National Registration Day

Sunday 15 August 1915 was National Registration Day in Britain. On that day every civilian aged between 15 and 65, man or woman, was to fill in a register form, the compiling of which had been decided by the July Act. Only soldiers and sailors were exempt from the obligation. In England, Wales and Scotland about 29 million forms were distributed. It was a kind of extraordinary census, but with one important difference: in an ordinary census the head of the household filled in the form for the whole house, whereas this time every adult answered for himself or herself.

Blue and white forms

Men received forms in a greyish blue, women white ones. They asked for name, age, address, nationality, marital status and number of dependants, and above all for occupation, employer and whether the person was working for the government. The last question was the most important: whether the person filling in the form was qualified for other work and willing to take it up. From the answers the government wanted to know how many people it could still move into munitions factories, mines and agriculture, and how many into the army.

Registration was carried out by local authorities under the supervision of the Registrar General for England and Wales, Sir Bernard Mallet. The forms were delivered to homes and collected after the Sunday, largely by volunteers. In the London borough of St Marylebone help came from, among others, parishioners and activists of women’s war organisations, and the borough authorities provided interpreters for its many foreign residents. Scotland chose its own arrangement: the registrar there collected all the forms in Edinburgh, whereas in England and Wales they remained in the local offices. Everyone who handed in a form received a certificate of registration, which they were to sign and keep. It was not, however, an identity card, only confirmation that its holder was on the register.

Pink forms

For the government the most valuable data were those of men of military age. Officials copied them onto separate pink cards. The cards of those working in occupations considered essential to the war effort, for example in mining, the munitions industry or on the railways, were marked with a black star. Such a star protected a worker from the recruiters.

The results of the registration were summarised in September. It turned out that about 5 million men of military age remained outside the army, of whom more than 2 million were single. In the autumn the pink cards became the basis of Lord Derby’s recruiting campaign, in which canvassers visited men in their homes. Opponents of the Act had warned from the start that the register would make it easier to introduce conscription, and in January 1916 that is what happened. The forms were kept in the offices until 1921, when they were ordered to be destroyed. Only a few survived, among them more than two thousand women’s forms from Cirencester in Gloucestershire.