Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS)

6. persons on poor relief as a result of unemployment, january 1922

When our original application was made to the ESRC our database was limited to the pre-1914 period. However, as our plans for our book developed we concluded that what in our published papers had been a largely implicit comparison with the inter-war period should be made explicit, and that existing research on the detailed geography of inter-war unemployment was astonishingly limited, mainly concerning itself with a small number of very broad regions defined by the Ministry of Labour which, for example, lumped together Tyneside and Lincolnshire.

In the summer of 1995 we received a small grant from the Nuffield Foundation which has permitted new data entry from the Ministry of Labour 'Local Unemployment Index' and inter-war poor law statistics.

Unfortunately, the former commenced only in 1927, perhaps justifying extending our use of trade union sources through to 1926. However, during the early 1920s recession many remained outside National Insurance and relied on the poor law. From 1922, pauperage statistics specifically identified those relieved 'as a result of unemployment' and they prove to have had a markedly different geographical distribution from other paupers, who remained concentrated in the rural counties of the south and east.

Note the high rates on the coalfields and also in east London. Some unfortunate gaps in the map are due to post-1910 boundary changes which will be covered in the extended GIS discussed below.