Guest Post: Laurence Brockliss, ‘George Calderon and the Demographic Revolution’

King Edward VII
replica by Luke Fildes
oil on canvas, 1902-1912, based on a work of 1902
NPG 1691
© National Portrait Gallery, London

(He had six children, against his mother’s nine.)

George Calderon married Kittie shortly before his thirty-second birthday. For a professional man at the turn of the twentieth century, this was not an uncommon age to wed. For the last ten years I have been leading a cross-generational study of professional families in eight different towns in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Based on an original cohort of 778 professional men drawn from the 1851 census, the team has collected biographical data on 16,111 individuals, male and female, whose lives span the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout this period very few men from these families got married before their late twenties and many were in their mid- to late thirties when they did so. This was older than the average male age of marriage, around twenty-five, but it made economic sense. Entry to a profession was seldom possible before the age of twenty-one: even though few professions demanded attendance at university or an institution of higher education, most required a five-year apprenticeship. Once admitted to a profession, too, it was difficult to make ends meet for several years, and it was commonplace for military officers, lawyers and medics especially to continue to be supported by their fathers throughout their twenties.

Early marriage for a professional man was therefore deemed imprudent and even immoral by many contemporary commentators. This was one of the reasons why the University of Oxford was reluctant to accept female undergraduates, unless they were carefully segregated. It was feared that a co-educational university would lead to romance, marriage at a young age, and a life of poverty. There was some opposition to late male marriage from social reformers who considered it to be the reason for the large numbers of prostitutes in London and other large cities. By and large, though, prostitution was accepted, even by the established church, as a necessary evil. The primary concern that led to Parliamentary action in the 1860s was ensuring that prostitutes were disease-free, not with clearing them from the streets.

The career of a writer was one of the few professional occupations which had no entry qualifications at all: cub reporters could earn a salary from their mid-teens and freelance writers were their own man (or woman). But authorship was a notoriously insecure and ill-paid profession, except for the lucky few, as George Gissing graphically reminded his readers in his 1891 novel, New Grub Street, a cautionary tale of an author who placed scholarship and art above the iron law of the marketplace. By abandoning the bar in favour of earning his living by his pen, Calderon had put aside one notoriously overstocked and hazardous profession for another. His father’s success as a portrait painter, yet another occupation that created paupers rather than princes, might have convinced him that he could buck the trend, but he would have been acutely aware of the wisdom in delaying marriage as long as possible. How he dealt with his sexual needs in his twenties will remain, as it does for almost every other professional man of the period, a closed book.

George’s bride, Kittie, was two years older than her husband. Had this been her first marriage, she would have gone down the aisle as an old maid. Most of her social peers would have found a partner when they were in their mid-twenties, if admittedly the evidence from our own project suggests that the age at which daughters of professionals married was creeping up across the Victorian and Edwardian eras. But George was her second husband. She had married her first, Archie Ripley, at the age of twenty-eight, much closer to the norm. Where Kittie was unusual was in losing her husband at such a young age, then taking another. As divorce before the First World War was extremely rare and most professional men lived into their sixties and seventies, very few of their wives were widowed before their late fifties. As a result, only between one and two per cent of the 5,000 or so married women in our study ever married more than once. For the most part, in the early twentieth century, these were war widows, such as Hazel Louisa Furse (1883-1962). Hazel Louisa, née Forrest, was the daughter of an Indian Civil Servant who married Captain George Armand Furse (1881-1914), a professional soldier, in 1905. Through her mother she was distantly related to the Gladstones and the Bazalgettes. Her husband’s early death on the Western Front left her with three young girls to bring up, and in 1917 she married for a second time, Major Ernest Cole Fleming (1884-1917), the son of a Scottish doctor. Sadly, he perished almost immediately, and in 1920 Hazel tried her luck for a third time by marrying Captain Wentworth Holder Alleyne (1878-1950), who appears to have survived the war by being taken prisoner. Hazel’s unhappy life did not improve. Her third marriage eventually ended in separation, while one of her three daughters by her first husband, Aileen Alison Furse (1910-57), was destined to compound her woe by becoming the mistress, then neglected second wife of Kim Philby, before taking to drink and dying of influenza. Luckily, Hazel died before Philby was exposed.

Kittie’s age when she married George might explain why the pair had no children. There again, at the beginning of the twentieth century, only 7 per cent of couples were thought to be infertile. It is much more likely to have been the result of personal choice, especially as only two of George’s seven siblings produced children. The average annual birth rate per thousand in England and Wales peaked in 1866-70 at 35.3.

