Dan Snow's History Hit - 1921 Census: Revealed

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

For the first time, the 1921 Census of England & Wales is now publicly available, only online at the family history website, Findmypast. More detailed than any previous British census taken up to that point, it provides us with a remarkable, once-in-a-generation snapshot of a country that had been transformed after the First World War. In this episode, we are joined by guests Audrey Collins, from The National Archives, and Myko Clelland, from Findmypast. They explain what the records show about how families, communities and workplaces were reshaped by the war, as well as share stories buried deep within the Census that reveal so much about how our ancestors lived a hundred years ago.Are you interested in exploring your own family history? After years spent digitising and transcribing this unique record of your recent history, the 1921 Census is now available exclusively online with Findmypast. Start exploring now at findmypast.co.ukIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hello and welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's very, very exciting because 100 years have now passed since the 1921 census. It is private for 100 years, so people won't get embarrassed about any domestic arrangements they want to keep a little bit quiet about. But now, 100 years past, it's all water under the bridge. There's no shame in it anymore. There's no shame in telling people who your pets were, what you were doing on that particular day in 1921. who your pets were, what you were doing on that particular day in 1921. The census is out and that means we can all rush to it and we can work out what was living in our house, what our families were doing, what British society looked like, how many kids people were having and what was the impact of the First World War on people's families. It is always an exciting event, the once every decade release of the census.

Here talking to me about it right on the podcast is Audrey Collins from the National Archives and Miko Cleland, who's been on the podcast before, absolute legend from Find My Past. Find My Past is the place to go to if you want to get hold of these census records. If you're not a subscriber, please head over there and subscribe to Find My Past,

where you can look at the census and all sorts of other documents. Actually, millions and billions, in fact, billions of other records. So get ready as Miko and Audrey talk us through 38 million lives. What they've learned about 38 million lives that are contained in this census. It's the most extensive census ever available online after years of digitizing, years of transcribing. Can you imagine all the hard work that's gone into this? Thank you very much, Find My Past, for doing all that. You're going to hear about what Britain was like in 1921 and you're also going to hear about some very interesting pets. Here it is. Enjoy. Audrey and Migo, thank you very much for coming on the

podcast. It's wonderful. It's lovely to be here. Thank you. Good to see you both. So it's here, the big 21, the big 1921 census. It's always an exciting moment, Audrey, but is there anything about this one that is, presumably it's the biggest census yet, the British population kept growing, right?

It's the biggest one to be released yet? Well, yes, there is always that. They just get bigger and bigger. A new census release is always exciting. And I can remember when the 1891 was released and all the others since then. But the really big thing about this one is that it was the first one after the war. And it's just the first opportunity to sort of look through everybody's windows, as it were, to see what sort of shape families and communities were in after the war. Oh, gosh, yeah.

Well, I'm looking forward to hearing examples of what you guys have found. But, Audrey, just with you for a second, what's the first thing you do when a new census is released? And what's the first questions you're asking? Is it about the structure of the census itself, or is it about looking for individuals and stories within it? Well, when a census is released, that's the first time you get all the personal details so you will have looked at all the stats

and get the big picture so what you're really looking for is the fine details and that might be a person, might be a family member or it might be you know your house or the street you live in. But it's right down to that very personal level, something that you can really identify with. In my case, it's my house because none of my family were in England and Wales in 1921. So I can be completely professional about this and not get sidetracked looking for my family. But it is the first thing most people do.

They look for somebody that they're connected with, for my family. But that's exciting. It is. It's the first thing most people, they do. They look for somebody that they're connected with, whether it's a family member or just someone that they're interested in. Just quickly on that then, is there anything interesting living in your house? Well, everyone's interesting, but is there anything interesting about the house that people live? It's pretty much what I expected because my house was built in 1919 and there was a child there who grew up and lived in that house until she was in her 80s. And although I obviously didn't meet her, my next door neighbour, who'd been here about 20 years longer than me, she had met her.

So I knew that I was going to see Nellie in my house as a child in 1921. And that was really quite nice. That's so nice. That's great. Now, Mika, obviously, we mentioned the First World War there. Just top line, is there anything big about this census of 1921 that gives us a sense of the trauma of that war? Oh, immensely. Almost a million soldiers, sailors, airmen never came home from the first world war so that gives a real demographic mark that you can see in something like this so not only that we see that there are one and three quarter million more women than men in the 1921 census 1096 to every thousand and the biggest disparities there are for the age groups 20 to 45 in 1921. So those are the ages of the majority that fell in the war.

