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The statistics presented in this volume are based upon the population returns of the 29th September, 1939, derived from the compilation of the National Register. The separate national statistics have been prepared by the respective Registrars General of the countries concerned, and have here been assembled for publication in a single volume issued under their joint authority. A uniform plan of presentation has been adopted in respect of the whole of the information which is available. Owing, however, to differences in the registration procedure in Northern Ireland, less information is forthcoming for that country than for Great Britain and the Isle of Man. These differences are described later. Preparations for the National Register were begun at the end of 1938. It was possible to inake executive arrangements for the purpose, notwithstanding that the National Register was not to be instituted unless and until war broke out, for the reason that those arrangements, viz. the division of the country into districts and the recruitment of enumerators, would in any case be required for the expected 1941 census, if the country remained at peace. Districts were planned, therefore, and enumerators recruited either for the National Register or for the 1941 census, whichever might he required. Apart from these essential preparations, the whole system of the National Register and of its maintenance was planned, and all schedules, forms, instructions and other documents drawn up, printed and distributed or stored in readiness for use if an emergency arose. Recruitment was gradual, and in some areas not completed until shortly before the outbreak of war. But all other preparations had been fully made by April 1939. Authority for the establishment of the National Register was furnished .by the National Registration Act, 1939, which received the Royal assent on the 5th September, 1939, two days after the outbreak of war, and by the Regulations, dated the 21st September, made under that Act. The Act applied to the United Kingdom; and was extended to the Isle of Man by an Order in Council dated the 8th September. Finally the whole machine in readiness was set in motion by an Order appointing the 29th September as the central date determining the time-table to be followed by 65,000 enumerators in the rapid distribution and collection of some 12 million household schedules and the issue of nearly 47 million individual Identity Cards. It has been customary to include in the first volume of statistics published in respect of any census a detailed account of the census enumeration. This is an appropriate course in the case of an operation planned and executed for statistical purposes alone and wholly discharged of its functions before its first fruits can be presented. In the present case, however, many of the functions of the National Register are non-statistical; and the enumeration may be said to be the beginning, rather than the end, of its full activities. It would not be possible, therefore, to give a full account of the National Register without exceeding the proper scope of this volume; and the account which follows has been limited to those aspects of the enumeration which are relevant to the nature and quality of its statistical products only. In Great Britain and the Isle of Man the enumeration was planned, generally, on census lines. Following census procedure, the whole country was divided into enumeration districts, each district being separately plotted with specified boundaries and specified street and house contents. Regard was had to the contingencies of war conditions by reducing the standard of size of district with a view to greater speed of enumeration. The total number of enumeration districts in Great Britain so planned amounted to rather more than 65,000 as compared with 49,000 at the 1931 Census; and the whole of the planning was carried out by local Registrars of Births and Deaths under the direct instruction and supervision of the central offices in London and Edinburgh. In the Isle of Man it was undertaken by Town Clerks, Clerks to the Commissioners and Captains of Parishes. In Scotland the work of supervising the actual enumeration also was performed by local Registrars; but in England and Wales this duty was entrusted to the Clerks to Borough and Urban and Rural District Councils, appointed by the Registrar General of England and Wales with the consent of their Councils as National Registration Officers. Persons included in the Register.
—Subject to the specific exception of certain classes under the Act, registration was compulsory in respect of all members of the population present on National Registration Day, the 29th September. The excepted classes, as defined by the Regulations of 1939, consisted of persons: — The purposes for which the Register was designed were primarily concerned with civilians; and the effect of exception (a) was to relieve the procedure of unnecessary returns in respect of members of the Armed Forces in naval vessels or barracks or other premises under Naval, Military or Air Force discipline. Complications in the returns of private households were, however, avoided by the inclusion of all persons present at the appointed time (other than billeted members of the Armed Forces) so that no distinction was necessary between non-civilians at home on leave and other members of their respective households. The former were removed from the Register on returning to duty; but they appeared in the initial compilation and are, therefore, included in the accompanying statistical record. As regards the second category (b) it was originally expected that a special Register would be set up to deal with the personnel of the Mercantile Marine. In fact, however, no necessity appears hitherto to have arisen for the creation of this special Register. No persons have thus become qualified to be included in it; and merchant seamen, both at the appointed time and since, have been subject to the ordinary conditions of registration. Information recorded in respect of each person.
