Northern Industrial Slums: The Working Class and the Great War

[Guest]

   The Mitchell and Kenyon stuff is fascinating   but, alas, it does throw up one great problem of hindsight. As the past is over and done with, there is a tendency to assume that  a few years hither or thither don't really matter that much-the picture is broadly the same. Up to a point Lord Copper.  But years were just as long before the Great War as they are now and things change across a period of time. Thus, although the stuff about industrial and social conditions remained broadly true, then the social surveys are NOT accurate about 1914 conditions entirely. Charles Booth, for example, whose studies of London are classic- first social survey of Tower Hamlets in 1886-87 ( Minus 27 years on outbreak of war), first "Labour and Life" is 1890-91 (Minus  23 years) and main final series in the last years of the century (Minus 14 years minimum). The Rowntree social survey  of York  is 1900-1901 (Minus 13 years). They are illustrative but they are not accurate.  Let me ask- would you find a history of the last Gulf War unassailable if it used data on conditions in Britain from the 1970s or 1980s?  I would hope not.  For the people involved in the Great War, time worked in real time for them as it does for us.  Broad brushes paint broad canvasses. They are not accurate enough - data for 1914 et al must be from those years -not "nearly"

[Guest]

   The Mitchell and Kenyon stuff is fascinating   but, alas, it does throw up one great problem of hindsight. As the past is over and done with, there is a tendency to assume that  a few years hither or thither don't really matter that much-the picture is broadly the same. Up to a point Lord Copper.  But years were just as long before the Great War as they are now and things change across a period of time. Thus, although the stuff about industrial and social conditions remained broadly true, then the social surveys are NOT accurate about 1914 conditions entirely. Charles Booth, for example, whose studies of London are classic- first social survey of Tower Hamlets in 1886-87 ( Minus 27 years on outbreak of war), first "Labour and Life" is 1890-91 (Minus  23 years) and main final series in the last years of the century (Minus 14 years minimum). The Rowntree social survey  of York  is 1900-1901 (Minus 13 years). They are illustrative but they are not accurate.  Let me ask- would you find a history of the last Gulf War unassailable if it used data on conditions in Britain from the 1970s or 1980s?  I would hope not.  For the people involved in the Great War, time worked in real time for them as it does for us.  Broad brushes paint broad canvasses. They are not accurate enough - data for 1914 et al must be from those years -not "nearly"

 

It was really offered as a visual snapshot. Mitchell and Kenyon were making films between 1897 and 1921. Assuming the bulk of the films showed events just after the turn of the century,  it would capture the working conditions that the majority of men who served would have experienced directly. 

 

The 'minus 20 odd years' of the various studies are I think very relevant because this was the environment that the men who fought the war were born into. The health and physical stature of people is largely determined by conditions in infancy. In particular nutrition which, for people on the so-called poverty line was critical and very closely related to subsistence level incomes; shelter and food being two high priorities. Malnourished or undernourished children (for example) don't tend to develop into robust adults. There is a large amount of empirical data to support this fact*. If 30% of the population were allegedly below the poverty line 20 or so years before the Great War and J M Winter's estimate of 80% of the population was 'working class', it means that as much as 24% of the population lived close to edge. If this is remotely true, the impact it had on the health and well-being of the available manpower might have been profound. Roll forward 20 years to the Great War and there is evidence in some of the employment and recruiting data of massive levels of rejection of recruits/conscripts on the grounds of physical shortcomings (no pun intended). These two tangible bodies of evidence (poverty in the 1880s-1890s and high rejection rates of recruits in 1914-1918) may well have a strong causal links. It is these potential links that interest me. I think studying the subtleties within the Working Classes in this period is extremely complex and I suspect the Working Classes were extremely stratified socially and economically. They are very difficult to define. 

 

Watching the film footage of the factory gates and mill workers, dockyard workers, colliers etc streaming out of the workplace I was struck by a few things:

1. The apparent health of the working man. Not many weedy men that Bean refers to in his criticism of the 'slum bred' Lancashire TF in 1915 (note there was film footage on Lancs TF in Part 2).

