The Official History of Britain

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

Text © Crown Copyright 2020

Illustrations by Liane Payne © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

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Cover illustration © Neil Gower

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Source ISBN: 9780008412197

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008412203

Version: 2020-09-23

CONTENTS

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Contents

5  Note to Readers

6  Foreword by Professor Sir Ian Diamond, UK National Statistician

7  Introduction

8  Part One – Who We Are

9  Part Two – What We Do

10  Part Three – Where We Live

11  Part Four – 1921: A Census of Enlightenment

12  Part Five – 2121: Back to the Future?

13  Conclusion

14  Sources

15  Resources and Further Reading

16  Acknowledgements

17  Index

18  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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FOREWORD

by Professor Sir Ian Diamond, UK National Statistician

The great scientist Lord Kelvin once said that ‘if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it’. Britain has a long tradition of measuring things about the life of the country with a view to improving them. True, William the Conqueror commissioned the Domesday Book to tax his realm rather than improve it, but in a year when coronavirus has sadly turned the spotlight on the weekly deaths figures produced by the Office for National Statistics as never before, it’s worth remembering that the tradition of regular reporting of deaths by cause goes back to late Tudor times. Then, the ‘Bills of Mortality’ for London were compiled from the returns sent in each week by the clerk of each parish in the city, which was vital knowledge to monitor when bubonic plague was a recurrent threat. The nineteenth century saw great strides in official data – the census to monitor whether the population was growing or shrinking, and registration of births and deaths to provide comprehensive national data. Florence Nightingale, as well as championing professional standards in nursing, was also a pioneer in the presentation of statistics and became the first woman member of the Royal Statistical Society. Dr John Snow famously used meticulous record-keeping to establish that cholera, the great scourge of Victorian London, was transmitted by infected water, not foul air. And Charles Babbage, generally remembered for his unsuccessful attempts to build a mechanical computer, is also credited with devising the pre-printed survey form. In the twentieth century, the Second World War highlighted the need for reliable statistics to enable the country’s leadership to make key decisions. Thus, as this book points out, Winston Churchill, complaining that ‘the utmost confusion is caused when people argue on different statistical data’, ordered the establishment of the Central Statistical Office, one of the predecessor organisations of today’s Office for National Statistics, to consolidate the efforts of other departments and issue ‘final authoritative working statistics’.

When my appointment as National Statistician was announced in August 2019, I said that I was looking forward to making use of rich new sources of information to deliver the data that decision-makers across the UK needed, as the ONS and the wider Government Statistical Service empowered Parliament, academia, business and beyond with trusted and quality data. However, I was little expecting that, within about six months of taking up my post here, the onset of a global pandemic would have created an unprecedented demand from within government, the media and the public as a whole for statistics that were both rapid and reliable regarding what was happening to the country. I’m proud of how well my colleagues here have responded to that challenge. To give one example, the ONS, with its partners, set up the Virus Infection Survey, to gauge the prevalence of COVID-19 in the community, going from its announcement to first publication of results in barely three weeks. And so I was very gratified to hear that one of the country’s leading media commentators on statistics had said that one of the things the pandemic has taught us is ‘the value of timely, accurate, trustworthy, comprehensive information’ and added that, in producing this new survey, we had done an impressive job in trying to get representative data on the prevalence of the infection. And this year has thrown up other instances of how we’ve responded – developing new survey questions to measure how British business was responding to the economic challenges and how the population were responding to the various measures introduced to hinder the spread of the pandemic, speeding up the publication of some of our economic indicators, and so on.

What has happened this past year is something more or less unprecedented in living memory – there has surely been nothing like this and on this scale since the Spanish flu outbreak over a hundred years ago now, Indeed, one of the recurring themes of this book is the dramatic effect that the two vast wars of the twentieth century had on the life of people in this country.