—The particulars required to be returned in respect of each individual were limited to the minimum which could be regarded as necessary for the purposes of the National Register as such, and are accordingly of a narrower scope than those of a modern census. They are set forth fully in the Regulations of 1939. In addition to the details of name and address (which have no significance in a statistical analysis) they comprised a statement of sex, date of birth, marital condition and occupation, with additional-information, where appropriate, regarding membership of Naval, Military or Air Force Reserves or Auxiliary Forces or of Civil Defence Services or Reserves. Enumeration Processes.
—Census practice was generally followed in matters of principle and method. The individual returns were made on household schedules; and responsibility for preparing the schedule was placed on the head of each household or, in the case of an establishment such as a hotel or institution, upon the manager or resident officer in charge, each of whom was required to supply the relevant record of every person who spent the night at the premises or arrived there the following day without having been enumerated elsewhere. Appropriate schedules of various types were distributed during the week preceding National Registration Day by the enumerator of each district, who had previously received detailed instructions as to the necessity of leaving no possible kind of habitation unvisited or unexplored. In view of expected evacuation movements enumerators were specifically warned to be on the watch for camps or other temporary premises likely to contain families or groups of persons in course of transit from one area to another. In the case of vagrants or homeless persons, a special single-person form was used, the distribution of which was undertaken by the police. The collection of the completed schedules was begun early on the morning following National Registration Day and completed with the minimum delay or interruption. On receiving a schedule, the enumerator was required to scrutinize it to see that it appeared to be in order, and, if satisfied, to accept it and thereupon to prepare National Registration Identity Cards in respect of all persons on the schedule and to hand them to the householder in exchange for the schedule. Some adaptations of the ordinary census procedure were introduced, either to provide for the foreseen consequences of abnormal war conditions or to ensure the personal delivery of Identity Cards. In the case of the homeless and certain other classes of persons whose schedules, for one reason or another, could not be collected by an enumerator, it Was made the duty of the holder of the schedule to deliver it himself at the local registration office, where any special circumstances of the case were at tended to and Identity Cards duly issued. The correct filling up and delivery of the forms by householders or other responsible persons was accomplished with the aid of the instructions printed on the schedule itself, or given orally by the enumerator, coupled with the valuable assistance rendered by the generous publicity services of the Press and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Their important contribution to the success of the Register is gratefully acknowledged by the Registrars General. An even more important contribution was that of the public itself. The nation as a 'whole and its individual members in their capacity as householders and private citizens gave their whole-hearted co-operation. Evidence was at once forthcoming of the adoption of a friendly and helpful attitude towards; enumerators; and on every side was exhibited a sense of duty affording a remarkable illustration of the national unity and resolution from which it had sprung. On the other hand the operations were greatly hampered by the direct and indirect consequences of the prevailing war conditions. Official evacuation schemes affecting children, expectant mothers and invalids, and the simultaneous dispersal of large numbers of business organizations as well as of private individuals, transferred millions of persons from homes in towns where a census would ordinarily have found them and deposited them in widely scattered areas all over the countryside. Such movements had, of course, been expected: but at no time could their magnitude or direction have been foreseen. The adjustment of the enumeration arrangements to meet the changed and changing population situation was not accomplished without heavy strain upon local and central staffs, aggravated in many areas by the simultaneous dispersal of enumerators already engaged and instructed in enumeration duties. The degree of dislocation varied considerably between one area and another, and was probably at a maximum in London. This unprecedented population movement had one indirect consequence of an unexpectedly far-reaching effect. The evacuation of a great number of families left the enumerator in many cases unable to form any conclusive opinion whether premises had been wholly vacated or whether they were still occupied at night by a breadwinner absent at all other times in the course of his occupation. In the latter case contact proved exceptionally difficult; and whether the premises were or were not wholly vacated, they cost enumerators relatively heavy expenditure in visits to establish the true position and to obtain the return where due. These and other hindrances were aggravated by the ìblack-out ", which curtailed the hours available for visits and in other respects slowed down the procedure. All these special conditions undoubtedly offered considerable obstacles. Had not the original planning of the scheme allowed a substantial margin, and made much special provision, for the consequences of war conditions both foreseen and unforeseen, their effect would certainly have been more damaging. But in spite of the difficulties no breakdown occurred; and subsequent examination of the records tends to show that the enumeration was successful and complete throughout all areas of the country. The aggregate totals of the population registered appear to be fully consistent with the numbers anticipated from the trend of earlier estimates. Later Stages of the Enumeration.— Excluding the small number of schedules delivered direct to local registration officers, the population record thus consisted of schedules containing particulars of more than 45 millions of persons and grouped in 65,000 enumeration district units. Under the scheme these original schedules had been reserved for the use of the local food authorities as a basis for the preparation of Ration Books and to constitute the local Food Register; and it had accordingly been provided that before each enumerator's schedules were surrendered for this purpose he should make a transcript of the returns to serve the purposes of the National Register. Thus the first duty of each enumerator after he had collected all his schedules and arranged them in approved order was the preparation of the transcript. The factor which governed the grouping of the returns by enumeration districts was the address1