And those who came home weren't unaffected either. So there are around 2 million people that came back with some kind of disability. One return I know lists the head of the household as being ruined by war. Wow. And over 40,000 of these were amputees. And we see one really poignant census that we found written on a typewriter. And against the official instructions, you were supposed to fill this in with ink but there was an explanatory note that says i regret not being able to fill up this schedule in ink as directed but i lost half my right hand in the late war and there's one really quite hauntingly prescient

drawing added by one veteran at the first world war it shows three officials sat around a table being served tea and a note that they were using the census to count available cannon fodder from the census returns of 1921. The next war will be in 1936. And then David Lloyd George said that he would build this land fit for heroes, for all those people that came back from the war. And there are entries with an almost righteous indignation using that slogan as a bit of a rallying cry, writing in huge letters the demands to bring forth that land fit for heroes, the nation's duty to provide houses. Another declares he's out of work but now living in the land fit for heroes.

And I've seen a few variations on that. It's a sarcastic dig at the government because in their eyes, they've abandoned the people that made that big sacrifice and despite that promise in the 1921 census 13.7 percent of the population of england and wales were living two families to a dwelling and 6.1 percent were living in dwellings that had three or more families at once all of these returns give you the number of rooms in a household giving you that better idea of the living conditions and there's a note on one return again that points out there are two rooms one for the four of us to sleep in we should be pleased if you could find us a house and that apprehension for the future is borne out in the section relating to children and their ages one couple had no children and they

wrote right over the top of the form they do not wish to produce for an overstocked labour market or for the purpose of cannon fodder oh god that's amazing i love those um audrey is there anything about this census obviously we get these little notes and things but the census itself was constructed differently it was put together differently wasn't it that you there were changes from the one 10 years before there were some changes that they weren't huge. If you look at the census as a continuity from 1841 up, it adapts. There's a bit of a change from year to year. Between 1911 and 21, one of the changes was that for the first time a question had, well, more than one question, was dropped from the previous census. That hadn't really happened before. And in 1921, previous census. That hadn't really happened before. And in 1921, the question that had been there in 1911 was called the fertility question, which was asking every married woman how long

she'd been married and how many children were born to that marriage. 1921, that was replaced with a different kind of question, which is called the orphanhood question. And this was asking for children under 16, whether they had both parents alive, both dead or mother dead or father dead. So it was related information, but slightly different. And the question that was dropped altogether, that had been in every census since 51, was the one about disability. You know, some people say, well, isn't this just the time when you'd want to know about that? But the reason that that was dropped was that there were better ways of finding the information. You know, the Registrar General and the authorities had worked out there were better ways of getting it.

And also what you were asking people to do was to give medical information, asking non-medical people to give a medical judgment about someone else, very possibly their own child. So the information wasn't reliable anyway. So that's the reason it was dropped. We can still find out a lot about people who were disabled because Mika says sometimes you'll get people saying very explicitly that they've lost fingers from a hand and some people in their occupation column, they will describe, it will be something like crippled ex-serviceman. So you get the information, you just don't get it in the statistical form. But other than that, it's very similar. There were small differences to the questions about nationality and citizenship. And there was one which was an expansion on a previous one.

Census is always obsessed with people's occupations. You get pages and pages of instructions to enumerators and clerks on how to record people's occupations, and actually quite a lot on the household schedule to tell people how to write it down. And in 1911, people who were in public service, whether it was local or national, were asked for their place of work, their employer. And quite a lot of people just filled this in anyway, even if they worked at the boot factory or something. So in 1921, the question about employment was extended to everybody. Not only was everybody asked for quite a lot of detail about their job, that wasn't new, but they were also asked who their employer was. So now you could reconstruct everybody who worked in a particular place.

My house was built in 1919, my house and next door, and the two houses were built for the supervisors who worked in the Britannia bootworks, which used to be just on the other side of next door. And of course, what I will now be able to do when I get time to have a really good look is to see just who worked in Britannia Boot Works, obviously at my house and Next Door, and I suspect quite a lot of the people who lived in the houses opposite and nearby. I'll bet. I think just briefly on your

point about people with no scientific expertise giving their judgment on scientific things. Important lesson from history there, Audrey, as we live through an era of weird people in social media giving their opinion on immunology. Anyway, you mentioned the kids without fathers. Presumably the First World War figures are reflected in that number. I imagine there's a big disparity between the number of children without fathers and then without mothers as well.

