RSSeNEWS to be determined...

There are not many RSS talks in which the presenter sings a verse protesting about the census, impersonates Winston Churchill, or highlights the significance of the 1837 trial of a telegraph signalling system on the incline out of Euston station. All these and much more were covered by Basil Mahon in his short history of official data collection in the UK, at a well-attended South Wales group meeting in March, held at the ONS in Newport.

Basil, an author and former government statistician, called his talk ‘Knowledge is power’, a quotation from the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon. Governments have justified data collection through censuses, surveys and administrative means in order to carry out the job of governing and to exercise their authority.

The history was told in three acts. In the first two acts, Basil outlined social statistics and business statistics, each up to 1940. The story of social statistics was largely about the population censuses (including protests in Ireland), health and education data. Business statistics also largely depended on censuses, but of production.

Basil used the foundation of the Central Statistical Office in 1940 as the start of the final act. In that year, Winston Churchill had requested, in a memo to the War Cabinet Secretary, that a single statistical office issue ‘the final authoritative working statistics’. He had noted the confusion caused by people arguing on different statistical data. Developments since then had been about bringing official statistics together, including through the Government Statistical Service, whilst keeping statistics connected with policy areas.

And the telegraph trial along a mile of track outside Euston? That led on to the transatlantic telegraph cable, the telephone, radio, television, the internet, and everything that people and governments rely on to conduct their day-to-day business, including the collection of data and the dissemination of statistics.

Basil’s paper was commissioned by Dame Karen Dunnell, when she was the National Statistician, to mark the Society’s 175th anniversary. The paper is being made available on the UK National Statistics website.

Report by Paul Allin