Sir Brydges Henniker (1835–1906)

Edward Higgs

Sir Brydges Henniker succeeded Major George Graham as Registrar General in 1880, and held the post until 1900. His stewardship of the General Register Office (GRO), the body responsible for census-taking and the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths, was not a great success.

Henniker was born in 1835, the son of Sir Augustus Brydges Henniker and a cousin of Lord Henniker, and succeeded to his father's baronetcy in 1849. Educated at Eton, he served in the 68th Foot, the Horse Guards, and was a captain in the West Essex Yeomanry. He was also private secretary to George Sclater-Booth, President of the Local Government Board (LGB), at the time of his appointment to the headship of the GRO (The Times; Nissel, 147). The LGB was set up in 1871 as a merger of the Poor Law Board, the Local Government Act Office of the Home Office and the Medical Department of the Privy Council Office to form a single board with primary responsibility for supervision of local government services. The GRO also came under its control at this date. The Lancet saw Henniker's appointment as 'evidence of the singular fatality which appears to have attended the ill-starred connection between Poor Law and public health administration... [and of the] ... repressive policy adopted towards the sanitary and medical department by the central authorities of Poor Law administration' (Eyler, 192). This may have been an exaggeration but Henniker's effect on the GRO does not appear to have been very positive.

Henniker certainly started to rein in the GRO's publishing activities almost immediately, as can be seen from the fate of the Annual Report of the Registrar General for England and Wales. His first Annual Report, covering 1878, but dated 31 March 1880, contained William Farr's last Letter to the Registrar General, a comparatively short piece of 38 pages. Farr's Letter had been the main means of carrying forward the GRO's medical and public health projects. The next Annual Report abandoned the separate Letter altogether, and the Registrar General's own commentary began a contraction in size which was to continue into the 1890s (Forty-first Annual Report of the Registrar General; Forty-second Annual report of the registrar-general). The text of the Annual Reports also lost much of the vivacity and pugnacity of the heyday of the Graham administration. The passages of purple prose, and the exhortations to local authorities to prevent unnecessary loss of life, were replaced by the rather dry recitation of statistical facts. The wording of some of the Reports in these years was indeed almost identical, with new dates and numbers merely being inserted in consecutive volumes (Higgs, 2004, 90–3). The Superintendents of Statistics under Henniker, William Ogle and John Tatham, were not without talent and interesting ideas, so the Office's inertia may have reflected Henniker's limited ambitions.

Similarly, his contributions to the organisation of the censuses of 1881, 1891, and 1901 do not seem to have been very innovative. New questions were introduced into the latter two enumerations but these appear to have been the result of the deliberations of the 1890 Treasury Committee on the Census, and the GRO's need to consult other departments in its aftermath. He and William Ogle actually fought the introduction of a question on employment status, and had to be ordered to include it into the census schedule by the LGB. The fact that the Treasury and LGB were willing to set up the Treasury Committee, and to allow critics of the GRO such as Charles Booth and Alfred Marshall to sit on it, does not indicate a high regard for the department (Higgs, 2004, 123–7). Similarly, the GRO failed to introduce machine tabulators, which had been invented by Herman Hollerith for analysing the 1890 US census data, until the 1911. This was some time after their introduction elsewhere. It might have been too early to introduce mechanised tabulation in 1891 but no attempt to investigate their potential seems to have been made in the following decade (Higgs, 1996).

Henniker's internal management of the GRO appears to have been equally problematic. He tended to defer to the LGB, even in matters that were his own responsibility. He was trapped between rising trade unionism amongst his staff and the intransigence of the Treasury, but he seldom seems to have approached the latter for extra staff to undertake the GRO burgeoning responsibilities. Increasingly the work of the GRO was undertaken on overtime, to such an extent that even the Treasury grew alarmed. Henniker's own staff even appealed over his head to the Treasury about pay, and the latter considered having the LGB deal with all important staffing matters. On his retirement, new Registrar Generals, Sir Reginald McLeod (1900–02) and Sir William Dunbar (1902–09), were able to rapidly expand the GRO's staffing through the introduction of boy clerks and women typists (Higgs, 2004, 119–23).

His 20 years at the head of the GRO seem to have been quickly forgotten, with neither The Times, the British Medical Journal, or the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, publishing an obituary when he died in 1906.

REFERENCES

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

Forty-first Annual Report of the Registrar General (1878), BPP 1880 XVI (C.2568). [View this document: Forty-first annual report of the registrar-general ]

Forty-second Annual Report of the Registrar General (1879), BPP 1881 XXVII (C.2907). [View this document: Forty-second annual report of the registrar-general ]

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).

Muriel Nissel, People Count. A History of the General Register Office (London, 1987).

The Times, 8 January 1880, 11.