Britain: An official handbook > 1977

IO
Fertility Trends
Age
Distribution
Migration
BRITAIN 1977: AN OFFICIAL HANDBOOK
There were nine decrees of divorce made absolute in 1975 ^or everY I)000
married people in England and Wales; a substantial proportion of divorced
people marry again.
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 (that is,
the number of children born per married couple) caused by the spread of
deliberate family limitation. Couples married just over 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 the average family size
for Great Britain fell to less than 2-1 for those married in the decade 1934-43.
There has since been some increase, and the average family size of women
marrying in the 1950s is about 2-3 liveborn children, although recently married
women have delayed child bearing.
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 women getting married and
of children surviving to adult life.
The effect of the fall in the birth rate beginning in the latter part of the nine¬
teenth century was to reduce the ratio of children and old people to adults of
working age. This ratio was at a minimum in i93°- After 1936 the number of
children leaving school for work fell sharply owing to the drop in the birth rate
after 1921, but the population aged over 64, born during an era of high fertility
and representing successive generations of steeply rising numbers, increased
very rapidly; the population aged over 40 was also increasing relatively faster
than that between 15 and 40. The higher birth rates after 1942 arrested the
compensating fall in the number of children and further reduced the proportion
of people of conventional working age.
Because of this high proportion of the young and the old in the present
population, which is expected to increase still further, and the growing numbers
of young people continuing in full-time education, there is a special need to
make the best use of national human resources, both by ensuring that those
available for work are able to find suitable employment and by increasing the
rate of technological improvement and of training and retraining in order to
raise productivity. At the time of the 1971 census 91 per cent of men and 55 per
cent of women between 15 and normal retirement age (65 for men, 60 for
women) in Great Britain were economically active in remunerative work (this
includes those temporarily out of work or sick). In addition some 19 per cent
of men and over 12 per cent of women over normal retirement age were still
economically active. At the other end of the scale, some 30 per cent of young
people between 15 and 20 were continuing their education (in 1971, 15 was
school-leaving age; it was raised to 16 in 1972).
From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the i93os t^ie balance of
migration was markedly outward. Between 1815 and 193° weM over 20 million
people left Britain for destinations outside Europe, mainly in the Common¬
wealth and the United States. Many emigrants later returned and large numbers
of Europeans, mainly Russians, Poles, Germans and Hungarians, entered