Britain: An official handbook > 1966

10
BRITAIN: AN OFFICIAL HANDBOOK
Marriage Over the past thirty years the proportion of the whole population who are
married has risen from 43 to 51 per cent, while the proportion of single
persons in the population over 15 years of age has fallen from nearly a third
to under a quarter. This change has been due mainly to an increase in marriage
rates among men and women in their late teens and early twenties. In 1962
some sixty per cent of the young women aged 20 to 24 were married; in 1931
only twenty-five per cent were married. Earlier marriage has led to a large
increase in the number of children born to women under 30 years of age and
in recent years has contributed to a substantial acceleration of the total flow
of births into the population.
FertiUty Trends The fall in birth rates in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early part
of the twentieth centuries was due mainly to a decline in the size of the family
(i.e. the number of children born per married couple) caused by the spread
of deliberate family limitation. Couples married a hundred years ago produced
on the average rather more than six liveborn children. The decline seems to
have set in with those married in the 1860s, and continued steady until, with
the couples married in the late 1920s, the average family size had been reduced
to between 2'2 and 2-1. The decline then stopped, and the figure remained
stable in spite of the disturbance of the war years; the latest data suggest a
definite increase.
The generation of girls born about 1840, and married mostly between 20
and 30 years later, had about 40 per cent more children than were needed to
replace the original generation, while those born at the beginning of the present
century had only about 70 per cent of the number of children needed for
replacement. Since then the figure has been rising again and seems likely to
exceed full replacement with the generation born during the second world
war. The rise has been due mainly to the increased proportion of children
surviving to adult life and of women getting married; but there has also been
some increase in family size and fertility statistics suggest that this increase
is continuing.
^ge The first effect of the fall in the birth rate was to reduce the number of
Distribution children, and therefore the ratio of dependent population to working popula¬
tion. This ratio was at a minimum in the i93os- After 1936 the number of
children leaving school for work fell sharply owing to the drop in the birth
rate after 1921, while the population aged over 4° continued to increase and
the population aged over 64, born during an era of high fertility and repre-