Introduction: the National Efficiency crisis

In the previous chapters it has been shown how it was that the GRO pulled back from launching a new official social classification scheme for the 1891 census after an initial expression of interest in the mid-1880s. It had become clear during the intervening few years that such an innovation was both likely to undermine the Office's long-standing autonomy in utilising its vital statistics for medical, epidemiological purposes and was also certain to provide intellectual ammunition for other, competing ‘schools’ of empirical social science that had emerged during the course of the troubled 1880s. They offered diagnoses of the causes of and remedies for urban poverty and disease that rivalled those of the environmentalist public health movement, to which the GRO continued to owe its primary allegiance.

In this respect relatively little had changed by the late 1890s, when preparations for the succeeding census of 1901 were beginning to be made. Financial restraint was still the order of the day in central government and especially at the closely-watched LGB; the main departmental rival for the GRO's control of the census – the Labour Bureau of the Board of Trade – was stronger than ever, having become a fully fledged Department in 1893. The segregationist proposals of Marshall and Booth regarding rural labour colonies had now become an experimental reality, enjoying something of a vogue among several important social work institutions, such as the Salvation Army, the Church Army and the Home Colonisation Society.