After a year none of us here at the ONS will easily forget, 2021 too promises to be an important year for us – not only does it mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of our creation by the bringing together of the CSO with another government statistical department, the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, it’s also time for the once-in-a-decade census, for which the ONS has responsibility in England and Wales (separate arrangements apply in Scotland – where the census will take place in 2022 – and Northern Ireland). This book makes much use of data from past censuses, as well as the other surveys and administrative data that the government collects, but the census process continues to evolve, as does the sort of topics we ask about. The 2021 census will, for the first time, be online-first, but of course you will still be able to reply in the previous way, by filling in a paper form, if you prefer. If, like me, you were intrigued by some of the snippets in this book (who knew that being ‘a pedestrian’ could be an occupation as well as a means of getting about?), then I hope you’ll make sure that, if you live in England or Wales, come Sunday, 21 March 2021 – Census Day – you get your own census return in to us, whichever method you choose. By so doing, you are helping ensure that the country has the information it needs to target its resources more effectively and to plan services such as housing, education, health and transport. In the meantime, please sit back and enjoy Boris Starling’s lively take on what official data past and present tell us about our nation, who we are, what we do and where we live. We official statisticians tend not be a showy bunch, but I hope readers will see from this story why we are quietly passionate about what we do and why, above all, it matters so much.

INTRODUCTION

In 2011, the year of the most recent UK census, the film One Day was released. Based on a bestselling novel by David Nicholls, it told the story of its two protagonists, Emma and Dexter, through the neat structural conceit of visiting them on the same day every year for two decades. As such, the viewer saw Emma and Dexter’s lives through snapshots taken at regular intervals, with the changes in those lives signified at least partially through the regular markers humans use: where they were living, what they were doing, the status of their relationships, and so on.

In other words, through a very small-scale and annual census.

This desire – to know, to mark, to record – is one that has existed for millennia. As mankind began to arrange itself into societies of increasing numbers and complexity, so too did the rulers of those societies seek to find ways of enumerating at least what they considered the most important elements of the body politic. Ancient Egypt introduced censuses towards the end of its Middle Kingdom era, roughly 1,800 years before the birth of Christ. The Sumerians and Babylonians also had some form of citizen registration. In the Bible, the Book of Numbers is named after the counting of the Israelite population, and opens with the Lord speaking ‘unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of the congregation, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt, saying, Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names’. Later, King David ordered Joab, the captain of his host, to count the tribes of Israel and Judah, which came to 800,000 and 500,000 men respectively. For this apparently sinful activity, God sent a pestilence that killed 70,000 men, and the fear of further divine retribution was one of the arguments used in eighteenth-century Britain against enumerating the population. The Chinese began to perform local population registers from the sixth century BC, and the Indians from around the third century BC.

But it was the Romans who first solidified the census into something approximating what we recognise today, and in doing so gave us its name too (from the Latin censere, ‘to assess’.) The first Roman census was carried out under the orders of Servius Tullius in the sixth century BC, and gradually became an event held every five years and aimed above all at establishing two things: the availability of men of fighting age and the determination of taxes. The most famous census of all was, of course, the one organised in Judaea by Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, the Roman governor of Syria, which became famous not so much for anything that it counted but for the movement of one particular couple. As the Gospel of Luke recounts, and as everyone who goes to a carol service hears during the lessons, ‘it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.’

Given that censuses concern themselves first and foremost with hard, quantifiable facts, it is ironic that Luke’s linking the birth of Christ to Quirinius’ census is almost certainly wrong on several grounds. Matthew says that the birth of Jesus took place in the reign of Herod, but Herod had died around a decade before the census Luke mentions; no Roman census required people to travel to the distant homes of their ancestors, thus making Joseph and Mary’s trip from Galilee to Nazareth extremely unlikely; and the Romans did not at the time impose direct taxation on their client kingdoms. But, as the man who shot Liberty Valance knew, when the legend becomes fact, then print the legend: and so the birth of Christ is always associated with a census.

The first formal English census is only slightly less momentous, coming as it did at the instigation of William the Conqueror and being enshrined in the Domesday Book of 1086. William, perhaps understandably for a man who had basically performed a hostile takeover of an entire country, wanted to know much the same things previous census-takers all over the world had sought: who lived where, who owned what, who had owned it before the Conquest, who could fight and who owed how much in taxes. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a collection of historical documents rather than a regional newspaper, which would have been a very early casualty of the digital journalism revolution) reports that William sent ‘his men over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out how many hundreds of hides* were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire’.