2. The vast numbers of children in the workplace

3. The extent to which women worked in the collieries (for example) doing hard manual labour above ground.

4. The apparent cleanliness of the workers.

5. Trifurcated symbols of class: top hats or bowlers or flat caps and the highly distinctive 'white collars'. 

 

Not much evidence of the emaciated poor. It might indicate an important division within the lower socio-economic groups  - the subtle difference between below subsistence level and those just above it. Rowntree was the first to distinguish between primary (subsistence) and secondary (near subsistence) poverty and (I think) coined the term 'underclass' - those at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder. This is something that Winter runs with and highlights one of the effects of the War was to close the gap.  The so-called 'underclass'  don't seem to feature in these films. Life might have been grim 'up North' but factory work and low skilled manual labour might have been enough to provide enough food on the table for those who survived infant mortality (200 in every 1,000 at the turn of the century in the worst towns  - all in the North) and a host of other medical impediments.

 

Somewhere further up the chain of this thread I posted a link to an article on War-time nutrition. It is striking that the calorific intake was hovering around 2,000 calories  for the working class males before and during the War. Today our recommended intake is 25% higher and while we are physically larger our lives are significantly less physically demanding. One doesn't see overweight people flocking out of the mills in these films but interestingly few seem underfed. It naturally makes one wonder where exactly were all the alleged slum-bred weaklings working?  

 

* "Height Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom 1750-1980" by Floud, Watcher, Gregory

 

 

[Guest]

Of interest: 

 

Report upon the Medical department of the Ministry of national Service

[Guest]

15 hours ago, QGE said:

Not much evidence of the emaciated poor. It might indicate an important division within the lower socio-economic groups  - the subtle difference between below subsistence level and those just above it. Rowntree was the first to distinguish between primary (subsistence) and secondary (near subsistence) poverty and (I think) coined the term 'underclass' - those at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder.

 

    Mitchell and Kenyon films are a fantastic glimpse into Edwardian society- but I think it is wrong to assume that all was well because hordes of workers are shown in apparently good health.  These films were shot before the introduction of the National Insurance Act 1911-  you only see healthy ones as the sick ones were not there but on the Poor Law. A man in a manual job who fell ill was likely to "lose his place". There are hordes of children as well-as the purpose of the films was to photograph as many people as possible to fill the local kino with folk gawping at their own images. The hordes of kids are because infant mortality was chiefly measured in terms of deaths before first birthday- after that bar was passed, children stood an increasingly good statistical chance of surviving into adulthood. There was plenty of manual women's work- coal sorting was a major employer of women  right up to the NCB.

      Rowntree identified what he called an "underclass"-a term  revisited by Margaret Hilda  after 1979.  But Rowntree was following on from Booth- who  developed the term of the "submerged tenth"- the bottom 10% of society by income(or lack of it) who would always struggle, be disorganised, transitory by housing and in and out of work. Quite how the army dealt with men from this group in terms of discipline, standards of dress and hygiene-as well as functional coherence of being able to perform in any military role is a bit of mystery.

     A major concern in our current debate is when did the North emerge as being the manpower victim of the war? Certainly not clear in the literature of the war itself- nor in the range of contemporary memoirs I have read across the years. If I was going to finger one  origin of this view , then it would be the emergence of  "working class" history in the Sixties- the development of historical work that moved away from the more traditional political, military, diplomatic and into social and economic- what many who were alive at the time will know as "Schools Councii History" after the radically different History curriculum developed by that body. Middlebrook, Accrington and the Pals just happened to come along in the middle of it.