Well, yes, there are far more without fathers. Although one thing you have to remember, and I found this doing a sort of local history study on not just the names of my local war memorial, but all the men who served as far as I could find out, including the ones who came back. Yes, there were a lot who didn't come back, including one whose widow later

married his twin brother. But there were also, there was at least one man in my town who came back more or less unscathed, but his wife had died of flu in the pandemic. So while all the men were away, but that meant you'd perhaps expect a disproportionately high number of young women to die from the flu because they constituted a bigger proportion of the population than they would have done in peacetime. And tell me, this is particularly exciting, both of you, because there's not going to be another release for a while. Tell us why not? Well, we have a 100-year privacy rule for census records, which means that people have a little bit of trust in being able to be honest and open about their circumstances

because they know they're probably not going to be around to see the release of these records. But in England and Wales, the 1931 census was destroyed in World War II, and not the way you might expect. It wasn't as a result of enemy action. It was an accidental fire, and the remains were swept away before anyone had a chance to inspect them. So there's no trace of that 1931 census, and the 1941 census wasn't taken because of the second world war so that means we have a gap now until 2052 where we won't get any other of these large national surveys of the country that we can use to do any kind of history whether it's's local history, social history, national history. And this is such a point that the world is changing. The First World War gave birth to

this totally different age, just kicking and screaming and becoming sort of almost unrecognisable from before. New technology, new expression in art and music, new ways to communicate, political upheaval, industrial unrest that made the 1921 census itself delayed for two months. And that bookends things with the 1921 census. It's that first national survey of that new world, just seen through the eyes of those people who were living it. And those original documents, because they've been filled in by the householders, it gives you the perspective in their own words, and gives you that starting point to see that transformation as it goes on and you mentioned parallels and we can see those things starting to change and those people making

sense of everything have the same concerns about work they've got money worries they feel the same kinds of anger they've got trust in politicians across the spectrum at an all-time low they're coming out of a global pandemic in the spanish flu there's all these different parallels from the world today and it just shows that these people aren't just our ancestors that they're us in so many different ways we are identical and the 1921 census is the biggest thing that we can use to look at that population in any level of detail now probably in our lifetimes because of this loss of records in that period in between this is devastating so we're not going to have another one of these happy because i'm getting quite used to these every 10 years it's like it's a sort of familiar thing and so we don't have one until the 2050s we're going

to be underwater in the 2050s so that's if we're lucky that's if we survive trump and putin and everyone okay anyway this is a big moment everyone even more reason to celebrate and pour over this census you listen to dad snows history we're talking about the 1921 census available now on findmypast.co.uk more coming up i'm matt lewis and i'm dr alan or And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go back 50 years to 1871. What are the big changes, Miko? What's different about British british society well we mentioned a little bit

about the ways that uh the first world war kick-started this new world but millions of the people in the 1921 census were also in the 1871 census so this collection kind of continues the story and they might have been children or younger adults perhaps now they're pensioners and that's something that wasn't introduced until 1909 with the Old Age Pensions Act. We see this changing nation, we have this big scale, but when you home in on the individual stories, you know, the stories in our own families, the individual changes to circumstance, the world that they're living in, that can be different, it can be similar. And that's the thing that's quite fascinating. The upper classes suffered disproportionately due to the First World War

because many of those young officers were from the landed classes and gentry, and so we see a different change in class. There's a lowering of the amount of people in domestic service. The 1921 census was the first one to include divorce, and that was quite controversial at the time because it was considered possibly tearing apart the fabric of society. And if we asked about it, who knows,

maybe it might become more commonplace. So there are lots of differences when we see this as we lay it out. And it just is that marker, that point, that really gets into things and we can place our own families inside that narrative. Are families getting smaller by this point have we kind of come off our well i don't know about the demography but is there a

sort of late victorian or edwardian peak of massive families and they started to get small i think that the peak was probably a little bit earlier than that because i do remember when the 1891 census was released that the families were slightly smaller than they had been in 81 and 71 and this was a general trend that continues and of course you have a rather peculiar effect on the birth rate well during the first world war years because you know while the men are away fighting i mean they obviously they weren't at home to father children. And also the people were maybe a bit more reluctant to bring children into the world and actually had the means of preventing it, which their counterparts in the 1870s wouldn't have had. So I'd say one of the first things you notice if you just look at any place in 1871 is how much bigger the families were. I mean, not all of them. Some people had small families because an awful lot of women were still dying in childbirth. So families were cut short

that way. But it was not at all uncommon to see large families, seven, eight, nine. Whereas in 1921, you do still get some very large families. But overall, the average family size was a bit smaller and carried on reducing. Okay, folks, let's just finish up with both of you. We've had some nuggets already. Give us some more nuggets about you and your families, your houses, anything else, anything that's got your attention that we can all ponder on. And what does this tell us about life 100 years ago? Miko, do you want to go first or shall I go with my scandal? Ooh, scandal. I mean, censuses are fascinating for all kinds of different reasons.

