Content associated with: The early development of the General Register Office   

Sir Bernard Mallet (1859–1932)

Edward Higgs

Sir Bernard Mallet was Registrar General, the head of the General Register Office (GRO), in the years 1909 to 1920. His career in the GRO saw one of the institutions most interesting and fruitful periods of administrative and intellectual development.

Mallet was born in September 1859. He came from a notable Huguenot family and his great-grandfather was the writer, Mallet du Pan, whom the French Revolution drove into exile in England in 1800. Mallet's grandfather, J. L. Mallet (Mallet do Pan's son), who was in the Audit Office, was a friend of Ricardo. His father, Sir Louis Mallet, was Permanent Under-Secretary of State for India. Mallet was thus steeped in political economy, and the atmosphere of official life. After Oxford, where he read Modern History, he joined the Civil Service himself. He entered the Foreign Office in 1882 and was transferred to the Treasury in 1885. From 1886 to 1891 he was private secretary to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, and then an assistant private secretary to the First Lord, the future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. In 1897 he was made a commissioner of Inland Revenue. In that post his most useful work was to frame a 'multiplier', which was designed to bring out the approximate total wealth of the country when applied to the yield of estate duty for the year (The Times).

The late nineteenth century had seen the Office hamstrung by funding restrictions, stagnant staff numbers, and poor management. However, in the new century bolder Registrar General's, Sir Reginald McLeod (1900–02) and Sir William Cospatrick Dunbar (1902–09), had expanded the staffing of the GRO and the scale of its publications. Mallet continued this expansion, and the practice of replacing expensive male clerks with boy clerks and women typists (Higgs, 2004, 129–55). Mallet became Registrar General in the same year as T. H. C. Stevenson became Superintendent of Statistics, and the two men struck up a close working relationship. Mallet and Stevenson conceived the idea of introducing a question on marital fertility into the 1911 census in order to test claims by the eugenicists that the 'lowest' social classes were out-breeding the middle classes. This process was seen by the eugenicists as leading to a decline in the 'quality' of the racial stock at a time of imperial crisis. The fertility survey did indeed show that marital fertility was higher the further 'down' one went in the social scale (Census of England and Wales, 1911, Vol. XII. Fertility of marriage ), although the coherence of the classification system used to analyse the data has recently been called into question (Szreter, 1996). It has been argued that this survey represented an environmentalist counter-attack on eugenicist claims that public health provision was a waste of resources, since mortality was genetically determined (Szreter, 1996). However, it has also been noted that Mallet was himself influenced by eugenic ideas, and the GRO's opposition to eugenics may, therefore, have been somewhat overdrawn (Higgs, 2004, 129–55). In 1913 Mallet published an analysis of British Budgets in the fiscal years 1887–88 to 1912–13, which revealed a concern with the distribution of wealth between social classes (Mallet, 1913).

In order to analyse the more complex data in the 1911 returns, Mallet and Stevenson overcame the reluctance of their colleagues in the GRO, and Mallet persuaded the Treasury to purchase machine tabulators to process the census schedules. Information could now be collected once as a database but processed in any number of differing ways. This allowed Stevenson to produce much more complex tables in his contributions to the ARRGs published between 1911 and 1913. Machine tabulation was to have far-reaching effects on the capabilities and structure of the GRO (Higgs, 1996; Higgs, 2004, 156–78).

Mallet and Stevenson's activities were subsequently hindered by the First World War and its aftermath. Staff resources were stretched by clerks leaving for the Front, and by the GRO's responsibility for wartime emergency measures such as national registration and rationing. His important contributions to state statistics were recognized in these years by his elevation to the presidency of the Royal Statistical Society in the years 1916 to 1918. In 1919 the GRO was absorbed into the Ministry of Health, which had a very different understanding of the future role of the GRO to that of either Mallet or Stevenson. The Ministry wished to convert the Office into a statistical appendage of its policy units, and to remove its independence. At the end of 1919 Sylvanus Vivian was appointed as 'deputy' Registrar General as the Ministry's agent in the GRO, and he rapidly took over the running of the Office. Mallet was left in an impossible position and resigned in 1920 (Higgs, 2004, 188–93).

Mallet had been interested in eugenics from his time at the GRO, and joined the council of the Eugenics Society whilst still Registrar General. On retirement from the GRO he quickly published a number of eugenic articles, including 'Is England in danger of racial decline?', and 'Registration in relation to eugenics' (Mallet, 1922a; Mallet, 1922b). He became life president of the Eugenics Society in 1928, and a member of the International Congress of Eugenical Organizations (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 150–1). He died in October 1932.

REFERENCES

Census of England and Wales, 1911, Vol. XII. Fertility of marriage. Part II (London: HMSO, 1923). [View this document: Fertility of marriage (part II), 1911]

Edward Higgs, 'The statistical Big Bang of 1911: ideology, technological innovation and the production of medical statistics', Social History of Medicine, 9 (1996), 409–26.

Edward Higgs, Life, death and statistics: civil registration, censuses and the work of the General Register Office, 1837–1952 (Hatfield, 2004).

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 96 (1933), 148–51.

Bernard Mallet, British Budgets: 1887–88 to 1912–13 (London, 1913).

Bernard Mallet, 'Is England in danger of racial decline?', National Review (Feb. 1922), 843–53.

Bernard Mallet, 'Registration in relation to eugenics', Eugenics Review, 14 (1922), 23–30.

Simon Szreter, Fertility, class and gender in Britain 1860–1940 (Cambridge, 1996).

The Times > 29 October 1932, 12.