     In terms of poor conditions, the largest single bloc of heavy, smokestack, polluting industry in the UK was actually not in the North but in London- the area to the east of the River Lea on what is now broadly the Olympic Park (Don't rake the long jump pit too much- stlill a lot of heavy metals and chemicals down there) For substantial numbers of men, the army was the biggest social and economic improvement of their lifetime. I have had occasion to look at the AVL locally for 1918- with a very large tail of men in uniform but doing all sorts of odds and sods jobs. Mostly past 30. So I would propose the view that for that section of the British Army which was not front-line material (and consequently didn't get shot too much), the war was a substantial boost. Another paradox-  for the more than one million men who remained in either back area jobs or in the UK, the war was the biggest single act of social and economic reform in their lifetimes- That is, that between 1914 and 1918, the British Army acted as a much more powerful agent of not only social and economic change but of social and economic improvement - far greater than,say, all the Liberal reforms of 1905-1914 put together. 

[Guest]

    And for no particular reason, other than it is to do with the North and the war:

 

 

       Katie Morter-   who described the death of her husband for the BBC Great War interviews. Certainly made an impact on me  as a kid when it was first shown-and just as powerful  when repeated nowadays.  What a lovely lady.

Edited 6 December , 2017 by Guest

[Guest]

Some hard data on the major categories of Occupation in England and Wales in 1911 - sorted by total employed.  I suspect the relative numbers by age group will not have altered much by 1914.

 

Data is heat-mapped to show the highest concentrations of age group and industry

 

Edit: Note in the Textile industry the large proportion of Young men below the age of 18. Men in the age groups 17-44 are relatively under-represented and might explain why the textile industry was under-represented in the recruiting (assuming 1911 distribution and 1914 distribution was more or less similar) MG

 

Edit Not shown is the % of men of military age as a % of total in each category. The average for 17-44 year olds is 65%. 

Highest: Commercial Sector had 72% of its male employees in the military age group

Lowest: Agriculture Sector had 55% of its male employees in the military age group.

 

Which might go a long way to explaining why the Commercial sector was over-represented and the agriculture sector was under represented. The data bears out comments further up the thread that the Agriculture sector's demographics was 'older'. Age distribution was clearly a major factor.

 

 

[Guest]

 There was plenty of manual women's work- coal sorting was a major employer of women  right up to the NCB.

 

1911 Census shows only 2,586 women working  (all above ground) at coal and shale mines. This compares to  884,530 men. Women were 0.3% of the coal and shale mining industry. I wonder if the images of women sorting coal and working above ground provides a slightly distorted view; leading us to believe they were a common sight in the mines. It is visually compelling but the numbers were in absolute and relative terms very small. 

[kenf48]

An observation on your chart, the Army did not like to recruit unemployed men and it is seldom seen on attestation papers, so an unemployed labourer for example would be shown as 'labourer'.  As soon as war was declared all poor and charitable relief ceased for unemployed men of military age and they were directed towards 'voluntary' enlistment.

 

Ken

[Guest]

On 06/12/2017 at 22:14, kenf48 said:

An observation on your chart, the Army did not like to recruit unemployed men and it is seldom seen on attestation papers, so an unemployed labourer for example would be shown as 'labourer'.  As soon as war was declared all poor and charitable relief ceased for unemployed men of military age and they were directed towards 'voluntary' enlistment.

 

Ken

 Indeed. I wonder how many men were itinerant agricultural labourers whose employment prospects changed with the harvest.  regardless of their employment or category of their last employment, as long as they were enumerated in the Census and the later registration programmes they would be liable for conscription after Jan 1916. 

 

What is interesting having now scratched the surface of the recruiting data is the sheer numbers who were not physically fit enough.  The tables above are broken down into 360 sub-categories (too big and complex to show here). The variations in age distribution across industries are a revelation.

 

Winter's article "Britain's Lost Generation" was published in 1977 and his "Great War and the British People" was published in 1985 some time before the digitization of the relevant Census. I suspect if they were re-written today the free access to massive data would yield considerably more insights.

 

Somewhere in the Census reports will be a breakdown of Industries by Administrative County. I have not yet found them as it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. I am trying to get the table posted above for each County so i can get a sense of where exactly were the various industries concentrated. 

