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28
BATTERSEA.
In this Sub-district the registered deaths in 1868 were
1046—553 males and 493 females. From this number,
however, should be deducted 82 occurring in the Union
Workhouse of persons not belonging to the parish, although
dying within it. This will reduce the mortality proper to
the Sub-district to 964.
The registered births were, in the same period, 1975—
1007 males and 968 females. The excess of births over
deaths was therefore (reckoning the entire mortality) 929,
or, making the correction for the deaths of non-parishioners
in the Workhouse, 1011. The addition to the population by
natural increase was consequently large, but much larger
it is calculated, must have been the increase by immigration.
Without more reliable data than we possess at present,
it is next to impossible to estimate with anything like
exactness, the increase by influx of new residents, but the
number of houses erected within the past year I have
ascertained was 1530, so that (filled as a large number of
these houses have been by strangers and their families
within a few days or weeks of their completion) it may
be fairly assumed that the increase by immigration in 1868
was quite as large as, if not larger than that of any year since
1861. Putting, however, the increase from all sources at
the very lowest estimate, it is pretty clear that a seven
years' interval must have added to the population to an
unprecedented extent, giving a death-rate much lower than
the mortality statistics would at first sight seem to warrant.
There is embodied in the annexed Form (the usual one
employed in the local summaries) much information relating
to the mortality of this Sub-district during the past year, that
cannot fail to put the reader in possession of many facts, it
would be very difficult to furnish in a comprehensive manner,
but through the medium of a carefully prepared statistical
table—a table that shall give at one view, as this does, the
sex, ages, and social positions of all who have died in the
parish, and have been registered within the year under
review.