VII .sx THE ENDURING FAMILY :sx A FIRST .sx IMPRESSION OF THE RETURNS .sx IN this chapter are given some first impressions of the Family returns received up to the beginning of April 1932 .sx They are first impressions only , not definite results .sx It will be impossible to say what definite results may emerge from the returns till their statistical analysis has been completed a task of many months .sx This chapter aims only at giving some impression of the kind of information that has come in and the kind of people from whom it has come .sx It is based on a hasty survey of as many forms as possible , and a careful reading and sampling of a few hundreds .sx The first and much the strongest impression that one gets in reading these returns is of the interest and care with which they have been made .sx The form is not a short and easy one ; filling it up is not an affair of a few minutes .sx It has twelve sections lettered from A to M each with any number of questions .sx To fill the whole form fully may take a person used to such work an hour and a half or two hours ; it must have taken many of those who sent in returns much more than that .sx I thought myself that most people , even if they wanted to fill in something , would be content to .sx answer only those sections which in the instructions are named as most essential :sx the Reference section A , section B , which gives marriage dates and ages , and section D , which gives the actual children of the marriage .sx I was quite wrong in this expectation :sx most of those who sent the form back have filled substantially the whole of it .sx 90 per cent .sx and upwards have answered not only the sections A , B , and D , but also E occupations and earnings of husband , wife , and children ; G husband's and wife's parents and their marriage and occupations ; H husband's and wife's brothers and sisters ; and J place of meeting of partners .sx The only section of general application which was not answered by more than 90 per cent .sx was F on Family Expenditure , and there we got answers from over 60 per cent .sx Finally , there was M the most difficult section of all , on " Changes and Forces in Family Life , " which I put at the end , so as not to frighten people , but we have answers in that section from 70 per cent .sx There is one section ( C ) as to previous marriage , which applies , of course , only to a very few people ; there is another ( K ) for remarks , and there is another ( L ) for offering further information .sx These naturally were not filled in by most people , though as many as one in four have offered further information in section L. .sx The result of this fullness with which the forms have been filled is that each separate form contains a great deal of information .sx It deals as a rule , not with one husband and wife and their children , but with parents , grand-parents , brothers and sisters , children's marriages and children's children .sx On most forms we find three complete families a husband and wife in section B and their children , the family in which the husband was born , and the family in which the wife was born .sx Taking a sample of 500 forms we found that , on an average , each recorded just under six marriages and nearly twenty-eight separate persons .sx Seven thousand forms and we have already close on that number will give us something like 18,000 families , 40,000 marriages , 180,000 separate persons after allowing for uncertainties and duplications .sx The marriages stretch over every decade in the nineteenth century , and there are a substantial number for every decade from 1850 to 1930 .sx There is any amount of work for statisticians in that .sx The care and interest with which forms have been filled is the first impression ; the fullness with which all sections have been answered is the first surprise .sx From what parts of the country and from what sort of people have these forms come ?sx A preliminary answer to the first part of this question is given graphically in the chart on p. 124 .sx This shows the distribution of the Family returns among fifteen principal districts of Britain , and compares this distribution with that of population and of wireless licences .sx That is to say , it shows of 100 of .sx population , of 100 wireless licences , and of 100 Family returns respectively how many are found in each district .sx Where the shaded rectangle ( representing wireless licences ) is longer than the white one ( representing population ) as in London , Essex , and Middlesex , this means that in that district there is more than the average number of licences per head of population ; where the shaded rectangle is shorter than the white one , as in Scotland , this means that there is less than the average number of licences per head of population .sx Similarly , comparison of the black rectangle ( representing Family returns ) with the other two shows whether in any particular district there is in proportion to population and to wireless licences more or less than the average number of Family returns .sx Comparing , first , population and wireless licences , we see that broadly over the whole south of England there is more than the average number of wireless licences per head of population in Britain ; while in Scotland , Wales , and the extreme north of England wireless licences are below the average ; in between , in the Midlands , Lancashire , and Yorkshire , they are about the average .sx Looking , next , at the Family returns , we see that these have come in more than in proportion either to population or to licences from .sx the south and west of England , rather less from Lancashire and Yorkshire , and still less from the extreme north of England and Scotland .sx In the east of England and the Midlands they have come pretty well in proportion to population and licences .sx In England , the mining areas and those occupied by depressed staple industries have , as might be expected , sent