[Guest]

The attached table is a very rough attempt to compare populations (by county) with County Regiments. It is very far from perfect and at best will only provide a rough approximations. It is worth remembering that nearly all the Battalions were raised/recruited/reinforced during the volunteer period. Clearly there are some distortions as we know Regiments could recruit in the designated Metropolitan Recruiting areas - major regional towns and cities. That aside, one might reasonably argue it was a level playing field. Either way here are the data. 

 

Lancashire and Northumberland & Co Durham (combined) appear to be over-represented in terms of the number of battalions they raised per head of population.  London and West Riding Slightly under-represented. Huge caveats here as the conscription period meant that county population and county regiment recruiting were not necessarily aligned. Despite this I thought it worth posting. MG

 

Edit. Northumberland is particularly interesting as it appears to have raised exceptionally large number of battalions for its size. I am 99% sure this masks the fact that the Northumberland Fusiliers tapped into the vast human resources of neighboring County Durham particularly those on the the south bank of the river Tyne.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

On 06/12/2017 at 23:14, QGE said:

Somewhere in the Census reports will be a breakdown of Industries by Administrative County. I have not yet found them as it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. I am trying to get the table posted above for each County so i can get a sense of where exactly were the various industries concentrated.  MG

 

 The data you want is probably in the "Census of Production"-which is not part of the decennial Census (it isn't on the 11,21,31,sequence for a start). My memory is that the first one is 1907.

 

    Yep- 1907.  The publishing details from the one copy on Tinternet:

 

Seller Image

Final report on the First Census of Production of the United Kingdom (1907).: with Tables [Cd. 6320

Great Britain. Board of Trade

Published by HMSO (1912)

 

Item Description: HMSO, 1912. Hardcover. Book Condition: Good. No Jacket. 938 pages. Large size 33cm x 22cm . Rebound in sturdy sound cloth covers - the original blue paper covers are bound in after the end papers. Clean sound tight hardback. (Final report on the First Census of Production of the United Kingdom (1907) : with Tables Cd. 6320 pub. in 1912 

[Guest]

 

 The data you want is probably in the "Census of Production"-which is not part of the decennial Census (it isn't on the 11,21,31,sequence for a start). My memory is that the first one is 1907.

Thank you. I have in fact found the 1911 Census breakdown by industry and County since posting but it is vast in scope and provides a breakdown by County and age groups employed and gender. I am transcribing Lancashire, West, North and East Riding, County Durham and Northumberland.... I will be back in a month....Age distribution by industry is a major factor and can distort the outcomes for men of military age. For example the textile industry was a huge employer, but heavily tilted towards females and children (10-17).  It would take a lifetime to transcribe and analyse the data. 

 

Preliminary rough calcs on the back on an envelope show that the 'headline' numbers are very misleading as the underlying gender and age demographics were very skewed. 

 

Of interest is that the Agriculture industry was very bar belled -  lots of young and lots of old people. Not a good parallel for men of military age. So when authors such as Winter (and anyone who quotes him including me) state the Agriculture industry was under-represented, they are I think, wrong. .... I would argue yes and no:  when one takes the subset of men of military age in this sector, it was not under-represented. ...Which tells us that one needs to focus on the sub-group of men of military age rather than the whole set. Here the dynamics vary considerably with the headline 'industry' participation....and by extension I think many authors on this subject have drawn incorrect conclusions. This part is really very interesting, potentially groundbreaking..I'll stick my neck out:

 

Lancashire, West, East and North  Riding  (Yorkshire to anyone else) , Northumberland and Durham provided a disproportionate number of men in uniform despite supporting major war related industries. A theory yet to be proved. It was always my gut instinct based on the sheer number of battalions raised and the fact that the North seemed to be the favoured supplier of reinforcements for 'Irish' units - someting that belies that possible fact that the North continued to have surplus conscripts during 1916-1918. ....and it is interesting that the data is beginning to yield results having been properly stratified and filtered. I am ever conscious of confirmation bias (no-one is immune) and shall stress test any hard data before publishing here. 

