A Wild Detail From The 1921 Census Sheds Light On A 100-Year-Old Betrayal

Like the U.S., the U.K. usually conducts a census every ten years. It doesn’t just count the overall population, but notes details of gender, race, profession, familial relationships and a host of other important demographic details. This information can be used to help governments make plans and allocate resources.

Everyone in England and Wales is legally obliged to complete or be recorded in the census. It marks one single day in one single year, but that day defines a decade. The government might use it to make decisions, but for the rest of the public, it remains something of a mystery. We might hear some disembodied statistics, but the stories are considered private.

Well, they’re private for a century, anyway. Then the full document is released with every little account of human life and death in all its strange and unpredictable glory. In 2022 the census for 1921 was released, and for the first time we were able to see just how different to us — and sometimes how similar — those people used to be.

Just look at some of the headlines: “Surplus women” living together because of the lack of men; aristocrats taking a break from the London season to talk to an archaeologist just before he made history; and a ground-breaking Jamaican-born doctor who couldn’t find a job despite graduating top of his class. And then there’s the unlikely figure of William Ambler, who probably never realized his struggles would make the news long after his death.

When talking about something that happened in 1921 it’s almost impossible to avoid mentioning WW1. It caused unprecedented destruction across Europe and changed everything about the social order. Website History.com tells us there were upwards of 18 million deaths, with nearly 1 million of them in Britain. Even more people ended up with permanent disabilities, as per the Historic England website. 

Of course, it wasn’t just Britain that saw astonishing change in that period. It was in 1917 that the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar in Russia and the world saw its first communist government. A growing America was quick to take advantage of newly fallen empires and rose to become the globe’s leading economic powerhouse.

For Americans the 1920s would be the “Roaring Twenties” or the “Jazz Age”, a time of decadence for many that would burn bright until its dramatic collapse in 1929. It was also the decade of Prohibition, and the associated rise in organized crime. Wealth and corruption would sit side by side.

The immediate aftermath of the war included the devastating Spanish flu pandemic that killed millions around the world. It was also in 1918 that the U.K. saw women being granted the vote for the first time. And the 1920s brought the election of Ramsay MacDonald, who became the first Labour Party politician to become Britain’s Prime Minister.

In this time of turbulence, a census to document a rapidly changing society became even more important. England’s first census had arguably taken place back in 1086 when William the Conqueror recorded the residents of his new kingdom in the Domesday Book. It didn’t take its current ten-year form until 1801 though, and even then it didn’t include all the same details.

The 1921 census was especially significant because it was the first carried out under the 1920 Census Act, which provided a new and specific framework that is still used today. To put it precisely, the British government’s website describes it as “an act to make provision for the taking from time to time of a census for Great Britain or any area therein and for otherwise obtaining statistical information with respect to the population of Great Britain.”

It was on the evening of June 19, 1921, that 8.5 million households filled in their census forms. According to broadcaster the BBC, that represented a total of 38 million people, who between them would take up nearly a mile of shelving with their returned questionnaires. Spare a thought for today’s archivists having to scan all of that onto the computer! There was one little problem with that night, though.

If you take a look at the forms, then you’ll see they’re dated for April 1921. So why did the count actually take place in June? Well, the authorities hadn’t been able to send them out in April because of strike action. The census was delayed but no one managed to change the form and the old date remained in print.

As you can imagine, it was no easy task to coordinate all those millions of forms. Every single one of them had to be delivered by hand. The people who did this were called enumerators and they would later have to go and retrieve them all again. No wonder, as per the BBC, that one referred to it as a “wearying job.”

One of the enumerators described the task, saying, “You walk from house to house trying to look pleasant and important, and doing your best to make believe you're loving the job, while all the time you feel you would welcome the Earth to open and swallow you up.” It probably didn’t help that children used these very important documents to doodle, or play tic-tac-toe.

And what did the enumerators see when they brought the census back to the office? Well, the impact of the war was definitely a prominent theme. For instance, Harold Orpen was a retired Army officer who lived in Paddington, London. That’s not the most interesting thing about him. Neither is the fact that his house had six rooms, nor that he lived with his wife Joan and their servant, Florence Wiles.

No, what is particularly eye-catching about his entry is that it wasn’t written in ink. Orpen had done something unusual and used a typewriter rather than a traditional fountain pen, explaining, “I lost half my right hand in the late war and cannot write properly.” All the same, people such as James Bartley, who lived with his wife and three children in a single bedroom in Sussex, may have said Orpen was lucky to at least have a proper home.

It wasn’t only the returning soldiers who felt the influence of the war on their lives. There were also the “surplus women”, or those who had been left behind when their husbands or potential husbands were killed: there were around 1.7 million of them. With their marriage prospects damaged, these women often gathered together in the same lodgings.

Most 1921 boarding houses were run by women. Take Elinor James of Bloomsbury: there were an impressive eight rooms in her home and between them they hosted five single women between the ages of 25 and 32. Most were employed as teachers and nurses, and some had even loftier aspirations, such as working towards careers in architecture, medicine or law.

Of particular interest in Elinor James’ boarding house was a 28-year-old translator who was among the first generation of pioneering women to graduate from Oxford. She earned first-class honors in 1915 but collecting a degree remained forbidden to women until 1920. Her name was Dorothy L. Sayers, and she would become famous as the author of Lord Peter Wimsey crime novels.

Every resident in that boarding house had an intriguing story. There was a librarian called Edith whose surname is an illegible mystery. Young Kitty Wood found employment at the venerable legal chambers of Lincoln’s Inn, where she was a clerk. Then there were the travelers, including Dublin-born Ursula Murphy. She was a civil servant in the Foreign Office, whilst Australian Alice Saxty made dresses for celebrated artist Dora McLaren.