of the household on the night of the 29th September. 1939. The enumerator was thus instructed first to exclude any schedules he might have collected from persons who had entered his district after National Registration Day, and then to copy the remainder into a special Transcript Book with which he had been supplied and which was to be the ultimate repository for the records originating in his district. On completing his book, he was instructed to count the number of persons entered and to record the number on the cover of the book. Checking of the Transcript Books was carried out by local registration officers before their despatch to the central offices. Transcripts of the excluded schedules were made on separate slips; and these, together with similar slips prepared by local registration officers in respect of schedules handed to them direct, were ultimately despatched to the central offices in England, Scotland or the Isle of Man, where they were sorted to district of assignment and copied into the relevant Transcript Books as and when the latter were received. Before parting with his Transcript Book each enumerator was also called upon to make a statistical analysis of its population content. It had been foreseen that the heavy administrative demands likely to be made on the National Register, when once it was in being, would leave little opportunity for statistical tabulation by the central departments, and that the principal man-power statistics afforded by the Register could not render their most useful service unless produced at an early stage of the war. It had been clear that fin these circumstances the only practicable course was to arrange for a statistical analysis by each enumerator of the population of his district, and for the rapid aggregation at headquarters of the 65,000 abstracts thus compiled. In view of the facts that there would be little opportunity of providing any full and detailed check upon the work and that enumerators as a class would he unfamiliar with the forms and methods of statistical analysis, it was necessary to make the operation as Simple as possible by reducing the groupings and sub- grouping to the smallest possible dimensions. The enumerator was provided with a carefully prepared abstract sheet, designed so as to enable him to divide his population into the two sexes, each sex being subdivided into 9 birth-year groups and each birth-year group being further subdivided according to marital condition, viz, single, married, widowed or divorced. The sheet was accom¨panied by detailed directions for carrying out the analysis and for making a series of checks and cross-checks, both internally and against the total population previously entered on the cover of the transcript book. By these means the opportunity for error was reduced to a minimum. Sample checking was undertaken by the local registration officers to whom the abstracts were first delivered; and they were further scrutinized and tested at the central offices, where a number of errors of various types were discovered and corrected, after reference, where necessary, to the original Transcript Books. On the whole, the work was carried out systematically and accurately; and little evidence has so far been discovered to suggest that the results from this somewhat novel procedure are subject to any significant degree of error. Analysis in similar form was made at the central office of the records received on transcript slips; and these were incorporated with the relevant enumerators' analyses diming their assembly and aggregation ï to Districts, Boroughs, Counties, Regions, etc., as now shown in the accompanying tables. The whole of the statistics contained in the present volume have been obtained in the first instance from the analyses thus described. No general reference to individual personal records in the register itself has been possible; and there has accordingly been no opportunity of presenting the results in any alternative or more detailed form. Thus, apart from the areal distribution of the population, the present volume deals only with the information returned in respect of sex, marital condition and year of birth, touching which last it will be seen that the use of the date of birth in place of the more direct alternative statement of age, hitherto customary at a census, has been reflected in the tables by a form of presentation with which users of population statistics in this country may not be altogether familiar. In concluding this part of this Report it may be useful to refer to two instances, one major and the other minor, in which the National Register statistics differ in principle or character from those of an ordinary census. The major point concerns the local distribution of population. Census-taking aims at eliminating temporary movements, such as those due to industrial and other holidays, and endeavours to conform to a standard based upon "usual residence". Population as distributed upon the more stable lines of this concep¨tion moves but slowly, and its movements are usually continuous. Hence a census enumeration will serve as an adequate base line for a series of subsequent annual corrective estimates, and subject to such estimated corrections, continues to afford statistics of local populations for a considerable period after the date of the enumeration. The conditions of the present war present an entirely different picture and entirely different problems. Great movements of population have taken place which may be described as capricious, in the sense that they have followed no established lines of flow, and