Age at death

Edward Higgs

Data on mortality were captured by the civil system for registering births, marriages and deaths set up in England and Wales under the provisions of the Registration Act, 1836 (6 & 7 Will. IV, c. 85) and the Registration (Suspension) Act, 1837 (6 & 7 Will. IV, c. 86). These acts established the modern system of civil registration to replace the parochial registration of baptisms, marriages and burials that had been established in the early sixteenth century. The whole of England and Wales was divided into registration districts based on the Poor Law Unions and registrars appointed to them. These local officers were to issue certificates of birth, marriage and death. They also sent copies of the certificates to the General Register Office (GRO), which created indexes of these and made them available to the public in a central site at Somerset House. A Registrar General for England and Wales was appointed to head the GRO and to supervise the local registration system (Higgs, 2004, 1–90). A similar system was set up in Scotland in 1855.

The death certificate carried the age at death, and almost from its inception, the GROs in England and Wales, and in Scotland, began publishing tables showing the number of deaths in particular age groups, including data on the death of infants, in their Annual and Decennial reports. Such data were produced on both a national and a local basis. However, tabular data were not always published in exactly the same manner each year. Thus, in the nineteenth century the conventional age groups adopted in the Annual and Decennial reports were in quinquennia such as 0–4, 5–9, 10–14, and so on. Only sometimes were ages at death broken down into single years – 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4, or even more occasionally into months under one year of age (Woods, 37). This creates difficulties for the study of infant mortality prior to the inception of much more detailed reporting on infant mortality in the Edwardian period.

When combined with data on the numbers of people in particular age groups from the decennial censuses, it was possible to work out age-specific mortality rates – mortality in the age group expressed as deaths per annum per thousand in that age group. These data could also be used to construct life tables, showing life expectancies at any age. These were useful for insurance companies wishing to set insurance premiums, and the desire to produce accurate actuarial aids lay behind much of the early history of statistical production within the English GRO (Higgs, 22–34). William Farr, the GRO's principle statistician and superintendent of statistics from 1842 to 1880, produced a number of such life tables in the Annual reports. Farr's first English Life Table appeared in the Fifth and Sixth annual report, based on national registration data for the census year 1841 (Fifth annual report of the Registrar General (1841), xii–xxxv, 161–78; Sixth annual report of the Registrar General (1842), 290–358). English Life Table Number Two appeared for each sex separately in the Twelfth and Twentieth annual reports, based on the census of 1841 and from death registration for the years 1838 to 1844. His most important life table, Number Three, using data from the censuses of 1841 and 1851, and death registration for 1838 to 1854, was published as a separate volume, entitled English life table, tables of lifetimes, annuities and premiums, in 1864 (Eyler, 66–80). Later life tables were produced by his successors.

The age specific mortality rates, and the various life tables produced by GRO, enabled it to compare the differential mortality decline between the differing age groups in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This revealed that in England and Wales the mortality rates for children of five years and over, and for young adults, began to decline in the mid-nineteenth century. However, mortality rates for infants under one year, and for the elderly over 65, did not see the start of a similar decline until about 1900 (Swerdlow, 21). As John Tatham, the GRO's superintendent of statistics, noted in the Decennial supplement for 1891 to 1900, published in 1907:

it appears that, although in the course of the last four decennia the death rate of all ages has fallen by 15 per cent., and the death-rate at ages one to five by not less than 33 per cent., nevertheless at ages under one year the death-rate in 1891–1900 has shown no reduction from the high rate recorded in 1861–70. The infant portion of the community has not shared in the common benefit (Supplement to the sixty-fifth annual report of the Registrar General, cv).

Such differentials helped to bring about an infant welfare movement, and the establishment of old age pensions, in the Edwardian period.

The recognition that differing age groups had differing mortality rates, also led to the introduction of methods for 'correcting' general death rates. If the elderly had higher death rates, then an area with lots of elderly people would have a higher general death rate than one with a younger population, although it was no more unhealthy. The development of methods for making such corrections began under William Ogle, the GRO's Superintendent of Statistics from 1880 to 1893, and continued under his successor, John Tatham (Mooney, 1997, 60–1; Ogle, 1892; Sixty-fifth annual report of the Registrar General, xxxiii–iv).

REFERENCES

John M. Eyler, Victorian Social Medicine. The Ideas and Methods of William Farr (London, 1979).

Fifth annual report of the Registrar General (1841) BPP 1843 XXI. (516) [View this document: Fifth annual report of the registrar-general]

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.

Sixth annual report of the Registrar General (1842), BPP 1844 XIX (540). [View this document: Sixth annual report of the registrar-general]

Sixty-fifth annual report of the Registrar General (1902), BPP 1904 XIV (Cd.2003). [View this document: Sixty-fifth annual report of the registrar-general ]

Supplement to the Registrar General's sixty-fifth annual report [Part II], BPP 1905 XVIII (Cd.2619). [View this document: Decennial supplement to registrar-general's sixty-fifth annual report [Part II]]

A. J. Swerlow, '150 years of Registrar General's medical statistics', Population Trends, 48 (Summer 1987), 20–6.

Robert Woods, The demography of Victorian England and Wales (Cambridge, 2000).