This being Great Britain, there were also some genuine aristocrats in the census. As it took place during the “season”, there were many lords away enjoying parties in London rather than at home. That wasn’t true for every noble though, and the Earl of Carnarvon, his wife, daughter and two guests were attended by four servants at Highclere Castle that night.

If the name Highclere sounds familiar, that might be because you followed the exploits of the fictional Crawley family: the castle was the setting of the popular program Downton Abbey. The Earl of Carnarvon had something the Crawleys didn’t, though. His visitors included the soon-to-be-famous archaeologist Howard Carter. Carnarvon would soon fund Carter’s little expedition to find a long-buried Egyptian pharaoh by the name of Tutankhamun.

The role of the census in documenting social history can also be seen through the likes of Dr. Harold Moody. He had attended King’s College, London, where he passed his medical degree with flying colors. Now he lived with his wife, Olive and their five children in a ten-bedroom house in Peckham, south London. They were joined by a 17-year-old servant by the name of Frances Hinds.

Another significant fact about Harold Moody? He had been born in Jamaica, which then was still a British colony. According to the Office for National Statistics, in the 2020/21 period there were around 44,000 Jamaicans in the U.K.; 100 years earlier, though, there were only 1,712. Might that explain why Dr. Moody couldn’t find work in a hospital and had to practice from home? As per the BBC, he certainly became an activist for racial equality, not least by founding the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931.

And then we come to Ambler, who in many ways may have been a quite ordinary man, but whose circumstances made for a highly unusual census entry. In fact, his story was one that couldn’t have been told before. This factory worker in the industrial town of Bradford, Yorkshire, was a married man who hadn’t shared a roof with his wife for over 20 years.

The reason a story like this wouldn’t have appeared in a previous census was because the new 1921 format changed everything. Questions were being asked that had never been asked before. How old were your children, to the month? Were they in school? For whom did you work? Where did you work? And, most significantly to Ambler, were you divorced?

At first glance this shouldn’t have made a difference to Ambler. He wasn’t divorced. In fact, the legal status of his marriage was absolutely undisputed and totally immune to change — much to his disappointment. In the section of the census that asked about marriage, he said he might have to “serve life-long misery” because of it.

That’s a pretty maudlin way to describe a marital union. What happened to the lifelong joy and companionship that are supposed to be the hallmarks of marriage? William explained in detail why he had become separated from his wife. Twenty years earlier she had cheated on him and had even given birth to an illegitimate daughter with that other man.

You’d think that something like that could be considered grounds for divorce, right? Even with the more conservative divorce laws in place at the time, surely infidelity was on the list of acceptable reasons for a marriage to end? And it was, technically — if you were reasonably well-off and could bear a bit of scandal.

The law was something else that was changing at the time, in line with the fact that divorce was slowly becoming more common. As explained by British newspaper The Guardian, in 1921 it was still governed by the old Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. This cited the extremely restricted grounds that could form the basis for divorce in court, and yes, adultery was supposed to be one of them.

Like so many things at the time, divorce was usually biased in the favor of men. Women couldn’t petition for divorce just because their husband was unfaithful, they needed an additional cause. For men, adultery alone could do it. That would change with the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923, but none of that would help Ambler. His problems with ending his marriage had a different origin.

The fact that divorce was legal didn’t mean it was encouraged, or acceptable in polite society. Ambler was only a factory worker and there was no way he could afford the expensive fees necessary to make his separation legal. He was too busy trying to pay his estranged wife maintenance, as he’d been ordered by the court.

Ambler was explicit about how he felt about this. “Is it not high time there was [sic] divorce laws to dissolve such unions?” he asked. He was talking about society acknowledging that marriages sometimes just break down and should be allowed to dissolve. This easier, more accessible concept wouldn’t enter the statute books in Britain until 1969: a little late for Ambler.

It wasn’t only Ambler who had comments to make about the state of divorce in the U.K. Another Yorkshire resident, a housekeeper named Edith White, wrote, “We favor divorce-law reform.” The “we” in question may have included the adult son and daughter who still lived with her.

Of course, this attitude wasn’t shared by everyone. Henry Forrest was a teacher in Manchester. He wasn’t married and at 42 still lived with his younger siblings. Bachelorhood didn’t prevent him from having vehement opinions about divorce and its appearance on the census. His explicit words were to describe divorce as a “CURSE on the country.” Yes, with the all-caps. Imagine him on modern social media!

There were around 1.6 million widows in the UK in 1921. The war had taken its toll when compared to the just over 600,000 bereft spouses mentioned in the 1911 census of ten years earlier. The number of divorcees was considerably lower: only 16,000 people would list themselves as divorced in 1921.

People such as Ambler can easily be forgotten by history. Having a census that records his own life in his own words is something unique and precious. It allows historians to see not just the statistics, but the stories and attitudes behind them. The window it provides into the past is unlike anything else.

Unfortunately, it’s not always something available to us. The 1921 census was made public after 100 years, as were other censuses before it. Yet there will be no such release for 1931. That’s because it was destroyed in a fire many years ago. And in 1941 they didn’t even conduct a census, because WW2 had kicked off and the British Government and its citizens had more pressing concerns.

That means that those of you who are particularly excited by stories such as Ambler’s are going to have to wait until 2052 if you want to see the next generation of entries. Until then, at least there’s still plenty of stuff to look at from previous releases. With so many millions of entries in 1921 alone, just how many details are still to be explored?