Calderon family photograph, 1 January 1894.
Clockwise: seated on floor George Calderon, Jack Calderon, Marge Calderon, Fred Calderon, Alfred Merigon Calderon, Evelyn Calderon, seated next to table Clara Calderon.

(Clara had eight children; they produced three of their own.)

It remained at this figure until 1876-80 and then began to fall to a pre-Baby Boom low of 15.9 per thousand in 1941-5. (Today it is 11.5.) The resultant collapse in the number of children per household was pioneered in particular by professional families. The mean number of children born to professional fathers who were married before 1861 was 6.4; the mean number of children born to those married in the years 1881-91 was 3.5. These figures come from a government report before the First World War drawn from the information in the 1911 census. If anything, they understate the collapse. Leeds is one of the towns studied as part of our professions project. Among the male and female descendants of the original cohort of 150 Leeds professional men, the average number of children produced by those who had been married for between eleven and twenty-two years in 1911 was 2.5. At the turn of the twentieth century, at the moment George and Kittie wed, these men and women were having none, one or two children in the main: only a quarter had more than two.

Authors and journalists were as likely to have substantially reduced their families as any other profession. In the Leeds case, this is borne out by the demographic history of the Baines dynasty. The Baines family, it may be recalled from my previous post, were staunch nonconformists who owned the Leeds Mercury throughout the nineteenth century. The founder of the dynasty, the MP Edward Baines Senior (1774-1848), had nine children (four boys and five girls), through his wife of fifty years, Charlotte Talbot, who was pregnant when he married her when he was twenty-four. His successor as owner-editor of the newspaper, the MP Edward Baines Junior (1800-90), had seven children (three boys and four girls). Thereafter the family became more circumspect. One son died at the age of thirty-one unmarried; another married but had no offspring; while only the third, John William Baines (1839-75), who took over the Mercury from his father and also had seven children, had a large family. The girls were just as unproductive: they managed only five children between them. The next generation, who began to marry in the 1890s, confirmed a new demographic regime had dawned. John William Baines had four girls and three sons. Two of the four girls never married; one had no children; the last had four. The three sons all married but had small families: Edward (1867-1946), a senior surgeon who lived in Whitby, married in 1900, and had a boy and a girl; Alexander (1873-1945), a government solicitor, married in 1903, and produced three children; while the Cambridge-educated Herbert Stanhope (1868-96), the last Baines to own the Mercury, might possibly have had more than a boy and girl, had he not died after only three years of marriage to an Irish-born Newnham undergraduate, Elizabeth Graham, whom he had met while up at Gonville and Caius College.

Herbert Stanhope Baines, c. 1895, the last member of the Baines dynasty to own the Leeds Mercury. He was born in the same year as George Calderon, 1868, and attended Cambridge University. His father John William Baines (1839-75) had seven children. Herbert Stanhope Baines married Elizabeth Graham, a Newnham undergraduate. They had two children, but Baines died aged only twenty-eight. © Andrew Baines, 2020

Herbert Stanhope Baines’s card for the 1895 election. His Liberal programme is impeccably progressive, but the heraldic symbols are probably intended to reassure voters that he believed in Home Rule within the Union. It was his first attempt to enter Parliament and the sitting Conservative and Liberal Unionist MP William Jackson defeated him by only 1500 votes on a 77% turnout after a 14-day campaign. For a full treatment of the Baines dynasty see Professor Brockliss’s previous post. © Andrew Baines, 2020

George and Kittie, then, would not have seemed peculiar in their social circle in being childless, and would have raised few eyebrows. They were part of a demographic revolution which was sweeping not just Britain and the white Dominions but the whole of Western Europe and the United States in the twenty years before the Great War. It is an insufficient explanation of their action, therefore, to say that they and their peers, unlike their parents, simply chose to have small families or none at all. Why was their particular generation, and class, rather than any other, empowered to make this decision, break with tradition, and trigger a completely novel demographic regime, which remains the default position today?

Many explanations of the revolution have been advanced by social scientists and historians but none has succeeded in gaining widespread consent. The most common argument promoted by those seeking to promote family limitation in the rest of the world has been that the revolution was the inevitable result of economic growth and improvements in health care. With industrialisation, there was an ever-increasing supply of desirable consumer goods for the better-off to purchase: a large number of children reduced the amount of money available to spend on such goods, and made it difficult to maintain the new inflated material lifestyle which was now the mark of respectability, i.e. keep up with the Joneses. At the same time, improvements in sanitation and medical knowledge greatly reduced infant mortality: as it became possible for the first time to know with reasonable certainty that a baby would live to be an adult, there was no need to keep adding to the family to ensure the survival of the family line. Unfortunately, it is not an argument that fits with the British historical reality. First, there was little improvement in infant mortality (that is, deaths of children before the age of one) in any social group across the long nineteenth century: the improvements in child mortality came in the five to twelve-year-old cohort. Secondly, the decades that witnessed the fastest growth in the standard of living of the middle classes and the landed, 1840-70, were precisely those when the national birth-rate, among all classes, rose to an historical high. It was only in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, when the growth rate slowed, that families, led by professional families, began to reduce in size.

