In the Italian cruise ship disaster, another death knell for the age of chivalry.


From the passengers:

Women and children were given priority in theory, but not necessarily in practice. The Australian mother said of the scene, “We just couldn’t believe it — especially the men, they were worse than the women.” Another woman passenger agreed, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboats.” Yet another, a grandmother, complained, “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.”

Not like during the Titanic disaster:

The survivor statistics tell the tale. More women from third class — deep in the bowels of the ship, where it was hard to escape

and instructions were vague or nonexistent — survived than men from first class. Almost all of the women from first class (97 percent) and second class (84 percent) made it. As Butler notes, the men from first class who were lost stayed behind voluntarily, true to their Edwardian ideals.

File under "some things never change."


Winston Churchill once said:




" There are three things I like about being on an Italian cruise ship. First, their cuisine is unsurpassed. Second, their service is superb. And then, in time of emergency, there is none of this nonsense about women and children first."