1911+Census+-+Households

=Household structure=

The Census returns for our area cover a total of 131 households, 43 in Alexandra Road, 20 in St Georges Road, 45 in Hatfield Road, and 23 in Southfield Road. Six of the houses in Alexandra Road were shared between two households, and Hatfield Road had one shared house. All the other houses and each of the Southfield Road flats contained a single household. There were also a few houses for which there are no returns, presumably because they were unoccupied on Census night, either because the houses were vacant or the household members were staying elsewhere.

The average number of people per household was three. St Georges Road has a slightly higher occupancy per house, five, and the Southfield Road flats a slightly lower average. There was one single person household in Alexandra Road, a 39-year-old single dressmaker, two in Hatfield Road, a widowed 41-year-old law clerk and a single 46-year-old motor cab driver, and one in Southfield, a single 67-year-old lady's maid. The largest household, in Alexandra Road, held a husband and wife, their eight children, aged 1-14, and the wife's mother. There were twenty-three two-person households, twenty of them husband and wife, one widow with a small child, a single woman living with her elderly father, and another single woman living with her stepsister. There were forty-one households of three people, largely married couples with one child, but also married couples living with in-laws, and three single sisters in their 40s who did fancy needlework.

There were thirteen three-generation households, three with fathers or fathers-in-law, nine with mothers or mothers-in-law, and one with the head of household and his wife, their son and his wife, two grandaughters, and an adopted daughter. Eight households other than those already mentioned included brothers or sisters of the head of household or his wife, three brothers and five sisters, and one of these included not only a single sister-in-law, but also two school-age nieces.

Twenty of our households included boarders, fourteen of them with just one, five with two, and one household with three. They were fairly evenly distributed between the households with three to eight members, though the two bedroom house in Hatfield Road must have been crowded with its husband and wife, five children aged fourteen to two, and one male boarder. The three boarders, all male, two aged nineteen, one thirty-two, shared their household with the its head, his wife and their twenty-year old son. All four younger men gave their occupation as "motor works", so were presumably work colleagues. Only three of the boarders were female, a clerk, a milliner and a lady of "private means".

Seven of the households had servants, all female, and one of them had two. This was in St Georges Road, where a commercial traveller, his wife, their nine-year-old son and one-year-old daughter had both a mother's help, aged 25 and a general servant aged 21. Most of the other servants were also to be found in St Georges Road. One of these was a fifteen-year-old in a household with husband, wife and daughter of under one, another a twenty-five-year-old in a house with three children aged between 9 and 3, a twenty-one-year-old in a house with three children aged four to newborn, and another fifteen-year-old in a household with a married couple in their forties. Alexandra and Hatfield had just one servant apiece, an eighteen-year-old in a household which containing a married couple and the wife's 77-year old mother (our oldest inhabitant), and yet another 15-year-old in house with two children aged 1 and 2.

There were also twelve visitors on Census night, who have not been counted into the calculations of household size. The most interesting of these are the two listed at one of the houses in Alexandra Road. One is a woman who has the same place of birth as the woman of the house, Godmanchester in Huntingdonshire, possibly an elder sister, and the other someone whose occupation is given as midwife. Their presence is almost certainly explained by the fact that the youngest child of the three listed, Mary, has a date of birth of 2 April 1911.