fewer Family returns proportionately than other districts .sx In Scotland the position is obscured by taking the country as a whole , though this is necessary since the census figures for the separate counties in 1931 have not yet been issued .sx Actually from the industrial centre of Scotland Edinburgh , Lanark , Renfrew , Dumbarton , Linlithgow , Stirling , Fife Family returns have come in more than in proportion to licences , though less than in proportion to population , the number of licences per head being very low in that district .sx On the other hand , in the north of Scotland there are proportionately more licences but fewer Family returns .sx While , however , these differences are interesting , the main result of the comparison in the chart is to show that on the whole the Family returns have come in substantial proportions from all parts of the country .sx This is more important than minor variations from one district to another .sx The forms are spread fairly evenly by districts .sx How are they spread by economic grade ?sx In section A of the form those filling it have been asked to classify the husband's occupation as being that ofwage-earner , salaried person , employer , or worker on own account .sx Of every hundred forms about twenty come from families where the husband is a wage-earner , fifty-five from families where he is salaried , ten from employers , and fifteen from people working on their own account .sx These figures show that , as compared with others , wage-earners are at present much under-represented in the returns ; instead of being about one-fifth of the whole they ought to be three-quarters .sx That does not mean that there are not plenty of people of limited means in the form ; of those who are salaried , a few have a total family income under 150 a year , more than one-quarter are under 300 a year , and more than half are under 500 a year .sx Of the wage-earners about 45 per cent .sx are under 150 of total family income , and another 45 per cent .sx are between 150 and 300 ; 7 per cent .sx are between 300 and 500 , and 3 per cent .sx of the wage-earner families have more than 500 a year .sx Just as wage-earners as such are under-represented , so naturally the poorest families in the country are under-represented ; so , apparently , are the richest .sx The great bulk of the forms nearly two-thirds come from people with between 300 and 800 a year ; that is , of total family income , not husband's earnings only .sx It is to people of the middle economic grades that this enquiry has appealed most strongly .sx For that , I think , there is a definite reason , which I will come back to later .sx For the moment I want to .sx make it clear that the fact that wage-earners and the poorest families generally are not represented in their due proportions in our returns does not in the least destroy the value of the returns .sx It lessens the value of what one can say about the classes which are under-represented , but doesn't prevent one from reaching some conclusions even about them .sx And it hardly affects the value of the returns for other economic classes at all .sx How great that value is going to be , what is going to come out of the forms , there is no means yet of guessing .sx We may find one always does find all sorts of unsuspected pitfalls , as our statistical analysis gets to work .sx We can only say that the care and accuracy with which the returns seem to have been made is very encouraging , and there are plenty of them .sx The idea with which some critics of our enquiry started , that , since there are eight or nine million families in Britain , one cannot learn anything about changes of Family life without examining all the families or a large proportion , is too fantastic to need refutation .sx But to say positively what we can hope to learn we must wait until we have done our statistical analysis .sx The most interesting and important results do not appear in a first impression .sx Of course , one or two things that statistics will bring out are beginning to show in a cursory inspection .sx One sees decline of birth-rate at work , in innumerable individual cases where a husband with thirteen brothers and sisters and wife with six have twochildren only , or a husband with three brothers and wife with five also have two children only ; one professional man gives numbers in three generations ; in each of the four families of his own and his wife's grandparents were on an average 8 children ; in the two families in which he and his wife were born there were on an average 5 children ; in his own there are only two .sx One sees again that we are going to learn very interesting things about change or persistence of occupations from one generation to another .sx In the handful of forms which I have looked at carefully I have come across striking cases where the families of both husband and wife have had one and the same occupation for three generations back :sx on one form they were all bank managers or bank officials ; on another all farmers .sx One comes across other striking cases of rapid change of economic grade .sx Whether fixity , or what Professor Ginsberg in his discussion with me called economic mobility , is going to predominate , we cannot tell till we have been through all the forms .sx Anyhow , it is clear that people have been much interested in giving their parents' and grandparents' and relations' occupations .sx They've equally been much interested in thinking back on how they and others of their family came to meet their respective partners .sx This section J has been filled in in 95 per cent .sx of the cases , and often for more than one generation .sx But though naturally one always glances at section J , there is no doubt .sx which are the two points that on a first survey are most interesting .sx One is the reason given ( in section E ) for choice of occupation ; the other is section M on Changes and Forces in Family Life .sx