 

I am sticking with my view that the North was over-represented in uniform. They have had no collective voice and that is something I cant quite understand. This should not denigrate the substantial contribution of other communities, particularly those of the industrial south (London in particular), South Wales and Scotland* or indeed the rural communities and those of the Dominions. This genesis of this thread was to try and address criticism of 'slum bred' British soldiers of the industrial North. I don't think I am anywhere close to a conclusion but I think things are becoming more clear. It seems that assumptions on the clear and present  physical deficiencies of industrial populations are not properly understood; In simple terms I suspect (but cannot yet prove) that the Class A (after 1917 Class I) men were sent off to fight leaving the Class C (later Class III and IV) to man the factories with the womenfolk and the Irish itinerant workers. We shall see....

 

One thing that is clearly not understood is the extent to which 'children' (in the modern concept (aged 10-17) were conscripted (yes I know its the wrong word but I cant think of the right word) into the workforce in 1914-1919. No-one has written that book. 

 

 

 

 

* The Scottish data (not shown here) is simply astonishing and will warrant a thread of its own. 

 

[Donald D]

No criticism of your very fine data, look forward to your follow up, but you appear to have Bedfordshire in twice.

[Guest]

On 10/12/2017 at 04:17, Donald D said:

No criticism of your very fine data, look forward to your follow up, but you appear to have Bedfordshire in twice.

 

  One entry includes Huntingdonshire one doesn't. It should read Bedfordshire  & Huntingdonshire. It doesn't really matter as I am quite focused on the top end of the chart.

[Steven Broomfield]

I thought Huntingdonshire recruited into the Northants Regt, with Hertfordshire into the Bedfords.

[Guest]

 

      Thus, the higher Beds+ Hunts figure minus the lower should give a true=-ish total for Hunts.??

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Steven Broomfield said:

I thought Huntingdonshire recruited into the Northants Regt, with Hertfordshire into the Bedfords.

 Yes. Got my H's mixed up. Beds has a Herts Bn which later split off I think... Rather like Cambridgeshire Regt used to be a Battalion of the Suffolks. A small matter. I was trying to approximate the counties with Regiments so Ox and Bucks consolidated and Notts and Derby  consolidated. The focus is really on the top of the table where the vast bulk of the population was. 

[Guest]

Here is the cleaned up table. Note Durham and Northumberland are combined because the Northumberland Fusiliers recruited heavily from the south bank of the Tyne in Co Durham. 

 

While imperfect due to the fact that Conscriptions sent men where they were required, there are some interesting trends. The one 'out-lier' is Middlesex which I think should be consolidated with London. 

 

Hampshire is consolidated with the Isle of Wight as the 1911 Census treats the Isle of Wight as a separate County. 

 

Yorkshire is shown as an additional line that consolidates West North and East Ridings.

 

Edit What the table really does (I think) is to show that areas such as London were probably supporting other areas as well. It seems unlikely that Surrey could raise so many battalions per head of population for example. 

 

Not shown of course is the KRRC and Rifle Brigade which recruited nationally, although I suspect with a slight bias towards London, Middlesex and the South. 

 

 

 

Edited 13 December , 2017 by Guest

[Interested]

Are the 1911 Census population figures totals across all ages?  I.e. is it a safe assumption that the age distributions are similar across all regions?

Any inconsistencies would distort the results in your 3rd column, I think.

Philip

[Guest]

On 11/12/2017 at 08:30, Interested said:

Are the 1911 Census population figures totals across all ages?  I.e. is it a safe assumption that the age distributions are similar across all regions?

Any inconsistencies would distort the results in your 3rd column, I think.

Philip

 

No. As already mentioned on a number of occasions the age distribution is not even. It varies considerably across industries and less so across regions due to the law of large numbers. 

 

The table is simply a starting point that raises many more questions than it answers. It simply highlights apparent distortions that raise questions. It seems abundantly clear that the various County regiments could not be sustained in many cases by the demographics of the indigenous County and therefore one might reasonably assume a substitution effect from nearby populous counties. It seems abundantly clear that London's surplus conscripts for example sustained a number of Home Counties regiments.

