Britain: An official handbook > 1959

THE BRITISH ISLES
17
In 1911 there were about nine million private households1 in Great Britain. By
I95I> according to the censuses of England and Wales, and of Scotland, there were
about 142 million households, an increase of about 60 per cent. This expansion,
so much more rapid than the 19 per cent increase in the total population for the
same period, was, in fact, of the same order as the increases in the numbers of
persons over 24 years old and of married persons. In other words, the increasing
age of the population meant more but smaller families. The average size of house¬
hold in Great Britain fell from 4-5 persons in 1911 to 3-2 in 1951. In England and
Wales the number of persons living in households of one or two persons almost
trebled between 1911 and I951 • At the end of this period such households constituted
about 40 per cent of private households and comprised about 20 per cent of the
population in private households. About two-thirds of the persons living alone in
1951 were 60 years of age or over, while in 43 per cent of families of two persons, the
head of the household was 60 or over.
It has been difficult to increase the number of separate dwelling-places (houses
or flats) sufficiently rapidly to overtake the increasing number of private house¬
holds, and this difficulty was aggravated by the suspension of house-building and
the destruction of property during the second world war. There were in 1951 only
some 13 7 million structurally separate dwelling-places in Great Britain, and about
2 million households shared a home. It is unofficially estimated that about three-
quarters of all dwellings in Great Britain are terraced or semi-detached houses
(usually of 4 to 6 dwelling-rooms including bedrooms) while the remaining quarter
consists of detached houses and flats in approximately equal numbers. In 1951, the
proportion of flats was greatly above average in Scotland (estimated at about 60 per
cent) and considerably above average in London (estimated at 17 per cent).
Of the 14-I million private households in Great Britain in 1951, n| million were
estimated according to the 1951 Census One Per Cent Sample Tables (based on an
analysis of a representative one per cent sample of census returns in Great Britain)
to be of the simplest type, comprising married couples or widowed persons with
their childien, if any, or persons living alone. More specifically, they comprised
3 ’2 million married couples with no children, 900,000 widowed persons living
alone, 6 9 million married couples or widowed persons with children of any age,
600,000 single persons living alone. Over a third of all married couples living alone
were 60 years old or over; less than a quarter of the married couples under 40 years
of age in these simplest types of household had no children; and the majority of the
single persons living alone were over 40 years old.
Only 2 million households contained persons less closely related to the head than
parent or brother or sister, or contained non-relatives. In nearly half of these
households, a second family—a married couple or a woman with children—was
living with the first family, usually the parents. Of the remaining 1 -i million house¬
holds which contained some unrelated or distantly related persons (numbering
1 ’24 million), 300,000 households consisted of only two persons.
Over 8 million households (57 per cent of all households) were estimated in the
1951 Census Sample Tables to be without children under 16, while another 3-1
million contained only one child.
It was estimated that in 1951 there were 180,000 households in Great Britain
employing a total of 205,000 resident domestic servants, of whom 178,000 were in
England and Wales. This compares with an estimate of 706,800 resident domestic
servants in England and Wales in 1931.
1 Counting persons living alone as one-person households.