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Census of fertility, 1911

Edward Higgs

The decennial censuses undertaken by the General Register Office (GRO) from 1841 to 1901 were all de facto censuses. That is, householders were asked to put down on their census schedule personal details of those present in their households on census night. But in 1911 more wide-ranging questions were asked in England and Wales. The householder was instructed to state 'for each married woman entered on this schedule':

'the completed years the present marriage has lasted';

the 'children born alive to present marriage'.

To answer the latter query there were three columns to be filled in, headed 'Total children born alive', 'Children still living', and 'Children who have died'(Census of England and Wales, 1911. General report with appendices, 257–8). Information was required, therefore, on the reproductive history of women, and on children who might not be present in the census household, or even alive. These questions were not asked in the 1911 censuses in Ireland and Scotland.

Various reasons have been put forward for this departure from the conventions underpinning 60 years of census-taking. Szreter has argued in a number of important works (especially Szreter, 1996) that the 1911 fertility survey represented a counter-attack by public health environmentalists on the ideas of the eugenics movement. Eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Karl Pearson argued that social structure reflected the genetic endowments of the members of the population. The Eugenics Society argued that the poor were poor and sickly because they had bad genes, and that public health provision would merely keep alive poor physical specimens who would breed more poor and sickly people. This was especially serious because the poorer levels of society were seen to be out-breeding the 'more intelligent' middle classes (Mazumdar). Szreter argues that the GRO had a long-standing commitment to environmentalist theories of disease causation, and the sanitary reform that it encouraged, which these eugenic arguments seemed to undermine. The 1911 fertility survey is seen as growing out of the desire of the GRO's superintendent of statistics, T.H.C. Stevenson, to test eugenic assumptions about class fertility rates (Szreter, 1996, 238–82).

Higgs also places the origins of the 1911 fertility survey in the context of the debates between public health environmentalists and eugenicists but sees this debate as also within the GRO. He points to the interest that the Registrar General in the years 1909 to 1920, Sir Bernard Mallet, had in eugenics – an interest that eventually led him to join the committee of the Eugenics Society whilst still Registrar General, and to become its president after he had retired from the GRO. Mallet's support for Stevenson's work can be seen, therefore, in terms of a eugenic impulse from within the GRO itself. Certainly, the eventual reports on the 1911 fertility survey did indeed show the lower social classes having higher fertility than the middle classes (Higgs, 2004, 129–55). Szreter and Higgs have debated this issue in a recent number of Local Population Studies (Szreter, 2005; Higgs, 2005).

Whatever the reasons for the taking of the 1911 fertility census, the subsequent analysis of the data derived from it had extremely important implications for the work of the GRO, and for the social sciences in general. As Szreter has argued, in order to analyse the fertility of social classes Stevenson developed a social economic classification that placed households into 'socio-economic groupings' on the basis of the occupation of the male household head (Szreter, 1996, 238–82). There were five main groupings in this classification:

Occupations were apportioned to these classes on the basis of the 'skill' involved in occupations, using specially constructed occupational dictionaries, but there appear to be all sorts of problems with the classification (Szreter, 1996, 283–309). Despite these problems Stevenson's classification became the basis of much subsequent work by sociologists and historians (Szreter, 1996, 271–9; Mills and Schürer, 150–9).

At the same time, the increasing complexity of census data in 1911, and of the forms of analysis applied to them, led to the adoption of machine tabulation for the abstraction of data from the census returns. Mechanical means of processing census data had been invented by the American Herman Hollerith over 20 years before for their use in the 1890 census of the United States of America. Hollerith patented two machines, one that punched holes at predetermined positions in cards of eighty columns, each hole standing for a numerical value. In this manner information could be stored on cards in a quantitative form. Hollerith's other machine, which read these cards, had what was known as a 'pin-box' containing spring-loaded needles, one for each possible hole in a card. This allowed the machines to count the value or occurrence of a variable, or the co-incidence of two or more, at great speed (Higgs, 1996; Higgs, 2004, 156–69).

As Sir Bernard Mallet explained to the Royal Statistical Society in 1916:

Once the labour of preparing the cards required for the routine tabulation as previously carried out has been accomplished, it becomes a very simple matter to obtain records of additional combinations of the facts recorded, whereas under the system previously employed each additional tabulation had to be undertaken independently, the record of one combination of facts not contributing in any way to the preparation of that of another (Mallet, 1917, 8).

The range and complexity of questions to be asked of survey data could thus be greatly increased. This represented, of course, the invention of the modern database.

The new technology was first applied to analysing the 1911 fertility data, and then to medical data published in the Annual Report of the Registrar General (Higgs, 2004, 170–5). An additional innovation consequent upon the adoption of this technology was that data analysis was now done directly from the householders' schedules, and census enumerators no long copied the data they contained into enumerators' books.

The publication of the Reports relating to the 1911 fertility survey was much delayed. The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 hit the GRO hard. Many of its staff left for the Front, and it also took on new duties, such as providing evidence of marriage and paternity for the payment of allowances to the dependents of soldiers and sailors. It was also responsible for the organization of National Registration, which was the basis of conscription and rationing (Higgs, 2004, 186–8). The appearance of many of the volumes of the 1911 census was delayed as a result. The 1917–18 parliamentary session saw the publication of a General Report, with an updated series of summary tables, and of tables summarizing data from the fertility of marriage survey (Census of England and Wales, 1911. Vol. XIII. Fertility of marriage. Part I). But it was not until 1923, two years after the first results of the 1921 census had been published, that the final discursive report on the 1911 fertility of marriage survey was published. This was the first report giving results from the census that was not a Parliamentary Paper, a pattern followed in subsequent years (Census of England and Wales, 1911. Vol. XII. Fertility of marriage. Part II).

REFERENCES

Census of England and Wales, 1911, General report with appendices BPP 1917–18 XXXV. [View this document: General report, England and Wales, 1911]

Census of England and Wales, 1911, Vol. XIII. Fertility of marriage. Part I. BPP 1917–18 XXXV. [View this document: Fertility of marriage (part I), 1911]

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).

Edward Higgs, 'Life, death and statistics: a reply to Simon Szreter', Local Population Studies, 75 (2005), 81–4.

Bernard Mallet, 'The organisation of registration in its bearings on vital statistics', Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, LXXX (January, 1917),1–24.

Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, human genetics and human failings. The Eugenics Society, its sources and its critics in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992).

Dennis Mills and Kevin Schürer, eds, Local communities in the Victorian census enumerators' books (Oxford, 1996).

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

Simon Szreter, 'Review by Simon Szreter of Edward Higgs, Life, death and statistics...', Local Population Studies, 75 (2005), 75–81.