 

Separately I have run the data on English born/resident/enlisted men who served and died in Irish line infantry regiments. The theory being that the lack of conscription meant the shortfall had to be made up from somewhere. It is therefore no surprise that when we look at the fatality data (as a rough proxy) we find that the high density population areas are typically over represented in the data by a very long way. It seems logical to assume that the English in Irish regiments would reflect where the surpluses were. The Northern Counties are heavily over represented as are high population density Middlesex and London.

 

[Steven Broomfield]

But was there (and I ask because I don't know) a sizeable Irish expatriate community in parts of 'The North' and London, who might gravitate or be directed to Irish units?

Edited 11 December , 2017 by Steven Broomfield

[Guest]

On 11/12/2017 at 20:12, Steven Broomfield said:

But was there (and I ask because I don't know) a sizeable Irish expatriate community in parts of 'The North' and London, who might gravitate or be directed to Irish units?

 

It is impossible to say for sure as the Army did not keep records of the country of birth of parents or grandparents. The Irish largely settled in high population density areas (industrial towns) and their children and grand children were born in these towns thereby losing their Irish identifiers; they were recorded as born in England (or Wales or Scotland).  During the war counties with high population density areas produced surplus conscripts, some of whom were sent to fill gaps in Irish regiments. It does not necessarily mean that the War Office sifted men for Irish heritage to send to Irish Line Infantry regiments. What we can do is look at the SDGW data which recorded place of birth, place of enlistment and place of residence and see if these correlate with areas of historically high levels of expatriate Irishmen.

 

The Irish Diaspora. The peak in Irish born resident in England was in 1861 at 3.00% of the population. In Scotland the figure was 6.66%. Thereafter the Irish-born as a per cent of the population declined steadily. What the Census does not capture is the English born sons and grandsons of the 'peak' Irish-born population. Anecdotal evidence suggests large proportions of the second and third generation were born and largely remained in the same areas. 

 

In 1861 the Irish-born resident in England were in highly concentrated communities. There is a separate thread on this so I will not repeat all the detail here; the communities were largely concentrated in industrial hubs of the North, particularly Lancashire (8.95%), Cheshire (5.66%), Co Durham (5.45%), Cumberland (5.13%) and Northumberland (4.38%)  as well as London (3.81%) and Middlesex (3.65%). The dilutive effects of London and Middlesex's massive population are apparent.  In 1861 one in four residents of Liverpool (24.58%) had been born in Ireland.  The existence of the Liverpool Irish, London Irish and the creation of the Tyneside Irish provides some atavistic indications of concentrations of the Irish diaspora. Newcastle upon Tyne (6.77%), Durham (8.18%), Gateshead (7.25%)

 

English Counties: Over-representation in Irish Regiments. When we look at the counties that are over-represented in the English born/resident/recruited who died serving in Irish Regiments the top of the list is Middlesex. I think this simply reflects the fact that Middlesex and London were often conflated (we often see the sample place suffixed with either 'London' or Middlesex'). This is closely followed by Lancashire, London, Surrey (again often conflated with London), Northumberland and Durham, Wiltshire and Essex.  All the remaining counties show negligible or no over-representation.

 

Lancashire, London , Northumberalnd and Durham are highly correlated with areas where expatriate Irish were over-represented.  Essex (0.86% Irish born in 1861) is more difficult to explain. It may simply reflect that fact that Essex  (pop 1.35 million ) was supporting 30 battalions v Co Durham (pop 1.37 million) was supporting 42 battalions, perhaps suggesting Essex had surplus conscripts. 