People call it a snapshot of life because it's that really big, comprehensive picture of what life was like. It's the closest thing we can get to a photograph in all the detail that it gives us. And you get those things like ages, birth locations, family circumstances, and lots more. But in the same way that photographs can capture different things exactly as we've seen in more modern discussions about censuses the government of the day get to decide the questions asked so this gives you a

front row seat into the mindset of the people in charge at the time they ask about what they thought was important that changes from decade to decade government to government and changing on local national world events and then the starring role always goes, once those census forms are distributed, up and down the country to the people that filled it in. The head of every household telling us what their life was like. Any historian uses all these different primary sources, diaries, letters, and that just gives you one person's perspective on the world. But the census is a chorus. It's this big cacophony of voices and all of the people of england and wales and for any kind of historical research that's really invaluable and these people they're

not just fragments of history they're our parents they're our grandparents they're our aunts our uncles the people we knew the figures in the books that we read about it brings them closer the 1921 census is a record collection that thanks to those privacy laws exactly because of this incredible detail, has taken a century to bring to us. But it lets you see the handwriting, the turns of phrase, all the people that you can think of, like they're stood in front of you right now.

And there's something magical about that. Because in so many ways, when we understand them, we understand ourselves more. And I know some months ago, we took a dig into your own family tree, if we remember. Yes, we did. It was great fun, but I thought the best way to show you that magic is to do the same again and give you that same feeling. So I took a little look into the 1921 census and found your grandfather, John Fitzgerald Snow, at Wellington College in Berkshire.

And when we look at this and we sit it down, we can see the boy next to him in his dormitory, Charles Marcus Clements, became commandant of Bridgend Prisoner of War Camp in the late 1940s, writing memoirs on his relationship and observations of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt in the years before his repatriation, who was one of the leading German generals in the Second World War. And those connections, the comprehensiveness give us that picture. It's not just households. It's not just schools. It's not even just institutions like prisons and hospitals barracks and the like and i kept looking for your family and a best way to really illustrate that census is that frozen snapshot in time a photograph of the nation a stroke of midnight i didn't find your

great-grandmother in her usual home take a guess where she was on the night of the 1921 census. Hang on, my great-grandmother. So, which great-mother? This would just be... That's John's mother. John's mum. I've got no idea where John's mum was. Geraldine. Oh, actually, well, yeah,

she should have been in Dorset somewhere. Where was she? Oh, very good. So, family stories have really followed through, and that's quite interesting. She was staying at the Royal Victoria Hotel in Swanage. So we might have peered into the window there in her hotel room. That's so cool. We know where she was on that exact day. It's great. And there are some other little things that perhaps not so much relating to our family,

but show how unique this census is. And Scotland organises their own census, separate from England and Wales. It's administered administered from Edinburgh their own 1921 census will be available to the public in due course but for Scotland they don't keep the original household returns so for the 1911-1921 census in England and Wales we can see them they've only kept the books that those responses were collated into by the enumerators so we've lost all of that handwriting all of the comments that could have been made all that magic and it's one lone household traveled to england and handed their census form into the english authorities so for whatever reason that never made its way north of the border and that's now all that survives of the original 1921 census of scotland so one family one family

and we could say then that we're releasing the whole census of 1921 for england wales and scotland without exaggerating and even inside that as well in that census there are all these moments that remind us that we're not so different from our ancestors there are notes that say the government's too nosy additions by the enumerator saying they're not allowed in to check the number of rooms because a very rude woman stopped them all those things can be there and one of my favorite ways that this comes to the fore is the way that we love our pets and the people a century ago were just like us again they loved them so much that when they were asked to list their families in 1921 sometimes they added their pets as if they were any other member of

the household so today and of course this isn't exhaustive but as we've been digging through the census we've been keeping an eye out and we've found seven horses, 17 dogs, 44 cats and kittens, three goldfinches, two ferrets, seven chickens, one rooster, one tortoise, and that's not even the whole of it. We've got their names as well. We've got Tarzan the cat. We've got Ginger the dog. Boggy the cat, who's noted in his marital status as being single.

And even when the animals aren't noted, in one census form in particular, there's a missing corner and there's a note in a pencil that says, dog did this. And that's the closest thing to a century old dog ate my homework that we're ever going to get. Brilliant, love that.