In a move of which modern-day dictators would be proud, the Domesday Book was not only official but unalterable: there was no right of dispute for anyone who felt the assessors had incorrectly calculated their holdings and liabilities. These overtones gave the book the name by which it’s known now. Richard FitzNeal, treasurer of England under Henry II, wrote that

the book is metaphorically called by the native English, Domesday, i.e., the Day of Judgement. For as the sentence of that strict and terrible last account cannot be evaded by any skilful subterfuge, so when this book is appealed to on those matters which it contains, its sentence cannot be quashed or set aside with impunity. That is why we have called the book ‘the Book of Judgement’ … not because it contains decisions on various difficult points, but because its decisions, like those of the Last Judgement, are unalterable.

The book is divided into two parts, Little Domesday (covering Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex) and Great Domesday (pretty much the rest of England at the time, with a few exceptions). Rumours that Little Domesday was so short due to the restricted gene pool of its East Anglian denizens are scurrilous and without foundation, at least according to a resident of Cromer whose brother may also be his wife. Rumours that Great Domesday was written almost entirely by a single scribe are much more credible (and presumably the scribe in question was the first Englishman ever known to have suffered from repetitive strain injury, carpal tunnel syndrome and bouts of incandescent fury when someone pointed out a typo on page 343 of a particularly beautifully illuminated manuscript section). And it was thorough: to take one example almost at random, the small village of Ightfield in Shropshire, or ‘Istrefeld’ as Domesday calls it, is summed up thus:

Gerard holds Istrefeld. Ulniet held it and was a free man. There two hides pay geld. There is land for four ploughs. A priest is there and two bordars [according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘a villein of the lowest rank, who held a cottage at his lord’s pleasure’], with one plough. Woodland there for fattening sixty swine, and two hayes [a ‘haye’ being an enclosure constructed for the capture of game, especially roebuck].

Some efforts were made to gauge the population: for example, in Elizabeth I’s reign, the bishops were asked to count the number of families in their respective dioceses and report back to the Privy Council. Later, mid-eighteenth-century proposals to count the population were fiercely attacked in the Commons, either as an affront to traditional British liberties or as a security risk if it meant disclosing our potential weakness to a foreign power (not to mention the risk of another pestilence from God). Indeed, despite the country’s increasing prosperity, some people thought the population might actually be falling: for example, in 1780, the Welsh Nonconformist minister the Reverend Richard Price published a book on the subject. Known in short as Dr Price’s Reversionary Payments, its title runs in full to 60 words, of which the last nine are ‘and a Postscript on the Population of the Kingdom’. In this he argued that the population might have fallen by as much as a quarter in the previous 70 years. Price was, incidentally, a friend of the pioneering statistician Thomas Bayes, the proponent of Bayes’s theorem, and was apparently responsible for getting the theorem published after Bayes’s death. However, it would be almost three-quarters of a millennium since Domesday before the country finally essayed another formal, general census. Blame it on political opposition, on expense, on successive governments having different priorities, on the country being at war as often as not, but it was not until 1796 that a statistician and former House of Commons clerk named John Rickman (once described as ‘hugely literate, oppressively full of information … from matter of fact to Xenophon and Plato’) proposed a census in the Commercial, Agricultural, and Manufacturer’s Magazine (which sounds very much like one of Have I Got News for You’s guest publications, alongside the likes of Hot Dip Galvanising or Cigar Aficionado). That Rickman also edited the Commercial, Agricultural, and Manufacturer’s Magazine may suggest that he wasn’t the most enormous fun at parties, but on this issue at least he was certainly persuasive. He enumerated 12 reasons as to why a census was necessary, among them the usual questions of taxation and conscription but also the contentions that ‘the intimate knowledge of any country must form the rational basis of legislation and diplomacy’, that ‘an industrious population is the basic power and resource of any nation, and therefore its size needs to be known’, that ‘the need to plan the production of corn and thus to know the number of people who had to be fed’ and that ‘the life insurance industry would be stimulated by the results’ (there is a certain Alan Partridge quality to the last of these, which may endear him to the modern-day reader). This all tapped very much into Thomas Malthus’s concerns of the time about overpopulation (which ran directly opposite to Dr Price’s fears), published in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population.

