My aunt was in the circus, but I know who the real clowns are...

ON THE night of April 2, 1911, my great auntie Vi spent the night in a caravan in a public park in Alva. It’s a beautiful spot actually, still there today, with a vast expanse of emerald green grass and the rolling Clackmannanshire hills behind.

Vi was 15 years old, the eldest girl in a family of seven whose parents ran a travelling theatre. On this particular night however Vi, an accomplished trapeze artist and bareback horse rider, was not with her family. She and my great uncle Harry were on tour with Pinder’s travelling circus.

I know all this because it’s right there in black and white, on the 1911 census. Vi and Harry, aged 15 and 20, shared a caravan with a wrestler, a cornet player and two other musicians, while the rest of their family, including my then seven-year-old grandmother, were at Vinegarhill, Glasgow’s biggest showground.

I mention it because as someone who has spent time recently tracing my family history, I have watched with mounting concern the utter hash the Scottish Government appears determined to make of the 2022 census.

The fact that it is 2022, and not 2021, is the first red flag. England, Wales and Northern Ireland all went ahead with the 2021 census as planned, without, as it turned out, a single hitch. The Scottish Government meanwhile, in its wisdom, decided to delay for a year because of the pandemic.

This turned out to be a Bad Idea. Apparently the Government believed delaying it would result in ‘the highest possible response rate’. Anyone could have told them that their best chance for a high response would have been when everyone was at home and in lockdown, with nothing better to do.

Which is one of the reasons why, two days off the deadline, it has now been forced to extend the census by a month because almost a quarter of households have not yet completed it – meaning the whole thing will now cost Scottish taxpayers an extra £10million. And to think that in England they had a 97 per cent response rate in 2021, and in 1911 they did it all with nary an iPhone between them.

That would be bad enough – and frankly it is – were it not also for the fact that the questions in this year’s census are strangely invasive and weirdly political. Questions about ethnicity force people to choose between Scottish and ‘other British’, and one sector allows trans people to state their sex, with the answer not having to match the one on their birth certificate. No wonder people haven’t been rushing to fill it in.

The census is meant to be a snapshot, a nation in one night, its data used in the coming years by analysts and planners, and kept secret from the public for 100 years.

I can’t help but think that the political slant on these question has been designed to prop up a government with its own agenda, and questions it is almost impossible to answer truthfully (for the record, I’d prefer to be marked down as Scottish and British, while I’m sure many would have preferred to choose English, Welsh or Northern Irish, rather than the uncomfortable sounding ‘other British’).

Other problems include a communications campaign south of the Border that the Scottish Government chose to shun, meaning many were, and perhaps even remain, ignorant that it is taking place. All in all, it’s turned into an expensive, confusing mess.

This is a huge shame. Censuses are important, for all sorts of reasons. Great auntie Vi died when I was one, and my grandmother when I was 13.

BY the time I was old enough, there were few left to ask about this rich seam which threaded our family history. The travelling theatre, the circus acts, the uncertainty and thrill of a life on the open road. These lines in the 1911 census open a window into a world that is long gone and lives that have until now been forgotten.

I think of young Vi, away from home perhaps for the very first time, bedding down in a caravan beneath the stars, going over her routine for the show the next night. Could she ever have imagined, as she gave her details to the census man, that 111 years later her great niece would read about it?

And then I think of my own descendants, a century from now, looking up this year’s census and learning… what? That the Scotland of 2022 was obsessed with political persuasion and gender, and run by a government so incompetent it couldn’t get its act together until a year late?

Perhaps, in that way, it really is an accurate snapshot of our times.