What about you, Audrey? What's jumping out at you? Well, it's not to do with anything in the census itself. It's to do with when the census was postponed because it was postponed by, well, eight weeks. And that was a very big deal. I mean, nobody wants to postpone something unless they absolutely have to once all the publicity has gone out and everything. And they made the decision at the very last minute. But to defray some of the extra cost

it was going to incur, for the very first time the Registrar General agreed that they could accept some advertising because it wasn't on the census itself it was on a flyer that was just to be wrapped around the census forms just notifying everybody that where it says April the 24th please read June the 19th and you know they deliberated about this and they'd been offered in the past, I mean, Pears Soap at least once in the past has said, can we advertise on the census paper? And they said, no, because it's an official government document. But this time they relented, but it wasn't Pears Soap. They looked around for suitable candidates and

they didn't want to have some dodgy patent medicine. I saw that the actual phrase used, we don't want advertisements for pink pills for pale people. So they decided to get something that was a bit more suitable. And an advertising agent approached them. And he had a client he thought would be perfect because he was about to launch a national newspaper. And they thought, OK, this seems

reasonable. Unfortunately, this meant that the census was actually embroiled in what turned out to be one of the big political scandals of the 20th century, because the newspaper proprietor concerned was Horatio Bottomley. He was an MP and also a newspaper proprietor and a very, very dodgy character indeed. He was massively corrupt. And in fact, later in 1921, he crashed and burned and actually ended up in jail. But it seemed like quite a good idea at the time. But almost immediately there were protests about this. As soon as people received their census with this flyer attached to it. Some people just objected that there was advertising at all. And we literally have a whole book of these slips that have been returned with people

scrolling protest notes on them. But then worse than that, a lot of religious bodies objected because it was a Sunday newspaper. So it was so sinful producing a newspaper on the Sabbath, worse still, if you looked inside this newspaper, it promoted gambling. And that was just absolutely shocking. So it created the most almighty fuss to start with. And then some enumerators and registrars objected to handling this material. So a very few of them had a dispensation. Okay, if you want to go through and cross out 24th of April and write in 19th of June, you can do it. And a few of them apparently actually did this. So the census did go ahead with the advertising on it and they kind of weathered the storm. But then unfortunately, the government never actually got the money out of the advertising

agency or Horatio Bottomley, the client, because the minute the census was taken, I mean, we're literally within days of it. We've got correspondence from Horatio Bottomley saying, lots of people have written to me to say that they never received the advertising. It's an outrage. I think it's a little bit unlikely that lots of people would have spontaneously written to Horatio Bottomley saying that they hadn't got an ad, but that's what he claimed. And the poor advertising agent said, well, I can't pay you because my client hasn't paid me. And so it went on.

And the advertising agent, who was no angel himself, as it turned out, the Treasury solicitor ended up taking him to court to try and get the money back. But they never did get a penny because he was bankrupt or, as somebody else rather cynically pointed out, he put it all in the wife's name, hadn't he? And there was correspondence and court cases, letters from Bottomley and letters from the advertising agent. And eventually, I think it was about 1928, the treasurer's solicitor had enough and finally wrote the whole blessed thing off. So the advertising, not only did it not defray the cost, which looked like a good idea at the time,

it ended up costing more. If you had to build a comedy satirical politician who was a corrupt evil joker horatio bottomley is probably the name that you would choose wouldn't you um guys thank you so much for coming on this episode of history hit tell us where we can learn more about this wonderful sentence and get to checking our own although miko is very kind on my family but where we can get checking our own houses and families and friends you can find it on find my past it's something that has been years in the making it's this wonderful window to this forgotten world it lets us look at all the people that came before us it's vast almost 40 million names and forever at the touch of a button there on Find My Past, alongside billions of other records to help you tell that big story, the grand story, the small stories.

It's there, 20th century England and Wales and far, far, far further before. The stories that make us who we are today, it's all there, and it's at Find My Past. Go and look straight away. You can see that right now. Loads of ways to look at the census. I will be doing so. If you're not subscribed to Find My Past already,

everyone make sure you do so literally billions of entries and stuff that we can all get our teeth into thank you very much for coming on thank you hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask i totally understand if you don't become a subscriber or pay me any cash money makes sense but if you could just do me a favorites for free go to itunes or wherever you get your podcast if you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review purge yourself give it a glowing review i'd really appreciate that it's tough weather that law of the jungle out there and uh i need all the fire support i can get so that will boost it

up the charts it's so tiresome but if you could do it i'd be very very grateful thank you