In answer to some of the questions posed here, I'm providing a cut & paste from a posting I made in an earlier thread several years ago. Hopefully it will still be of interest:
In most countries today the age of majority, at which people assume full adult control and responsibility for every aspect of their own lives, is 18. In 1912 it was generally 21. I can't speak of the situation in every country, but that was the case in England and Wales. It was the age at which a man could vote, for instance, and a couple could marry without their parents' consent. Anybody under the age of 21 was regarded in law not necessarily as a child but always as a 'minor'. Within that period of life, the 'age of license' was variable for different activities and situations. The British Board of Trade regarded all aged 12 and above as adults. They are so designated on passenger lists, and all were charged adult fares.
All were obliged to attend school until the age of 12, could not enter licensed premises before the age of 14, and could not buy tobacco before the age of 16. The age of consent for sex outside the bounds of marriage was 16. The age of consent for marriage without need for parental approval was 21, but a 12 year old girl and a 14 year old boy could be legally married with their parent's consent. Most people, however, would have regarded a girl as unready for motherhood before the age of 15 or 16.
Minors up to the age of 15 were referred to in Law as 'children and young people', for whom the Law provided special protection from exploitation. The age at which a child became, in the eyes of society, a 'young person' (roughly equivalent to the later concept of the 'teenager') was open to interpretation, but it was generally 12 or 13, the point at which they left school and entered the adult world of working for a living. In employment records of the time, male employees up to the age of 15 were listed as boys, those 16 and over as men. Certainly a boy generally regarded himself as a man at the age of 16, at which point he was still a minor but no longer regarded as a vulnerable 'young person', so most legal restrictions on his bevaviour had been lifted.
So, on the boat deck of the Titanic, there were three age groupings - those who were adult by any definition; the children under 12; and those who were minors in the eyes of the law but no longer children. Among the male passengers, it's that last group, or rather the lower end of it (the 'young people' aged 12-15), who are often now considered to have been harshly treated on the boat deck. But in 1912 the boats were being loaded by men who had begun their own working lives at sea at the age of 12 or 13 and had no reason to grant much leeway to others who had the look of being at least as old as that, like the 13 year old Ryerson boy. So the steward (not Lightoller) who wanted to exclude him was acting in a way that most would have expected. It was, however, a matter of personal judgement in each case. Winnie Coutts had trouble persuading the crew to allow her 9-year old son into a boat, but Frank Goldsmith told how an officer seemed willing to allow Alfred Rush (just turned 16) through to the boat deck. It was Alfred himself who was determined to stay behind because he considered himself to be a man.
