A year the rate cannot describe
The counters are a peacetime year. A big war is a different kind of year, and it often burns the office that would have recorded it.
Every figure on the dashboard is an annual rate from a recent, mostly ordinary year, divided down to the second. It does not secretly include 1916 or 1943. Those years are not a faster version of the same count. They are years in which the count, and the population it was counting, both came apart.
The dead, and the missing paper
Two things happen, and the second is the one this site is for. People die in numbers that make an ordinary annual rate meaningless for a while: in battle, and in larger numbers from hunger, infection, and cold, and in the births that do not happen. And the registers stop. Offices are burned, occupied, or abandoned. Populations move. Soldiers and civilians are written in different systems, or not written at all. A later historian can estimate the dead. A later statistician cannot pretend the estimate is the same kind of object as a WHO file for 2023.
The wars readers will expect are 1914–18 and 1939–45. They are enough. The first of them is tangled with the 1918 influenza, which Three kinds of paper treats as a failure of certificates. The second is the clearer case of paper itself being destroyed.
A census that did not survive the war
The 1931 census of England and Wales was destroyed by fire in 1942. No census was taken in 1941, because of the war. A census is not a death register, but it is the base a death rate is divided by. Losing it is what a war does to the years on either side of the fighting, not only to the years of the fighting. The National Archives keeps the file on that loss.
Battle deaths are the smaller part of the story, and the part that gets the monument. The figures people quote for the dead of 1939–45 are in the tens of millions, military and civilian together, and they do not agree with each other. They do not agree because the count was one of the things the war broke: famine in one place, occupation in another, a front where no clerk remained. Publishing one total here would pretend the Ledger had a file it does not have.
The counters keep running at a peacetime pace because that is the only pace the current papers support. A war year is not hidden inside them. It is the year the method refuses. The bills of mortality is how a count gets started. This piece is how one gets lost.
Sources
- The National Archives: the 1931 census for England and Wales was destroyed by fire in 1942, and no census was taken in 1941 because of the war.
- National Archives file RG 20/109, “Destruction of 1931 census schedules by fire,” 1942–1950.