Following our look at The People newspaper from 1911 census day, we’ve turned our attention to The Times from 3 April 1911 - the day after the 1911 census was taken.

In an article called ‘The Taking of the Census’, the newspaper describes the royal household’s completion of the 1911 census. It reports that the royal family ‘set an excellent example in the careful and accurate filling up of the Census schedules.’ Not all the credit should go to the royals themselves, however, as the article goes on to say, ‘the Royal Family did not supply the details personally, but the necessary particulars were carefully compiled and returned on their behalf.’

Looking at a very different section of society, the article then focuses on how homeless people were recorded in the 1911 census. It reports that the Salvation Army walked the streets of London on census night ‘to gather men in from the highways for food and rest and enumeration and classification.’

Regent’s Hall was ‘prepared for some hundreds of wanderers’ and, although midnight was given as the official opening time, ‘an hour earlier scores of men, shabby in appearance and too poor to pay for a bed in the cheapest “doss-house,” had lined up on the pavement in front of the Westminster shelter.’ It’s easy to understand the incentive for these men to be included in the census: after being enumerated, each man received soup and bread and a place to sleep until 4am when they were sent back to the streets with ‘two big hunches of bread and margarine’.

The police had orders to take a census of anyone they found living on the streets on census night but the Salvation Army’s work had ‘practically cleared the streets of its usual nomads’. We discovered 10 homeless men who were recorded in the 1911 census as being ‘found in open air’:

Click to enlarge

In another article in the same newspaper, ‘A Last Word on the Census’, The Times poignantly comments: ‘We are all, by faithfully writing a line or two in the great Book of the Nation, helping each other; and, to an extent and in ways in which we can now imperfectly realize we are also helping ages to come.’ We couldn’t have put it better ourselves!

In the lead up to the 2011 census on Sunday 27 March, we’ve been looking at The People newspaper from Sunday 2 April 1911 - the day that the 1911 census was taken.

In an article named ‘Numbering Nobs’, the paper informs readers about the different census questions, the problems they could pose and offers tips on completing the form.

Directed at the head of the household, the article stresses the importance of filling in all the questions: ‘any evasion is treated with the severest penalties’. Slightly menacingly, the paper goes on to state that, ‘No one, however great or however insignificant, can escape the census’.

On the issue of how to approach potentially sensitive questions when filling in the census, the article uses the example of a cook who is separated from her husband. The head of the household is advised to ‘postpone his questions till after dinner - otherwise the dinner may be spoiled.’

Here you can see a 1911 census return which suggests that the head of this household didn’t read The People’s advice on how to fill in the form:

Click to enlarge

The article also mentions the suffragettes, saying ‘the avowed determination of the suffragists to withhold all information about themselves is likely to lead to considerable friction in some quarters.’ It goes on to say that ‘the more hardy’ protesters would probably spend the night in Trafalgar Square. We know all about one famous suffragette’s whereabouts on census night - Emily Davison spent the night hiding in the House of Commons.

It’s fascinating to read about how the nation prepared for the 1911 census. Perhaps in another 100 years, future generations will be doing the same with the 2011 census.