Thomas Stevenson (1870–1932)

Edward Higgs

Thomas Henry Craig Stevenson was the last Superintendent of Statistics in the General Register Office in London (GRO) in a line stretching back to William Farr in the early nineteenth century. His career reflects both the revival of the GRO's fortunes in the early twentieth century, and its frustration in the inter-war period.

Stevenson was born on 24 November 1870 in Strabane, co. Tyrone, the son of an iron founder. He received a medical education at University College, London, and set up in medical practice. Stevenson continued his studies whilst in general practice, obtaining a MD in State Medicine at London University in 1902, and taking the Cambridge Diploma in Public Health the next year. His examiner was the medical statistician Arthur Newsholme, the medical officer of health for Brighton, and Stevenson subsequently became his assistant. Stevenson next became deputy county medical officer of Essex, then a member of the schools medical service of the London County Council, and then school medical officer of Somerset County Council. In 1909 he succeeded Dr John Tatham as Superintendent of Statistics at the GRO, the same year that Newsholme became the chief medical officer of the Local Government Board. The latter was the GRO's parent department in Whitehall (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

Stevenson was fortunate in joining the GRO at an expansive period in its history. The late nineteenth century has 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 (Higgs, 2004, 129–55). Stevenson became Superintendent of Statistics in the same year as Sir Bernard Mallet became Registrar general, and the two men struck up a close working relationship. Stevenson was thus closely allied with key figures in the medical statistics community.

Stevenson and Mallet 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. Stevenson developed a system of 'socio-economic groupings' to place families in social strata by occupation, and this was used to examine the fertility data. This 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 this classification system 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 order to analyse the more complex data in the 1911 returns, Mallet and Stevenson overcame the reluctance of their colleagues in the GRO and 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 — the publication of mortality data by sanitary rather than registration districts; the consistent return of deaths in hospitals to place of usual residence for the purposes of tabulation; greater detail respecting the cause of death in relation to age and sex for aggregates of large towns, smaller towns, and rural areas, which had hitherto only been given for the country as a whole and for London; new tables giving a double classification of mortality by primary and secondary causes; and the introduction of data on mortality according to place of death - private house, hospital, workhouse, and so on. Stevenson also abandoned the GRO's own internal disease classification and introduced the abstraction of deaths according to the International List of Causes of Death (Higgs, 1996; Higgs, 2004, 156(1844–1924)78).

Stevenson's activities were subsequently hindered by the First World War and its aftermath. Lack of staff, and the imposition of emergency responsibilities on the GRO, meant that the publication of Stevenson's pioneering work on fertility was not completed until 1923 (Census of England and Wales, 1911. Vol. XII. Fertility of marriage). In 1919 the GRO was absorbed into the Ministry of Health, and Mallet was forced to resign. Stevenson ceased to be Superintendent of Statistics, and became merely one of the GRO's 'professional officers'. He appears to have been regarded with suspicion within the new GRO as a member of the old guard, and was seen as a 'thoroughly discontented officer'. It is perhaps significant that Stevenson made comparatively little use of his system of socio-economic groups in his work in the 1920s, which would have been politically difficult given the Ministry's policies at this time (Higgs, 2004, 188(1844–1924)201).

Stevenson continued to publish important work on subjects such as the aetiology of cancer and neonatal mortality (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). However, by the time of his retirement through ill health in 1931 (he died in September 1932 from cancer of the stomach), Stevenson's form of statistical analysis was seen as somewhat out of date. The leading edge of medical statistics now lay with the sort of multivariate analysis pioneered by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, rather than the aggregation of data in classification systems used by Stevenson. The leadership in statistical medicine had now been taken up by the Statistical Unit of the Medical Research Council (Higgs, 2000; Higgs, 2004, 202(1844–1924)8).

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, 'Medical statistics, patronage and the state: the development of the MRC Statistical Unit, 1911–1948', Medical History, 44 (2000), 323–340.

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

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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