COUNTING THE PEOPLE CENSUS GIVES PICTURE OF WHOLE COMMUNITY

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26397, 16 April 1951, Page 6

COUNTING THE PEOPLE CENSUS GIVES PICTURE OF WHOLE COMMUNITY

(From an articla bv a special correspondent of "Ths Tims*.") (Reprinted bv Arrangement.)

Though they are commonly confused, the purposes of a census and those of an official registration are entirely different A census, whether of paupers, persons, production, or distribution, is a statistical inquiry. It asks personal questions, but its interest in the answer is impersonal. It does not seek—indeed, is strictly forbidden to seek — to put a label on any particular person, or to pass on inforrtiation about him to any authority for use in its dealings with him. The census gives the community an accurate picture of its own anatomy, indicating now many persons possess certain common attributes, but not which particular individuals possess them. The purpose of registration, on the other hana, is precisely the docketing of individuals, whether they be insured persons, consumers of sugar, ratepayers, owners of land or cars, sufferers from tuberculosis or blindness, children of school age, poultry farmers or timber merchants, guardians of minors or lawfully wedded wives. Registration, whether of persons, possessions, or personal events such as marriage, is a means of identifying particular individuals whose status, rights, or obligations have to be recorded for some public purpose.

Age-long Suspicion In all ages the citizen has been suspicious of registration. When parish ministers were first required, in 1538, to keep registers of all christenings, weddings, and burials at which they officiated, Sir Piers Edgecumbe wrote to Thomas Cromwell from the west country’ that “ther mystrust ys that somme charges, more than has byn in tymys past, shall growe to theyme by tois occacyon of regesstrynge of thes thyngges.” Perhaps for some such reason, Queen Elizabeth in 1590 turned down Lord Treasurer Burghley’s plan for the compilation of national vital statistics. He wanted to set up a central office to collect a yearly return from all parish registers, “whereby it should appear how many christenings, weddings, and burials were every year within England and Wales, and every county particularly by itself, and how many menchildren and women-children were born in all of them, severally set down bv themselves.” Burghley’s aim was not finally achieved until 1837 in England and Wales and 1855 in Scotland. The passions stirred up by registration were evoked likewise by any attempt at numbering the people; for until the nineteenth century, administrators were almost as prone as the public to confuse the counting of heads with the registering of taxable purses. There is a curiously modern note in the chronicler’s statement that at Gloucester, at Christmas, 1085, King William “held very deep speech with his council about this land—how it was peopled, and with what sort of men.” But the Domesday survey which followed was primarily an investigation of the resources (including men) of the King’s tenants in chief, an assessment of their taxable capacity, and a review of their legal titles to tenure. The compilation made at Winchester from the returns of the royal commissioners was hardly a census report, but rather a “geld book” —a classified directory of landholdings and a rudimentary valuation list. Small wonder that the chronicler should complain that, “so narrowly did he cause the survey to be made, that there was not one single hide nor rood of land, nor _it is shameful to tell, but he thought it no shame to do—was there an ox, cow, or swine that was not set down in the writ." This descriptio totius Angliae was an event unique in medieval Europe. Nothing like it was done again in England for over seven centuries. But from the time of the Tudors, King William’s question—how was England peopled, and with what sort of men?— grew gradually into a major topic of public debate. The “bills of mortality and other material derived from parish registers were used to compute changes of population in particular places.

Ingenious Estimates Ingenious national estimate* of the size of different social classes and the distribution of wealth among them were deduced from tax returns and similar sources—for instance, Gregory King’s famous calculations in 1695, based on records of the hearth tax. But the spread of dissent, added to the absence of a central register office, impaired the usefulness of the Church s local registers of baptisms and burials as guides to total numbers of births and deaths. Right up to the first census of 1801 no one knew whether the population was growing or dwindling. In 1753 the Commons actually passed a bill to institute a census based on a count of parish registers, as had recently been done in Sweden. The

Lords threw out the measuz, , „ ing the tone set in the LowLyS by the members who "feared u., o '* great public misfortune or an cal distemper should follow bering,” and who demanded end then should our number k- u except that we are to be the fleet and the army, or l4l fel u n . S t 0 the planta And what purpose will jt know where the kingdom* and where it is thin, except be driven from place to place u lers do their cattle? If this hT •F*’ ded, let them brand us at on«.' Wet Fifty years later all opposite. . collapsed. On top of the med 5? economic revolutions, the disloMtii 44 the French wars, the raging J about pauperism, came the Su’ challenge of Malthus’s “Essav c® 4 lation.” Following the T 4 of Alexander Webster in 1755 Sir Sinclair had iust issued his Account of Scotland.” a monuS economic, social, and demogranhir . vey compiled with the help of ovL'2 parish clergymen, which imprest,! demonstrated the possibilities of u? finding on the grand scale “wT, asked Charles Abbot, M.P for w»ir in November, 1800, ‘‘should thia n and powerful country choose torX S in ignorance of its most cerns when, by an instantaneom iS sure, it can at once dissipate doubt?” Without more ado Part ment passed his "act for taVfa", count of the population of Great ain and the increase and dimitiS thereof.” : It was not, however until 1841 th the census assumed its modern l tures—a count held simultaneous everywhere, the householder’s duh, fill in the schedule, and the uae i census-taking of the central and to machinery tor civil registration. | the absence of this machinery adw ules for the first four censuses sent, not to householders, but throw the justices of the peace, or, in defsj to some “substantial householder" i each parish. They, reinfoseed churchwardens, vestry clerks Uthi» men, constables, and other worth* interviewed people in their toa* noted their answers, and sent suma® returns to the Home Secretary, n clergy also sent in returns ha^. their parish registers. Rickman and Farr All these documents were bv* over to the versatile and scholarly Ja Rickman, who compiled the tables a reports. Having helped Abbot in h campaign for the census, he «pc most of his life (but not most of h time) as a clerk to the House of C®. mons, and eventually became a Mi of the Royal Society. The pretiifo genius of the early censuses, andaj aware of their deficiencies, he sees also to have been the main lita’fw of the improved system inauttna in 1841 (in Scotland. 1861). It was Dr. Farr, the first and pete S'eatest medical statistician of ft eneral Register Office, who shra how to extract the greatest value in the organisation constructed by Bid man. From the current vital statfei yielded by the local registrars* return combined with the comprehensive* terial of the decennial censuses, Ife laid the foundations of a system analysis of mortality (and so indirect! of health), and to a lesser degree < fertility, which to-day has few $1 in the world. Less happily inspired were the a tempts, repeated by Parliament 1 every census from 1851 to 1911, tawi of the mounting protests of the iteti ticians, to get householders to i«n any family members who were Win deaf, or dumb, or (from 1871 onwud lunatics, imbeciles, or idiots. Sew censuses (including the present) to inquired about education, but dgte! 1851 was an inquiry made into wb; ion—by inviting voluntary refer from clergymen of the size of th congregations on census day. Piibi concern about the birth-rate wairete ted in the questions asked about bB lies in the 1911 census, and again i 1946, when the Royal Commission population held its voluntary saoft family census. Questions about people’s work ton always been asked, but it is only to ing the present century that a dete mined effort has been made to clato people precisely according to the w« they do, the industries or service I which they do it, and the places wtel they work. Precise definition of tn different kinds of work has in M been the most intractable of csM problems, though it is now new* solution. The most neglected probls has been the study of the grouping: people into families and houseHi and the relation of such groupings! the housing situation.