The Occupational Structure of England and Wales: the 1939 National Register

Abstract

A gap in the census surveys for England and Wales between 1921 and 1951 hinders the analysis of their labour structure for the interwar years. The present article uses a dataset containing occupational titles from the National Register – a census-like enumeration of 1939, recently digitised by the genealogy service ‘Find My Past’ – which was previously assigned numerical codes (the pst system). The study expands the existing data analysis on the occupational structure of England and Wales by introducing three further variables: the gender of the surveyed individuals, their age, and the shares of the inactive population per gender and age groups.