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7
POPULATION AND HOUSES.
The enumerated Population at the Census taken on Sunday, April 2nd, 1911,
was 49,357, a reduction of 10,048 on the previous census of 1901 or 16.9 per cent.
During the previous decennium 1891-1901 there was a reduction of 7,376 or 11.0
per cent. The Borough is becoming; less and less residential and more and more
important as a business centre. The number of factories, workshops, workplaces
and offices keeps increasing so that we have now a very large day population.
The density of the population was 122 persons per acre in comparison with 61
for London.
The number of inhabited buildings was 7,985 and uninhabited 1,393 and
38 were in course of erection.
Further details were given in my Annual Reports for 1912 and 1913.
ESTIMATES OF CIVIL POPULATIONS, 1915.
The war has made it impossible to adhere to the methods of estimation of
local and national populations hitherto in use. Men of military age have been
largely drafted to military training centres or sent abroad with the Army, and
the remainder of the male adult population, as well as, to a lesser extent, the
female population, has migrated on an unprecedented scale into areas other than
those in which it was enumerated at the last census.
Under these circumstances estimates of local populations based on the census
returns were clearly inadmissible, and it became necessary to search for a substitute.
Fortunately this was ready to hand in the shape of the National Register. Those
who were absent from their homes on the Registration Day were afterwards
allocated to their proper district.
The method by which the estimates of civil populations have been derived
from the National Register is as follows:—
The ratio of the total population less the males aged 15-65 years to the
number of females aged 15 to 65 years at the date of the census was calculated
for each administrative area, and this ratio was applied to the number of females
on the National Register; the resulting product plus the number of males aged
15 to 65 years on the National Register was taken to be the number of the civil
population of the district. Other small adjustments for the population in
institutions which were not registered together with a number of persons of no
fixed abode were distributed evenly over the whole country. These adjustments
raised the original estimates by about one per cent.