IT has taken hundreds of historians and technicians three years to digitise more than 18 million pages of century-old census documents - revealing the lives of every man, woman and child in the country like never before.

Taken on June 19, 1921, the census is a survey of 38 million people living in England and Wales during a period of economic turmoil between two world wars and recovering from a global pandemic. As reported in the T&A yesterday, the document records one-year-old Thomas Moore from Keighley, who went on to become national treasure Captain Tom.

Also mentioned is Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who famously fell for the Cottingley Fairies hoax. The author and spiritualist was intrigued by photographs taken at Cottingley Beck by cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, shown to Bradford Theosophical Society in 1919, and publicly declared that he thought they were real. He gave the girls a folding quarter-plate Cameo to take more pictures. The camera is now at the National Science and Media Museum.

Conservators, technicians and transcribers from online geneaology service Findmypast have digitised more than 30,000 bound volumes of original census returns, from Windsor Castle to cramped family homes, now available to the public for the first time. Released after 100 years in vaults, the records offer a snapshot of life across the nation - the grim reality of post-First World War Britain, amid crippling unemployment and social unrest, a changing jobs market and a shortage of adequate housing.

The records highlight working-class hardship. James Bartley, a young father of three, wrote: “Stop talking about your homes for heroes and start building some houses and let them at a rent a working man can afford to pay.”

Retired Army officer Harold Orpen apologised for providing a typed response rather than the required handwritten one, adding: “I lost half my right hand in the late war and cannot write properly.”

Audrey Collins, National Archives historian, said: “We see firsthand peoples’ heartfelt comments. You don’t protest about something if you’re just a little irritated; these are real cries from the heart. Undoubtedly, things were very, very grim for an awful lot of people in the 1920s.”

The deadly impact of the First World War is writ large, with the census recording around 1.7 million more women than men in England and Wales. The population grew by just 4.9per cent from 1911-1921, having previously seen a double-digit increase every decade since records began.

The records also reveal a nation emerging from the grip of a global pandemic, with mask-wearing and isolation an eerie similarity with what was to happen a century later. The Spanish flu epidemic, which hit Britain in summer 1918, was later described by the UK’s Chief Medical Officer as “a pestilence which affected millions of men and women and destroyed more lives in a few months than did the war in five years.”

In 2020 historian Dr Christine Alvin wrote in the T&A: “Bradford, like the rest of Britain, was unprepared. When the influenza arrived it infected victims regardless of whether they lived in a slum or suburbs.

"There’s still debate about the origin of the virus, but research suggests it came from China and may have arrived in vast war camps in northern France where there were millions of troop movements, and where many of the 135,000 Chinese Labour Corps workers began to arrive from 1916, some thought to have brought a form of flu that was raging in China.

“It arrived in Bradford in June 1918, maybe from injured soldiers transferred to local hospitals, or returning home. The Yorkshire Observer announced outbreaks in Bradford: “It spreads with extraordinary rapidity”...”the best advice is to avoid crowds”

"The influenza outbreak overstretched the city’s medical professionals, already under strain with many serving abroad or treating invalided soldiers. Bradford’s Medical Officer of Health reported on”the grave shortage of medical men and nurses” and advised people to isolate. Schools were closed, pubs were out of bounds and there were repeated warnings to avoid crowds.

A second wave in autumn led to more deaths. Bradford Infirmary closed its doors to new patients, as large numbers of staff fell ill. A third wave followed in 1919, and the virus continued overseas in 1920.

The impact was still felt in 1921 when the census was taken. More detailed than any before, it asks about workplace and industry for the first time. And people could declare their marital status as 'divorced', with more than 16,000 doing so.

The census has been completed every 10 years since 1801, although documents remain secret for 100 years. The 1921 data is particularly significant as the 1931 census returns were destroyed in a storage unit fire, while the 1941 census was abandoned in the Second World War. The most recent census for England and Wales was sent to households in March last year.

Findmypast has launched 20sPeople, a programme of events and activities connecting our lives in the 2020s with those of people in the 1920s. Chief executive officer Tamsin Todd said: “Taken between two world wars, following a global flu pandemic, during a period of economic turmoil and migration, with social change at home, the 1921 Census documents a moment in time that will resonate with people today.”