Thus Rickman’s idea took hold, and the necessary legislation, proposed by Mr Abbot, MP for Helston in Cornwall, was rapidly passed by Parliament in late 1800. The first UK census therefore took place on 10 March 1801, and consisted of six questions aimed at working out the national population, their living arrangements and occupations, and giving some idea as to whether the population was increasing or decreasing. Without an overarching national body to take charge, enumeration in each area was the responsibility of the local overseers of the poor or, failing them, substantial householders and church officials and, if need be, ‘constables, tithingmen, headboroughs or other peace officers’.† (In Scotland, early censuses were, by contrast, carried out by local schoolmasters – perhaps a mark of the high esteem that Scotland has traditionally placed on education – but in 1861 responsibility passed to the recently created General Register Office for Scotland, now the National Register of Scotland.) Since there was obviously no previous census against which the last point could be measured, baptism and burial records were requested from each of the previous 20 years and then for the start of each decade before that, all the way back to 1700. The population of England and Wales was found to be 8.9 million, and that of Scotland 1.6 million – almost exactly the same numbers who live in modern-day Greater London and the Glasgow metropolitan area respectively. Ightfield in Shropshire, which in 1086 had had four ploughs, two bordars, a priest and woodland for 60 swine, now boasted a population of 209 people (which would have risen only to 529 by 2011).

The next census took place in 1811, showing a population of 12 million, an increase of 15 per cent over the decade. With one exception – that of 1941, which was cancelled due to the small matter of the Second World War being in full swing, though even that was partially offset by the drawing up of a wartime National Register at the start of the war in 1939 – so it has stayed to the present day: a census every year ending with a ‘1’. (Tottenham Hotspur fans of a certain age will remember when those years were reliable sources of glory: the League in 1951, the League and FA Cup double in 1961, the Cup in 1981 and 1991. Spurs fans of younger vintage, used to altogether sparser pickings in the silverware department, will regard years ending in ‘1’ rather like all other years, as for them all years end in zero.)

The census has not, of course, stayed still. Categories have been added, changed and removed; questions asked and suspended. In 1821, respondents’ ages were included for the first time, albeit in quinquennial groups (categories nowadays familiar to marathon runners and triathletes whose advancing years are brutally marked out in black and white: MV45 for men’s veterans 45–49, FV50 for female veterans 50–54, and so on). 1821 saw the first census in Ireland, which was of course then in its entirety part of the UK. The early enumerators there were mostly appointed from local tax collectors, apparently on the theory that, like the Poor Law officials in England and Wales, they would be familiar with their districts.

The 1841 census saw a seismic shift in the way the count was organised and conducted. Whereas the three previous censuses had been fundamentally myriad local affairs subsequently tallied together, which had left substantial scope for people being counted twice or not at all, responsibility in England and Wales was now passed to the recently created post of registrar general. A trial run was carried out to see how many households an enumerator could cover in a single day – the forerunner of today’s census tests and rehearsals. In consequence, 35,000 enumerators were appointed to take the census in the shortest possible time, and all records were to be sent to London for analysis at the General Register Office. In addition, proper information on every member of a household was now sought, and all the data collected were published in three separate volumes: the Enumeration Abstract, the Age Abstract and the Occupation Abstract, which sound like long-lost Robert Ludlum novels. If 1801 was the first modern British census, 1841 was the first one to do things as they are in effect still done today: the principles of enumeration have not really been altered since, although the methods have been updated by such developments as printed forms and the development of next year’s primarily online census. Ironically, Rickman himself did not quite live to see the introduction of what might be termed census version 2.0: he had died the previous year.