Page:Britain An official handbook 1954.pdf/24

 population meant more but smaller families. The average size of household 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 triple between 1911 and 1951. 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 at least 43 per cent of families of two persons, at least one 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 households, and this difficulty was aggravated by the suspension of house-building and destruction of property during the second world war. There were in 1951 only some 13.3 million structurally separate dwelling-places in Great Britain, so that over 2 million households had to share a home (see page 250). 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. The proportion of flats is greatly above average in Scotland (estimated at about 60 per cent) and considerably above average in London (estimated at 17 per cent).

Of the 14½ million private households in Great Britain, 11.5 million were estimated in the 1951 Census Sample to be of the simplest type, comprising married couples or widowed persons with their children, 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.

Nearly another million households were of these simple types except for the inclusion of parents or non-married brothers or sisters of the head of the household. Only 2 million households contained persons less closely related to the head than parent or brother or sister, or contained non-relatives. There were nearly a million families consisting of married couples, or married or widowed persons with children, who were without their own homes, and the majority of these were living in the homes of their parents. Apart from these satellite family groups, 1,102,700 households contained an aggregate of 1,240,000 other persons unrelated or distantly related to the head of the household, tire bulk of whom were presumably of the status of boarders. Of these more than half a million constituted sole individual additions to the more normal types of families with married heads. There were nearly 300,000 households consisting of two persons who were distantly related or were unrelated to one another.

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. In Great Britain as a whole it was estimated that, in 1951,180,000 households contained a total of 205,000 resident domestic servants. Of these, about half were in households of one or two other persons, and over a quarter were in the households of single or widowed or divorced persons, 40 years old or over, living alone except for a servant. A sample analysis of 1931 census data covering only England and Wales showed 706,800 resident domestic servants in private households, which compares with 178,000 in England and Wales in 1951.