Supplements to the Registrar General's Reports

Edward Higgs

When the General Register Office (GRO) was set up in 1837 to administer the system of civil registration established by the 1836 Registration Act, there was little indication that it was authorised to undertake an extensive publications programme. The 1836 Act merely indicated that 'the Registrar General shall send once in every year to one of the principal secretaries of state a general abstract of the numbers of births, deaths and marriages registered during the foregoing year in such form as the said secretary from time to time shall require...' (6 & 7 Will. 4, c.6). But given the scientific interests of William Farr, the GRO's Superintendent of Statistics, and the demands of parliamentarians, doctors and sanitary reformers for medical and demographic statistics, the Office's annual reports (ARRG) blossomed into treatise on various epidemiological and demographic subjects (Higgs, 2004, 45–89).

The annual format of the ARRG was not, however, very useful for showing long-term trends, or broad patterns, and in 1865 the GRO published a 'Supplement' to the 25th ARRG. This took the form of a report written by Farr, entitled a 'Letter to the Registrar General on the mortality in the registration districts of England during the 10 years 1851–1860'. Farr justified this exercise in terms of the need for comparability: 'The determination of the law of mortality requires an extensive area of observation, both in space and time, to eliminate accidental perturbations. And the causes affecting the life of children, of adults, and of old people, — of males and females, — of person in different occupations, are so various that we can only hope to unravel their influence by a general analysis of the phenomena in different places through a series of years' (Supplement to the Registrar General's Twenty-fifth annual report, iii). However, this raises the question of why it had taken the GRO over a quarter of a century to come to this conclusion. In fact, the idea for the introduction of such an longitudinal analysis appears to have come from Sir John Simon, the Privy Council's Medical Officer, who was pressing the GRO to expand it's medical output in these years (Fourth Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, 500–1; Higgs, 2004, 81–4).

The first Letter was a comparatively modest, and somewhat terse, document of 33 pages, although it was supplemented by over 600 pages of tables. Much of the Supplement related to examining the causes of deaths in various age groups, as well as the relationship between mortality and population density. There was also a brief discussion of occupational mortality, that revealed that the highest rates of occupational mortality were to be found amongst innkeepers, no doubt due to their consumption of alcohol (Supplement to the Registrar General's Twenty-fifth Annual Report, xxxv–xxxvi). Ten years later Farr produced another Supplement (Supplement to the Registrar General's Thirty-fifth annual report), covering the years 1861 to 1870. This was a rather more substantial document, containing 74 pages of text and 692 pages of tables. The text was also rather more florid and exhortatory, and this leads one to wonder if the first Supplement had not been produced under some duress. Farr now allowed himself to discuss highly abstract concepts, such as 'the principal of population', 'the law of mortality', 'hygienic topography', and the 'march of an English generation through life'.

After his retirement, Farr was replaced as Superintendent of Statistics by William Ogle. Ogle was another medical man and he also used his only decennial Supplement to look at mortality in the years 1871 to 1880. His approach was, however, rather more technical than Farr's, and showed a greater willingness to tackle some of the problems in the GRO's statistical series. Thus, he stressed the importance of being able to look at local mortality after the taking of two censuses, when the start and end populations were thus known. This avoided the problems of estimating local population sizes in inter-censal years, a practice that might lead to misleading mortality rates being calculated (Supplement to the Registrar General's Forty-fifth Annual Report, iii). He also produced a new English Life Table, and started to explore the effects that differences in age and sex distributions in differing populations would have on general death rates. This led eventually to the development of techniques for 'correcting' such distorting effects (Mooney, 1997, 60–1; Ogle, 1892). Ogle also looked at occupational diseases, and the impact of foul air, dust, alcohol and lead poisoning on health.

Ogle retired in 1893, and the next two Supplements, covering 1881 to 1890 and 1891 to 1900, were produced by his successor, Dr John Tatham. Tatham split each Supplement into two volumes. The first volume covered mortality from various diseases, and the second covered occupational mortality and the impact of foul air, dust, alcohol and lead poisoning. These volumes saw some technical innovations, such as the use of graphs. The Supplement for 1890 to 1900 also gave greater emphasis to infant mortality, in line with the current concerns over the failure of very young children to share in the mortality decline of the late Victorian period (Higgs, 2004, 134–8).

Tatham was replaced by T. H. C. Stevenson in 1909, and by the time the latter came to produce Supplements looking at mortality over the period 1901 to 1910, the First World War had intervened. The disruption caused by the latter, and the increased workload involved in the expanded census of 1911, may explain the somewhat episodic nature of supplementary volumes subsequently produced. A volume of life tables appeared in 1914. A volume of registration summary tables for 1901 to 1910 was published in the middle of the War. But it was not until 1920 that a series of abridged life tables appeared as a Supplement, followed in 1923 by a volume looking at the "mortality of men in certain occupations in the three years 1910, 1911 and 1912". These were all described as a Supplement to the Registrar General's Seventy-fifth Annual Report. However, in 1920 Stevenson also produced a somewhat anomalous Supplement to the Registrar General's Eighty-first annual report, which was an examination of the mortality in England in 1918 and 1919 from the great influenza pandemic of those years.

In 1920 the GRO ceased to produce the ARRG, the series being replaced by a new Registrar General's Statistical Review. However, Decennial Supplements, in one form or another, continue to be produced by the GRO's successors to this day.

REFERENCES

Fourth Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, BPP 1862 XXII.

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

Graham Mooney, 'Professionalization in public health and the measurement of sanitary progress in nineteenth-century England and Wales', Social History of Medicine, 10 (1997), 53–78.

William Ogle, 'Proposal for the establishment and international use of a standard population, with fixed sex and age distribution, in the calculation and comparison of marriage, birth and death rates', Bulletin de l'Institute International de Statistique VI (1892), 83–5.

Supplement to the Registrar General's Twenty-fifth Annual Report, BPP 1865 XIII (3542). [View this document: Supplement to registrar-general's twenty-fifth annual report]

Supplement to the Registrar General's Thirty-fifth Annual Report, BPP 1875 XVIII Pt.II (C.1155-I). [View this document: Supplement to registrar-general's thirty-fifth annual report]

Supplement to the Registrar General's Forty-fifth Annual Report, BPP 1884–85 XVII (C.4564). [View this document: Supplement to registrar-general's forty-fifth annual report]