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7
AREA AND POPULATION.
Acres. Estimated Population.
1563 110,299
The population of the Metropolitan Borough of Deptford at the
census taken April, 1911, was 109,496.
Estimate of Civil Population, 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
National Register, which referred to a date only six weeks removed
from that for which estimates were required, viz., the middle of the
year 1915. No doubt this does not form a perfect record as it is known
that a number of persons escaped registration. From investigations
however which have been made in another connection it appears that
the defects in the register taken as a whole are not on such a scale
as to affect seriously the estimates of population based upon it. By
the method described below it was possible to derive from these returns
estimates of the civil population only of each administrative area on
August 15th. No attempt has been made to increase these by allowance
for members of the fighting forces because, apart altogether from the
difficulty of ascertaining the average military population of each district
during the year, experience has shown that under present circumstances
only civilian deaths can be tabulated for local areas. If military deaths
were to be included they would have either to be debited to the area in
which they occurred, a course which would render the death-rates of
districts containing large military hospitals meaningless, or to the area
of residence. An attempt made to pursue the latter course has had to
be abandoned owing to military authorities having been unable to furnish
to the registrars the necessary information. It has been found necessary
therefore to limit the tabulation of deaths by local areas to deaths of