Arguably, the most successful attempt to come up with a chronologically accurate solution to the conundrum was produced by the historical sociologist J.A. Banks in his 1981 book Victorian Values: Secularism and the Size of Families. In the third quarter of the twentieth century, Banks wrote three books on the cause of the demographic revolution in Britain, where he explored the relative weight to be apportioned to a number of variables that could have played a part, such as changing levels of prosperity, secularisation and the women’s movement. In the end, he opted, cautiously, for an explanation built around state modernisation. Around 1870 the British state replaced a system of appointment and promotion in the armed forces and the civil service based on patronage with one based on merit demonstrated through examinations and evaluation. The new system, which was adopted by the private professions and increasingly in business as well, had a profound effect on the mind-set of the generation moving into the workplace in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It taught them that success in life was not serendipitous or in the hands of others; rather, they were now masters of their own fate. How far they were to rise up the career ladder would depend on choosing an occupation that suited their talents and the extent to which they applied themselves. It was only natural that taking control of their lives in one sphere led the young men of the late Victorian and Edwardian age (and women, too, in that it was at this date they began to infiltrate at least certain professions) to believe they should control the size of their family as well. And if they failed to imbibe the message by transference, the very fact that entrance to the best careers required long years at boarding school and even university encouraged young professional fathers to think twice about having a quiverful of sons.

Banks’ argument, however, equally fails to cut the empirical mustard. The British state may have embraced meritocracy after 1870, and entry to the military and the home and imperial civil service may have depended on a public-school, and in the second case, Oxbridge education. But he was wrong to believe that meritocracy had replaced patronage and family connections in the private professions and business. Significant changes in the careers that absorbed the mass of middle-class sons occurred only after the Second World War. Our own research, moreover, has shown for the first time that the large majority of professional men, even those who entered their careers in the Edwardian era, did not go away to an expensive boarding school. Social polish and a good acquaintance with Ancient Greek were unnecessary for those entering the private sector. Instead, they attended cheap and local day grammar and proprietary schools where they learnt useful subjects, such as mathematics and simple accountancy, then moved on at sixteen to articles or an apprenticeship. It is a hoary myth, still continually peddled by present-day politicians and policy makers, that Britain’s comparative economic decline before the First World War was caused by the pernicious classical grip of the public schools and Oxbridge that taught the young to place service to the Commonweal and the Empire above the pursuit of profit.* That public-school was largely eschewed did not mean that young professionals were slow to join up and fight for King and Country. A very large proportion of young professionals of the right age, captured by our study, did good service in the Great War, but few would have carried a copy of Aristotle, Homer or Thucydides in their pocket. The educational background of Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and, of course, George Calderon, was not typical of the subaltern officer during the First World War. Wilfred Owen was a more representative figure.

Sir Roland James (‘Jim’) Corbet, son of Kittie Calderon’s closest friend Nina Corbet and the last in an unbroken male line since 1066

The Great War is a good place to end. If we cannot yet properly understand the causes of the demographic revolution, it is possible to reflect on its unexpected and tragic short-term consequence. The death-rate among British and Imperial subalterns in the First World War, as everyone knows, was appallingly high. Every death of a young soldier would have been heart-breaking for their families, but it must have been particularly so for the mothers and fathers of many of the junior officers. It was they who, for the first time in human history, had decided to limit their families to often just one boy and girl. When a son and heir died on the Western Front, for many professional families there was no spare.

*  Banks wrote before the Cambridge School of Historical Demography had begun to study the demographic revolution in detail. We now know that the national pattern obscures complex regional, confessional and occupational differences that may explain why no-one since has attempted to isolate a dominant explanatory variable. For the present state of research, see especially Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1860-1940 (Cambridge, 1996), and Michael Anderson, Scotland’s Populations from the 1850s to Today (Oxford, 2018).

© Laurence Brockliss, 2020

Laurence Brockliss is an Emeritus Professor of History of the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He works on the history of education, science and medicine in Britain and France between 1500 and the present day. His books include French Universities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford, 1986); [with Colin Jones] The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 1997); Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2002); and The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford, 2016). He is currently writing-up an ESRC-funded study of the professions in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.