Time collapsed as I saw how
my grandad lived a century
ago. History turned intimate
Offered an early preview of the
just-released 1921 census, the
historian found himself overcome
by details of his forebears’ lives
39
Last summer, I visited a facility run
by the Offi ce for National Statistics, a place in which
the raw material of history was in the fi nal stages
of being made ready for public release. The centre
of operations was a large, open-plan offi ce, one half
dominated by tall metal racks on which hundreds of
large boxes were stored, the other fi lled with rows of
desks on which digital scanning equipment had been
set up. There the 1921 census for England and Wales, all
38m entries, held in 30,000 bound ledgers, was being
digitised and conserved.
My visit took place in the fi nal, scaled-back weeks of a
colossal process that had begun three years earlier. The
team from the genealogy company Findmypast and the
National Archives had almost fi nished their work and
there was a palpable sense of anticipation. Last week,
the fruits of those three years’ work were released.
The publication of a census is a once-in-a-decade
event. After each census is taken, the millions of
individual census returns are gathered together and
the information within them analysed and condensed
into national statistics, the metrics used by politicians
to shape policy. But the census forms themselves,
fi lled in by our ancestors, are closed to the public for
100 years.
Those returns, the individual atoms of offi cial data,
have a signifi cance and a meaning that goes far beyond
national statistics. They are the intimate records of
8.5m individual households and that passage of a
get through without weeping. That was not the case on
this occasion. I have thought about my grandparents,
and the north-east they knew as children and teenagers,
more deeply than ever , having seen them recorded
at the ages of 16 and 10 on the pages of the census. I
have thought about what they had been through in the
decades before I and their other grandchildren moved
from Nigeria in the early 1970s, to live with them in the
same Gateshead fl at my grandfather was living in when
the census form dropped through the letter box in the
summer of 1921.
For many families, what will be most poignant about
the census of 1921 will not be the names listed in the
neat columns on the left-hand side of each return form
but the names that are missing from those pages – the
boys and young men who appeared in the census of 1911
but who are missing 10 years later, on the other side of
the rupture that was the Great War.
Their names can be found on another census of sorts,
inscribed on to the hundreds of thousands of Portland
stone headstones and memorials to the missing that are
today scattered across the former battlefi elds of France
and Belgium, the work of what in the 1920s was known
as the Imperial War Graves Commission. That census
of the fallen also contains the names of many men
who had been fathers to the 730,000 children listed as
fatherless in 1921.
While the 1921 census is a record of a moment
of unique trauma, it arrives in the public domain at
another fraught and disorienting point in British history,
making it impossible not to draw comparisons between
then and now.The nation of 1921, like that of 2022,
was affl icted by a deep and socially corrosive housing
crisis. Looking through their family returns many
people will make the same calculation that I made when
looking at the conditions in which my grandmother
grew up. Divide the number of people in any household
by the number of bedrooms and the housing crisis
of 1921 becomes clear and manifest. Hardly the “ fi t
country for heroes ” promised by wartime leader David
Lloyd George.
But our age is horribly redolent of the postwar era
in another way. In 1921, the nation had, just two years
earlier, been through a third wave of the infl uenza
pandemic that had begun in 1918. That pandemic
claimed more lives globally than the war of 1914-18. In
Britain, it sent another 228,000 people to their graves.
Beyond what it tells us about housing, class,
poverty and changing relations between the genders,
what makes the release of the 1921 census especially
signifi cant is that for many of us it will be the last we
see. In 10 years’ time, the archives will have nothing
to say about life in England and Wales of 1931, as the
census of that year was destroyed by fi re in 1942, a
mundane accident rather than an inferno caused by
the Blitz. The census for Scotland survived and will
be released. The census of spring of 1941, for obvious
reasons, never took place. What this means is that after
2022 the next English and Welsh census to be released
will be that of 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain
and Winston Churchill’s return to Downing Street. Its
release is due in January 2052.Comment
Analysis
David
Olusoga
A miner’s
daughter carries
a younger child
in Wigan during
the miners’
strike of 1921.
Gettycentury, the span of three generations, means that a
census bridges the gulf between history and memory.
I learn ed this lesson during my visit to the ONS
archives. The team involved in the digitisation had, very
thoughtfully, laid out for me two pages from two census
ledgers. They contained the entries made by two of my
great-grandfathers. Listed on one was my grandfather,
then a boy of 16, already apprenticed as an engineer,
learning the skills that would carry on through a
lifetime spent on industrial Tyneside, a life punctuated
by war, booms and recessions. My grandmother, a girl
of just 10 in 1921, was listed in the other ledger as living
in a tiny house with her six siblings, some of whom I
vaguely remember as old people, whom I was to meet
more than half a century later. Some I never met as they
did not survive their childhoods. Infant mortality is one
of the many hard truths that rise from the pages of the
1921 census.
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