Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS)

3. infant mortality in the north of england, 1928

From 1911 onwards, mortality statistics were reported by local government district: County and Municipal Boroughs, Urban and Rural Districts. Unfortunately, the tables in the Registrar General's Decennial Supplements provide data for individual County Boroughs (and London Boroughs), but otherwise report only totals combining all the other urban units in each county and, separately, all the Rural Districts in each county.

Such data is used in the atlases created by Melvyn Howe and by Gardner et al, and also in our collaborator Daniel Dorling's recent comparison of the 1950s with the present, Death in Britain (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1977). However, using such data means, for example, merging Lancaster with a substantial part of modern Salford.

We are therefore exploring the more limited data for all individual local government districts published in the Registrar General's Statistical Review. The data are broadly similar to those in the earlier Quarterly Returns, but published annually, listing total births, total deaths and deaths under 1; in other words, we can compute an infant mortality rate and, drawing on our census data for the age and sex structure of each local government district, a Standardised Mortality Ratio. The example below shows the infant mortality ratio for the five northernmost counties in the late 1920s.