 

Wiltshire As an Out-lier. Wiltshire (0.25% Irish born in 1861 - one of the lowest in the country) is the big anomaly having never had a large expatriate Irish community. The reason harks back to the formation of K1 battalions when large surpluses of Wiltshire Regt K1 recruits were diverted to the 10th (Irish) Div. There evidence that the vast majority had no Irish heritage (there is a separate thread that does the analysis). The Wiltshire men who died serving in Irish regiments are heavily skewed towards the units of the 10th (Irish) Div. This is little evidence from their Wiltshire Regt Army Numbers of later drafting of Wiltshiremen for Irish units. It is an anomaly that is explained by Kitchener's missive to send surpluses in Aug/Sep 1914 to fill the large gaps in the 10th (Irish) Div. 93% of the men who enlisted in the Wiltshire Regt who subsequently transferred to the Irish regiments were born in England, resided in England and enlisted in England. Their former Army Numbers indicate almost all were Aug-Sep 1914 enlistments. The men sent were in blocks of recruits with sequential Army numbers. It is unlikely in my view that the Wiltshire Regiment had clustered men of Irish heritage into one large mass  with consecutive numbers. It is equally unlikely that a county with one of the lowest historical expatriate Irish communities could produce a massive proportion of men with Irish heritage. So unlikely as to be impossible in my view. Sampling of men through historical Census shows almost no Irish heritage. I am 100% certain that the Wiltshire men were almost all of English birth and English heritage. They were nearly all C of E for example. 

 

While it would be easy to assume the 'English' conscripts were largely of Irish heritage, there is little evidence to support this. Only 6 of the 125 men who enlisted in Wiltshire who subsequently died serving in Irish regiments were born in Ireland. Of these only  two (less than 1% of all transfers from the Wiltshire Regt) served previously in the Wiltshire Regiment. Most in fact had served in English regiments before being transferred.  The Irish settled in areas of high population density (industrial towns) and two generations later these high population density areas produced lots of 'surplus' conscripts . Later these conscripts were sometimes diverted to fill gaps in formations built on 1881 recruiting areas.  The asymmetry  between the traditional recruiting areas and the populations are apparent; Lincolnshire (for example) could not support the same number of Battalions  for the Lincolnshire Regiment that Co Durham (for example) could support for the DLI whose population was over four times larger. 

 

Surplus Population  and Recruiting. Northumberland (pop 696,893 ) had a population only 1% larger than Devonshire (pop 690,993) yet it nominally supported 51 battalions against Devonshire's  29. (that's 76% more). We know the Northumberland Fusiliers could tap into Co Durham's vast population of 1,369, 860 across the Tyne. Devonshire did not have a neighbour with similar human resources. 

 

Conclusion. My belief is that the  surplus conscripts from high density population areas that were diverted to Irish line infantry regiments were not filtered for their Irish heritage. I think the Army was simply too busy trying to win the war rather than worry too much about the ethnic origins of English recruits.  Just a theory as yet unproven.

 

 

[Interested]

Thanks for replying regarding population distribution issues.

Also, trying to clarify the London and Middlesex issue, some of my forebears are from Bethnal Green, and interestingly the Census record shows Bethnal Green to be included in the Middlesex registration area.  not straightforward, then.

Hope this helps.

Philip

[John_Hartley]

4 hours ago, QGE said:

This is closely followed by Lancashire

Probably easily explained by geography - Liverpool being probably the most significant port of entry for Irish people. By the mid-19th century, you have a double push-pull. Push from the famines causing population emigration. Pull from the still developing Lancashire cotton industry creating jobs for those people (although many of those jobs that the Irish took up were in constructing mills, rather than working in them.

 

http://www.prideofmanchester.com/mancirish/history.htm

[Guest]

By 1911 the % of Irish born in England and Wales had diminished to 1%. Assuming the Irish born community in England and Wales had grown at the same pace as the English and Welsh, - in theory staying at 3% of Irish descent - it might imply a further 2% of the English and Welsh population were of Irish descent in addition to the 1% Irish born.. For those born in Ireland living in England and Wales in 1911 the communities remained highly concentrated (see below). Naval and Military establishments in some towns and counties slightly distort the overall picture. This is noted in the text of the General Summary of the 1911 Census Report. 

 

1851-1911 Census

 

1911 Census

 

Edited 11 December , 2017 by Guest