Registrar General's Reports for England and Wales, 1899–1920

Edward Higgs

The annual reports of the Registrar General for England and Wales (hereafter ARRGs) had been published for each year from 1839 onwards. ARRGs before 1879 usually had two parts. First, there was the Registrar General's own Report, that tended to comment on the development of the registration service, and to emphasize the registration of births and marriages. This was usually supplemented by the Superintendent of Statistic's Letter, containing detailed considerations of the cause of death data collected by the civil registration system, as well as developing epidemiological theory and the tools of public health research (Eyler). A summary of the quarterly returns of deaths also appeared, either as part of the Registrar General's Report, or as a separate appendix. But from the Forty-second annual report of the Registrar General for 1879 the separate Superintendent of Statistics Letter disappeared, although a cut down version of the summary of causes of disease under headings used in his his Letter was printed in the main section Report under the heading 'Registered Causes of Death'. The annual reports of the Registrar General in the period 1880 to 1900 were also, on the whole, slighter texts than those of the High Victorian period.

A number of reasons have been put forward for these changes, although they may simply reflect the policy, or limitations, of the Registrar General, Brydges Henniker, in these years (Higgs, 2004, 90–128; Szreter). The structure of the ARRG bequeathed by Henniker was carried on by his successor, Sir Reginald McLeod (1900–02), but changes were introduced by Sir William Cospatrick Dunbar, who took over as the head of the General Register Office (GRO) in 1902. Dunbar reinstated the separate Letter on the subject of causes of death to the Registrar General from the Superintendent of Statistics, and over time the size of the ARRG expanded. His successor, Sir Bernard Mallet (1909–1920), maintained the split between the Registrar General's contribution and that of the Superintendent of Statistics, but radically reduced his own Report to a short introduction to the latter's Letter, which was renamed the Review of Vital Statistics (Higgs, 2004, 130–1).

The Edwardian period also saw an increasing emphasis on the measurement of infant and child mortality which was a reflection of the failure of infant mortality rates to decline in line with those of other age groups, and an increasing fear of imperial decline (Higgs, 2004, 134–9). In addition, the ARRGs published between 1911 and 1913 saw a considerable number of innovations: the publication of mortality data by sanitary rather than registration districts; the consistent return of deaths in hospitals to the place of usual residence for the purposes of tabulation; the abandonment of the GRO's internal nosologies and the introduction of the abstraction of deaths according to the International List of Causes of Death; greater detail respecting the causes of death in relation to age and sex for aggregates of large towns, smaller towns, and rural areas, which had hitherto only been given for the country as a whole and for London; new tables giving a double classification of mortality by primary and secondary causes; and the introduction of data on mortality according to place of death — private house, hospital, workhouse, and so on (Higgs, 2004, 131).

These innovations, and the general expansion of the GRO's output, were based on expanding human and technological resources. In the late nineteenth century, Henniker had been unable to expand the staffing of the Office. His Edwardian successors managed to increase numbers by the introduction of boy clerks and women. This partly reflected the expansion of workload relating to checking the census records for pension purposes, but probably spilled over into statistical production (Higgs, 2004, 149–52). At the same time, the machine tabulation of data that was introduced into the 1911 census was extended into the analysis of vital registration data. This allowed the introduction of the multiple tables, noted above, without the need for increased numbers of human 'computers' (Higgs, 1996).

However, this effervescence in the form and content of the ARRGs was somewhat checked by the onset of the First World War, as their size contracted. This was, no doubt, a reflection of the departure of male clerks to the Front, which could not be made good by increasing numbers of women and boys, and the distraction of other war-time duties. The GRO, for example, had to divert resources to checking marriage and birth records for the purpose of checking claims to separation allowances for military personnel, and it became the central organisation for the system of national registration that facilitated conscription and rationing (Higgs, 2003, 134–6; Higgs, 2004, 186–8).

At the end of the War, the GRO passed under the direct control of the newly formed Ministry of Health. The Ministry had little time for the Office as an independent statistical body, and took steps to subordinate it to its own narrow public health agenda. Indeed, it was touch and go whether the GRO would survive as a separate entity, and it was nearly subsumed into the statistical apparatus of the Ministry. Sir Bernard Mallet resigned as Registrar General in 1920, to be replaced by Sylvanus Vivian. This had an immediate impact on the form of the GRO's published output. The Eighty-second annual report of the Registrar General for 1919, published in 1920, was the last ARRG to be issued as a Parliamentary Paper (Eighty-second annual report of the Registrar General). The Eighty-third annual report of the Registrar General was published by HMSO in 1922 but was not laid before Parliament. This did not contain a Report by the Registrar General, but was made up of the Superintendent of Statistic's Review of Vital Statistics (Eighty-third annual report of the Registrar General). The following year, the whole ARRG series was replaced by a new, and anonymous, series of Registrar General's Statistical Reviews.

REFERENCES

Eighty-second annual report of the Registrar General , BPP 1920 XI. [View this document: Eighty-second annual report of the registrar-general ]

Eighty-third annual report of the Registrar General. Including an appendix relating to marriages, 1915 (1920) (London: HMSO, 1922). [View this document: Eighty-third annual report of the registrar-general. Including an appendix relating to marriages, ]

John M. Eyler, Victorian social medicine. The ideas and methods of William Farr (London, 1979).

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, The information state in England: the central collection of information on citizens, 1500–2000 (London, 2004).

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

Simon Szreter, 'The GRO and the public health movement in Britain 1837–1914', Social History of Medicine, 4 (1991), 435–64.