Male height and wellbeing in nineteenth century New Zealand: an analysis of the Boer War contingents

Abstract

We report on the heights and physical characteristics of New Zealand soldiers who served in the Second Boer War. Adult heights are widely used as evidence of the standard of living. The adult NZ-born soldiers had a mean height of over 68 in., which is tall for the period and consistent with NZ having a high standard of living at the turn of the twentieth century. To explore the implications of using self-reported ages, we match soldiers to their birth records to establish their true age. We document a tendency for young soldiers to over-state their age. When we use self-reported ages, the youngest adult cohort are a statistically significant 0.35 in. shorter than the base cohort. When we use true ages, they are a statistically insignificant 0.18 in. shorter. This suggests that greater care is needed in the use and interpretation of historical enlistment data for estimating adult heights.

KEYWORDS:

• Stature
• Second Boer War
• historic birth records
• nineteenth-century New Zealand

JEL Classifications:

• O56
• I10
• N37

Acknowledgements

We thank Xueying Zhang for her excellent research assistance. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments, and seminar participants at the New Zealand Association of Economists, University of Canterbury, and Auckland University of Technology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The timing of changes in the standard of living during the British Industrial Revolution has been debated in a now very large literature. The modern debate began with Lindert and Williamson (1983). Selected references incluCrafts (1985), Lindert and Williamson (1985), Mokyr (1988), and Feinstein (1998).

2 Oeppen and Vaupel (2002); Human Life Table Database, http://www.lifetable.de. The data were last accessed on 21 February 2019.

3 Phelps (1908). The estimate for Australia is a population-weighted average of the individual states. Australian state populations come from the 1901 census, from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The estimates for the USA are from the Twelfth Census for the Registration States of 1900: Connecticut, District of Columbia, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont. On infant mortality in New Zealand see also Neale (1925); Lessof (1949); and Sadetskaya (2015).

4 The study of urban disamenties has a long history. The debate was reinvigorated in the 1980s by Williamson (1981) and Williamson (1982). For a later contribution that finds for the pessimistic case, see Feinstein (1998).

5 In the case of the NZ soldiers who served in the Boer War, the Attestation Form included a declaration of fealty to the crown, but not to the accuracy of the information provided. Attestation forms for the Australian Commonwealth Battalions included a declaration that the information provided was correct, that they would serve the Imperial Government, and that they had no claim against the Commonwealth Government. It is not clear whether these differences made an impact.

6 Surveys of the broader literature on anthropometric measures of the standard of living incluFogel (2004); Floud (2002); Komlos (2009); Steckel (2008, 2013); Steckel and Floud (1997a). Surveys of the literature on adult heights include Inwood and Roberts (2010); Steckel (1995, 2009).

7 As evidenced, for example, in the recent literature on historical skeletal remains. See Steckel, Rose, Larsen, and Walker (2002); Steckel (2003).

8 A useful reference on adult heights and genetics is Silventoinen (2003).

9 Fogel (2004) offers a detailed account of the growth process.

10 The debate over the actual changes in adult heights in the nineteenth century in the USA remains open. See for example Zimran (2019).

11 NZ had conscription from 1916 in WW1 and from 1940 in WW2. The Boer War Contingents were composed of volunteers.

12 All files were from Archives New Zealand https://www.archway.archives.govt.nz/. The majority of them are identified by series code ‘18805’, and years 1899–1903 (inclusive). This search criteria yields all soldiers that served in the Boer War only. We then performed a second search with years 1898–1938 (inclusive). Sorting the search results by the beginning year in the date range, we were able to identify all soldiers that served in both the Boer War and WW1.

13 Stowers (2002), p. 4. This number includes reserves, details, and reinforcements. Hall (1949), p. 10, discuses some of the difficulties in estimating the numbers who served.

14 We define the following occupations as agricultural: (in descending frequency) farmer, station hand, shepherd, bushmen, shearer, horsebreaker, rabbiter, musterer, or fruit grower.

15 https://www.bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz/

16 Although there were exceptions, the rules for enlistment required that non-officers be single. See Hall (1949), 1. p. 9.

17 For example, Depauw and Oxley (2018) use a two-year window in their matching.

18 Komlos (2004) discusses the various approaches for handling truncation in heights data.

19 While neither we nor Inwood et al. (2010, 2016) include denominational differences, according to the 1896 census 40% of New Zealanders were members of the Church of England, 23% were Presbyterians, and 14% were Roman Catholics.

20 Shlomowitz (2007), p. 485, footnote 1 discusses some of the related issues. See also Inwood et al. (2010), p. 280.

21 Inwood et al. (2016), p. 34 also report results for NZ soldiers who served in WW2. For that war, the soldiers with an occupation of farmer born between 1896 and 1899, the omitted category, are taller than 68 in. It is not possible to determine the extent to which their tallness relative to the youngest WW1 soldiers is due to differences in selection relative to their birth cohort, or the misreporting of ages.