1911–1951

Abstract

In 1911, as has been noted, a first attempt was made to produce separate tables for distributions by occupation and by industry. Inspired by the British Empire Statistical Conference of 1920, the Registrar General and his Officials repeated this endeavour in a more determined way in 1921, so that the ambiguity that bedevilled previous reports was largely removed. So it is that it becomes possible to mobilise workers into occupational classes defined by characteristics inherent in their occupations. This is what I have done with the census data from 1911 to 1981, in an endeavour to measure the quality of the labour force. The occupational classes used here are related to, and generally derived from, the social classes and socioeconomic groups used in the census (see Census 1951: Classifiation of Occupations, HMSO, 1956; and Routh, 1965, Appendix A).