51
female occupations is one of the places where the difference is discernible
The occupations of males as recorded in 1911 are shown in Tables 19 and 20, which are re-arrangements of the information in the 1911 Census, and the occupations of Northern District males as recorded in 1921 in Tables 21, 22, and 24. It will be seen that the enumerators in the two Districts in 1911 differed in their classification of occupations. It is unlikely, for instance, that there were no restaurants in Northern District, and certain that there were numbers of ferry boats (the absence of ferry boats may, however, be a reflection of the 1911 Census tendency not to record the floating population in Northern District). Equally, there were certainly fishmongers in Southern District. Clearly, some people were being entered into “General” classifications in the one District, who would have been separately classified in the other. Similarly, there seem to have been differences of interpretation in, for instance, the distinctions to be drawn between general carpenters and boat-builders, and between medicinal drug-dealers, and opium sellers. Too much weight should not be placed on the detail of these tables, therefore, although certain general conclusions can be drawn from them.
The dominance of society by farming in the Northern District comes out clearly in these statistics. About two-thirds of all men in that district in 1911 were full-time farmers. This dominance is even more profound in the 1921 figures, where 78.8% of all the recorded males are farmers—although, as noted above, these figures probably include part-time farmers, and are not completely comparable with those of 1911. Even in Northern District the second most important occupation was the other major primary occupation of fishing, with 8.1% of males employed in it in 1911 (9.4% in 1921). The long-standing quarrying industry in the area is also clearly shown, with 1.7% of all males in Northern District in this trade (in 1921 there were about 1.8% of all recorded males in this trade in Northern District). The remaining males in Northern District in both 1911 and 1921 were working as shopkeepers, artisans, or labourers, some in the market-towns, the others within their villages.