are isolated in statistical experience, without any, element of continuity either with the past or with the future. The consequent distribution may or may not be temporary; but the normal distinction between usual and temporary residence has lost much of its significance under prevailing conditions. In any case they are too large in volume and promise to be of too long a duration to be disregarded for the numerous practical purposes of administration for which local population statistics are employed. For war purposes, therefore, and for the administration of peace services under war conditions, statistics of actual local populations, however abnormal and erratic, are what is needed ; and these are what the National Register is providing in this volume in respect of the point of time corresponding to the end of the third quarter of 1939. But the large-scale movement is not at an end; and the re-distribution recorded in this volume was without any inherent stability. Movements subsequent to National Registration Day have been and are likely to continue to be, equally capricious, and incapable of being gauged by the ordinary processes of estimation which are effective under stable conditions of regular and continuous movement. Thus the statistics included in this volume will not suffice, as a census would suffice under ordinary peace conditions, to energize a series of periodical estimates of the population distribution at successive future intervals. Repeated resort will still be necessary to factual records of changes in the local distribution; and it will be the duty of the National Register to provide these periodical figures. In another, minor, respect differences of procedure have produced a difference in principle between the initial National Register record and a census enumeration. An ordinary census enumeration aims at including in the population present at the appointed time the population in ships of all kinds which, whether coming or going, are within territorial waters during the night of census. day. Under a moving Register system, however, it appeared vnappropriate to include the populations of outward bound vessels which, even if due to be registered on the above criterion, would immediately fall to be removed from the Register on passing out of the jurisdiction. Conversely, as all persons entering the United Kingdom after the appointed time are required to be registered under the maintenance provisions of the Act, there appeared to be little point in discriminating between those whose inward voyages brought them within territorial waters during the night of National Registration Day and those who might enter the United Kingdom immediately after. The result produced by the appropriate procedure has thus been that "shipping populationî normally included in a census count has been excluded from the initial count of the National Register and included in part in the numbers added thereto under the maintenance provisions. Shipping population of this nature is not important in relation to the total population; but it may have local significance in relation to the contents of the port areas themselves, particularly since the maintenance procedure provides for the registration of incoming passengers in the areas of the residences to which they proceed on landing, and not in the areas of the port of entry. The procedure by which the initial register was compiled in Northern Ireland differed in certain material respects from that employed in Great Britain and the Isle of Man. No independent enumeration on census lines was carried out on the 29th September, 1939; in lieu thereof recourse was had to the contemporaneous returns obtained by the Food Control authorities for the purpose of rationing. Application forms for ration books were delivered to all householders on or about the 25th September, 1939, through the local organization of the General Post Office. They were not delivered or required for inmates of institutions, whose food needs were to be met by a scheme of bulk supply, nor for serving members of the Armed Forces who were outside the operations both of the Food Control and National Registration measures. Each householder was instructed to include in his return all members of his household, including those who were temporarily away. This requirement incidentally led to a certain amount of duplicate registration, through the inclusion of a person both at his home address and also at some other address. The completed forms were returned during the ensuing period to the local food offices where the ration books were written; and they were subsequently transmitted to the Registrar-General of Northern Ireland in Belfast to form the basis for the issue of Identity Cards and the preparation of the National Register. In compiling the initial Register, late applications have been admitted in respect of persons who should have been included amongst the original returns; and at the same time cases discovered of duplicate registration have been eliminated. As previously stated the register in Northern Ireland excludes inmates of institutions (as distinct from nurses, domestics, etc.) as these were not required to be included in applications for ration books. In order however to secure com¨parability in the statistical returns in Table I of this volume which combines the records of all the component parts of the United Kingdom, an allowance for this excluded class has been incorporated in the Northern Ireland figures. As there appear at present to be no independent figures of the numbers and distribution of the excluded class allowance has been made on the basis of the figures provided by the 1937 census. There is no reason to suppose that there is any material difference between the 1937 and 1939 position as regards this small section of the population. No analysis either by sex, age or marital condition has been made of the population included in the Northern Ireland section of the National Register. Total figures alone are available and have been included with the corresponding figures in the relevant section of Table I. 1
Vagrants and homeless persons are recorded in a separate section of the Register. For statistical purposes they have been assigned to the areas in which their schedules were delivered -up in exchange for Identity Cards. INTRODUCTION
GREAT BRITAIN AND ISLE OF MAN.
NORTHERN IRELAND