7 - Poor Law statistics and the geography of economic distress

Summary

Introduction

This chapter forms part of my continuing research on the antecedents of the ‘North-South’ divide in Britain, a division defined most commonly, in economic terms and for policy purposes, in terms of unemployment; it first became generally recognised in the form of the ‘depressed areas’ of the inter-war period. My earlier research has studied the regional distribution of unemployment between 1851 and 1914, using the records of trade union unemployment insurance schemes. These are arguably a very reliable source for trade union members, but clearly cover only a small fraction of the working population; existing analyses are further restricted to three principal trade unions: the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE), the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (ASC&J), and the Friendly Society of Ironfounders (FSIF). The results of these studies point consistently to the concentration of high levels of unemployment in the north of England, contradicting various authors who have asserted that the First World War marked a turning point, and hence that the ‘Depressed Areas’ dated only from the inter-war period (Southall 1984, 1986, 1988).

Given the significance of these findings for an understanding of the genesis of the British regional problem, there is a need for confirmatory analyses of economic distress concerned with a larger part of the population. The Poor Law, in contrast with the trade unions, notionally provided relief for the entire population, and therefore provides the obvious base for such a wider study.