The Thames of the North
The Social Survey of Merseyside. Edited by D. Caradog
SINCE Mr. Seebohm Rowntree published his famous study of York in 1901, a vast number of English provincial town areas have at different times been socially investigated. But the inquiry now before us, both in scale and scope, out- ranges any of its predecessors. Its only congener of equal rank is the New Survey of London Life and Labour, with the results of which its findings may at many points be profitably compared. The work was undertaken by the University of Liverpool with the aid of a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. A small strong committee was constituted with Professor Carr-Saunders as chairman ; and they appointed Mr. D. Caradog Jones as Director of the Survey, with a staff of three assistants and a secretary, supplemented by voluntary workers.
" Merseyside " for the purposes of the inquiry means four county boroughs — Liverpool, Bootle, Birkenhead and Wallasey—with five adjoining urban districts. In 1931 78.0 per cent. of the total population in this area lived on the Lancashire side of the Mersey and 21.4 per cent. on the Cheshire side. These proportions have been shifting for the past century in Cheshire's favour ; in 1831 only 3.5 per cent. were on that side of the river. The area as a whole is peculiarly inviting to the investigator, being, for so large an agglom- eration of human beings, remarkably homogeneous. Mersey- side is a great port, and very little else. Unlike London which, besides its port, contains great manufacturing centres, great banking and administrative centres, the capital of an Empire, and a huge well-to-do residential population drawn from far and wide, Liverpool remains by comparison a city of a single activity. That activity has suffered heavily under the world slump ; and though the data of this inquiry- were collected in 1929-32, largely before the worst blows fell, unemployment was even then much graver than in London.
The basis of the house-to-house inquiry was as follows. On a copy of the last register of electors every thirtieth inhabited building was ticked off. The buildings thus chosen were then further divided as between working-class and non- working-class families (according to the definition laid down by Professor Bowley for the New London Survey), and the investigation, carried out through school attendance visitors, was confined to the former. The sample thus obtained was nearly 7,000 families ; but it is important to remember that it was a sample, not of the whole population, but of the wage-earning class. Unless this is borne in mind, the various results obtained in regard to the poverty-line, overcrowding, or unemployment, which are expressed as percentages or fractions of it, will seem a good deal worse than they really are.
Taking the poverty-line adopted by the Inquiry (based on the bare cost of necessaries), it was found that of 6,780 families whose incomes were recorded, some 16 per cent. fell below the line. If public assistance were included, the percentage would be lowered to '14 ; • but no less than 10 per cent. of all the families were below the line and yet in receipt of no public assistance at all. If, on the other hand, the line were drawn, not by bare subsistence, but by Mr. Rowntree's " Human Needs " standard, the percentage below it would be 30. These results are markedly worse than those ascertained by the London Survey for East London ; wliere the percentage equivalent to Merseyside's 16 was 11. Curiously enough -the average working-class income in relation to needs seems to be rather higher on Merseyside, although the proportion in grinding poverty is so much worse. The main cause of such poverty in both areas was fotmd to be, not (as .in Mr. Rowntree's York 83 years ago) low wages, but unemploynient and casual labour. In 63.5_ per cent. of the Merseyside -families below the line the principal earner was unemploYed or casually employed ; and as another 31.4 per cent. hid no principal earner at all, I...will be seen that poverty in families with a principal earner regularly employed was
a very small scale. Another interesting point is that the
.percentage of persons in poverty between the ages of 21 and 64 inclusive was 13, while between the ages 0 and 4 it was 23.4, and between 5 and 18 it was 22.5. In this, no doubt.
two factors combine ; partly poverty breeds children, but partly also children breed poverty. The broad outlines of the Liverpool housing problem are pretty well known to housing reformers, and the Survey, though very thorough here, suggests no new conclusion. The second volume is devoted to an industrial examination of Merseyside, in which such matters as the decasualization of dock labour are gone into, with all other details of employ- ment subsidiary to the life of a great mercantile community. This volume closes with a chapter on " Surplus of Labour and Prospect of Employment," concluding that there is no visible hope of absorbing the surplus in the next ten years. Elsewhere it is shown that the population of Liverpool itself is declining rather more, it appears, than is accounted for by emigration to adjoining areas. On the other hand, the continuing immigration of Irish into Me rseyside is estimated to average about 6,000 a year ; a movement very hard to justify permitting, in face of a table like that on p. 199 of Vol. I, showing how they tend to swell the ranks of casual labour, or of their evidently preponderant contribution to Liverpool's worst slum problems.
The third volume surveys a number of public services— local government, education, public health, public assistance, infant welfare—of which the details are of most interest to the local reader, even though national interests are involved. But it also studies adolescents and pensioners, and gives an extended report on recreation and the use of leisure, and another on organized religions and the attendance (between 15 and 20 per cent. of the population) at churches. After a series of chapters on the various forms of physical, mental, and moral defect and on the social services, it closes with a very interesting chapter on differential fertility and its anti- eugenic aspects. Here it is shown, not merely that size of family is related to social class and the higher classes are the less fertile, but that the highest fertilities are largely associated with a sub-normal type, which is seen to be characterized by strong tendencies to low skill, unemployment, public assistance, overcrowding, and poor physique in all its forms. It seems clear that this type is contributing much more than its fair share to the population—a fact which British statesmen might be invited to consider, if it did not seem almost futile to bring any eugenic fact to their notice.
R. C. K. ENSOR.
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