Two Sussex University academics are to use a unique record of British domestic life to chart how ordinary Britons moved from poverty to prosperity during the 20th century.
From this month, historian Dr Ian Gazeley and economist Andrew Newell will analyse data from government surveys of household accounts for the project – The Living Standards of Working Households in Britain 1904-60.
Mr Newell said: “Everyone knows we became massively better off but nobody knows the details of how prosperity trickled down to working households.”
According to Sussex University, research into living standards in Britain has been challenging because of the paucity of evidence.
Records exist for just three national household expenditure surveys for the period from 1904 to 1954.
For each survey, householders volunteered to keep a record of their earnings and expenses. They also provided details of their household structure and the occupation of the head of household.
The records for 1904 and 1937-38 have been digitised, so part of the Sussex academics’ project will be to digitise the last and largest data sample.
The Falmer-based academics will spend two years on the project, digitising the data for 1953-54, when 12,900 households took part. The records for 1904 and 1937-38 will also be made available online.
Dr Michael Hawkins, of the Newton Project, a project to place all of Isaac Newton’s papers online, also based at Sussex University, will supervise the digitising of the million images of accounts that make up the 1953-54 Household Expenditure Survey.
It will take about a year to photograph the returns and build online data sets for 1,200 boxes of accounts for the 1953-54 survey.
This new set will complement expenditure records from 1960 onwards, which are held by the National Archives in Kew.
The 1953-54 records are particularly interesting as they mark the divide between the end of post-war austerity, where basic items of food were still rationed, and the beginnings of the new consumer era.
In conjunction with the results from the post-1960 household expenditure surveys, the complete set of records from these earlier surveys will allow the researchers to build a picture of living standards for the entire 20th century.
In addition to research on living standards, these data have immense potential for future use, from research into obesity and smoking trends to patterns of charitable giving.
The university also said that the project, funded by a £1.1 million grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), could help developing countries to tackle poverty issues as their own economies grow, as well as providing a web-based “one-stop shop” for research into British living standards research.
Dr Gazeley said: “The eradication of extreme poverty is the first of the United Nations’ millennium goals, yet we understand surprisingly little about its elimination as living standards rose in the Western economies during the 20th century.
“For instance, for Britain, we do not know the precise roles played by the welfare state, self-help, education, reductions in family size, and improvements in real wages driven by technological progress.”
Research findings and resources will be placed on the web, forming a virtual research centre, said the university.
This would provide policy-makers, poverty agencies, public intellectuals, teachers, school children and any other interested party with the information needed to reach an informed opinion on the changing economic circumstances of working households in Britain.
The complete digitised records will be available to download from the National Archives’ website in the coming year.
Further work will include enlisting the help of secondary schools to create new household accounts, with pupils keeping records of family expenditure for a week, which will be compared with the data provided by families up to century ago.
The researchers are also planning to hold conferences to share their findings and to help work out how people can use the information as a teaching resource and also as a research resource.
