Don’t assume your ancestors all married and died young – Dr Edward Dutton has some surprising news…

Dr Edward

An 18th-century allegory of the ages of man, represented in a step scheme, with the Divine judgment under the stairs

We tend to assume that the further back we go in our family history the more likely people are to ‘live fast and die young’. With life increasingly precarious, our ancestors will have children younger and, surely, they’ll die younger. So, it may come as a shock, as you delve into your various lines, to discover that it’s not like that at all.

Life expectancy

You will often find that late Victorian ancestors didn’t live as long as mid- Victorian ones. In fact, if you factor out infant mortality – tragically high among the Victorians – then the life expectancy in 1870 was roughly the same as ours is now. Male life expectancy aged 65 was 10 years (75) compared to 13 years today (79). However, by 1900, it had fallen to just three years (68). And according to the Office of National Statistics, male longevity aged 65 reached a peak in about 1945, of roughly 12 years. It did not return to this peak until circa 1979.

In my own family history, this pattern holds with almost complete consistency. My great-grandfathers, born between 1885 and 1896, died aged 57, 67, 65 and 66. However, their fathers died, respectively, at 69, 77, 79, and 56. With one exception, they not only lived longer than their sons but lived over a decade longer. Their own fathers, however, generally did not live as long as them: 47, 74, 44, and 72.

Diet & lifestyle

According to nutritionist Dr Paul Clayton, the reason is simple: ‘The British diet deteriorated very significantly after about 1895…This is why the generation that were born in 1878-1890 experienced a decline in health and life expectancy.’

How old were your forebears when they wed & died?

Together with his colleague Judith Rowbotham, Dr Clayton has shown that public health among mid-Victorians was the best it’d ever been. In their study ‘How the Mid-Victorians Worked, Ate and Died’ (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2009), the researchers argue that the reason for this ‘Golden Age’ is clear. The mid-Victorians had an extremely healthy diet, did lots of exercise, and few people smoked. This peak in health was underpinned by a series of developments converging.

The Agricultural Revolution meant we could grow more vegetables, produce more animal feed, and breed more livestock. This led to fresh meat being available even in winter and food prices falling. With farming mechanised, and the Industrial Revolution in full swing, the population migrated to the cities in droves and power passed from the landed gentry to the factory owners. Control of parliament also began to slip from the gentry’s grasp, leading to the repeal of the Corn Laws, which had kept the price of corn artificially high. The Corn Laws had contributed to the ‘Hungry ’40s’, when many people had starved. At the same time, the railways were spreading rapaciously, bringing fresh food to people living in urban areas. In terms of access to healthy cuisine, we’d ‘never had it so good’. And this came alongside huge improvements in sanitation and medical science.