M - for 31 to 50 years of age we see near identical 15:85% split - the number of elderly passengers > 50 who perished was comparatively low - 71/832 or 9.9% - the split was 9.9% F to 90.1% M - given that so few 3rd class passengers survived - it bares record that there were simply fewer Female 3rd class passengers than male to begin with who were immigrating to America to start a new life - the fact remains - a far too high percentage of the deaths on Titanic were children or youth - what else can be stated is that these deaths were not unrelated - often as was the norm in the early part of the 20th c. families were large compared to today's small families - hidden in this dreary List that most likely most often receives only a cursory glance from the website visitors is the fact that the entire (11) member Sage family perished - so too the (9) member Andersson family - the (8) member Goodwin family as well as all (6) members of the Rice - Scoog - Ford and Panula families - wiped out and completely lost to history - by studying the names of the List you can see several other grouping - often mothers were travelling alone with their children - young couples - brothers or cousins can be seen paired together - it is a common practice in history texts to only list numbers in tragic events such as this or The Great War - but these cold digits tend to have no associated faces or lives attached to them - ironically it is my use of those very same numbers that has extracted from it those very lives that are glossed over - that are lost to history - the aftermath of the Titanic is in some ways far more intriguing than the event itself which highlights and captures so well the face of modernity for us and which is why I think this epic tragedy will last much as the Greek tragedies have done so - the real-life tragedy of the Titanic will still be told a millennium from now - it will survive far longer than the (4) short days the ship did ... it contains ALL of the elements of a modern day Greek Tragedy - there were (2) passengers - most likely brothers named Henry and William Morley - as far as I know unrelated or nonetheless very distant relations to myself - included also amongst those Passengers who perished were: (1) Captain - (1) Major - (3) Colonels - (2) Reverends - (5) Fathers - (1) Don (Spain) and (4) medical Doctors - one of these a Canadian born in Hamilton having studied at my alma mater - University of Toronto ( class of 1906 ) - a certain Dr. Alfred Pain as if a worse surname for a Doctor could ever be given !