Printing and distribution of the GRO's reports

Edward Higgs

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the reports produced by the General Register Offices (GROs), in both England and Wales, and in Scotland, were always published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO), which was then a government department. These included the results of the decennial censuses, and the Annual and Decennial reports of the Registrar General (the head of the GRO), which contained data on births, marriages and deaths derived from the civil registration system. HMSO at first sub-contracted the printing of these publications to commercial printers but later took over this task as well.

Until about 1920 the Census, Annual and Decennial reports were all Parliamentary Papers &mdash they were 'laid before Parliament', i.e. they were considered to be so important for parliamentary business that they were distributed free to Members of Parliament. These documents are also referred to as 'Sessional Papers' because they were subsequently bound up in volumes by the parliamentary session in which they were laid before parliament, and usually are cited as such. Thus, the First annual report of the Registrar General for England and Wales can be cited as 'BPP 1839, XVI' — it can be found in the sixteenth volume of the Parliamentary Papers laid before the 1839 session of Parliament (First annual report of the Registrar General). From 1920 onwards, probably as an economy measure in the aftermath of the First World War, the Census, Annual and Decennial reports all ceased to be Parliamentary Papers. They were published as before by HMSO, but everyone now had to purchase them, as had always been the case for the general public. Some of the publications of the GRO in London, such as its quarterly and weekly reports on mortality, were never Parliamentary Papers.

In its early days, however, the GRO in London had a conscious propaganda mission (Szreter), and was able to distribute large numbers of its reports gratis to people it wished to inform and influence. Prior to 1858 the Office had sent in excess of 4,000 free copies of its Annual report to registration officers in the country, to every clerk in the GRO, to all coroners, and to learned societies, medical practitioners, reading rooms, mechanical institutes, the statistical departments of foreign governments, and private individuals. It also distributed 9,000 free quarterly reports, and an astounding 65,000 free weekly reports a year (National Archives, London: RG 29/1, 551–2). The Treasury then decided that as an economy measure in future the GRO was only to receive 100 Annual reports, 100 weekly and 150 quarterly reports. (National Archives, London: RG 29/5, 425–6). This position subsequently improved slightly. Thus, in January 1876 the HMSO informed the Treasury that the Registrar General, 'has hitherto, always been allowed 350 copies of his Annual Report..., mainly for distribution to parties, mainly abroad, from whom he expects, or has received information.' (National Archives, London: STAT 3/16, 268). But the distribution programme of the London GRO plainly never returned to the position of the 1840s and 50s.

The speed with which the GROs in London and Edinburgh published their various reports depended, to some extent, on their overall workload and on external factors. Thus, in England the publication of the Annual reports appears to have been delayed in the early part of each decade, presumably because much of the clerical effort of the GRO was being put into the analysis of the census data collected every ten years in the second year of the decade. The Annual report might appear up to 40 months after the year upon which it commented, although a twelve-month gap was more usual. The First World War created even more problems for the GROs, as clerks volunteered for the Front. In the case of the English GRO, one of the volumes of reports on the 1911 census did not appear until 1923 (Census of England and Wales, 1911. Vol. XII).

The English GRO attempted to get round some of these problems in the 1840s and 1850s by producing a shorter abstract that was laid before Parliament, and by publishing the full report with an explanatory text separately at a later date. Thus, an abstract relating to the births, marriages and deaths in 1848 had been laid before Parliament in 1850 (Eleventh annual report of the Registrar General), but the full report was not completed until December 1851, and not published by the Stationery Office until 1852 (Eleventh annual report of the Registrar General). This means, at least for some years in the mid-nineteenth century, that the Annual reports found amongst the published Parliamentary Papers are not the full texts, a phenomenon that can cause confusion. These dual publications ended with the Annual report for 1855. However, in Scotland, perhaps with the example of the English before them, the Scottish GRO always produced two sets of reports from its inception in 1855. A preliminary Annual report was published within a year or so of the collection of the data, but a more extensive detailed annual report was published some years later. In the early years the gap between the two reports could be five years but this narrowed towards the end of the Victorian period. Both the preliminary and 'detailed' Annual reports were, however, Parliamentary Papers.

REFERENCES

Census of England and Wales, 1911, Vol. XII. Fertility of marriage. Part II (London: HMSO, 1923). [View this document: Fertility of marriage (part II), 1911]

Eleventh annual report of the Registrar General (1848), BPP 1850 XX (1255). [View this document: Eleventh annual report of the registrar-general ]

First annual report of the Registrar General (1836) BPP 1839 XVI (187). [View this document: First annual report of the registrar-general]

Eleventh annual report of the Registrar General (1848)(London, 1852). [View this document: Eleventh annual report of the registrar-general (Registrar-general's edition)]

TNA RG 29/1, GRO Letter Books: Outward Vol. 1.

TNA RG 29/1, GRO Letter Books: Inward Vol. 1.

TNA STAT 3/16 Stationery Office, Treasury Out Letters.

Simon Szreter, 'The GRO and the public health movement in Britain 1837–1914', Social History of Medicine, 4 (1991), 454–62.