The Children

Speaking in Parliament on the 12th of January, Colonel Henry Croft (MP for Christchurch) with relation to the Military Service (No.2) Bill commented: "One has only to think of what happened the other day in the sinking of the steamer "Persia." There was that great liner sailing through the ocean, and I have been told by someone who was on the ship that every day there were scores of little children playing on the decks of the ship. Suddenly, in a moment, the ship goes down. Those children are plunged into the water, gasping, and their lives are ended".

He was of course referring to the significant toll in lost lives of children on the SS Persia. Almost all the children on board drowned in the sinking. It was interesting to note that the attack occurred at lunchtime, which was similar to what happened with the Lusitania. In an age of children being "out of sight, out of mind" most would have been in a nursery away from the passenger dining rooms when the attack happened. The sinking was so swift that the parents would not have been able to get to them.

It was a common practice also for families in India to send expectant mothers back to England to give birth and then when the child was a few months old they would return to India. For this reason there were a number of unaccompanied mothers with infants on board. It does not seem that any of the babies aboard survived.

There were also several "ayahs" (the Indian term for a nursemaid) on board and most of them did not survive either.

There were at least 18 children on board by my calculation, of which only two survived: