[History by Numbers] A wealth of history

The long story of inherited money

A while ago I had a deeper poke around the Families of England project. The site is the work of academics Greg Clark and Neil Cummins, and primarily provides a home for various research papers on the themes of wealth and social mobility.

Given that the higher echelons of government and society today are permeated by Oxbridge graduates and old Etonians (oh look, David Cameron’s back!), these remain issues as pertinent as ever. When Clark and Cummins started publishing the results of their research, from 2012 onwards, the media were beside themselves to stir up the social divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. ‘How having the right surname STILL sets you up for life,’ the Daily Mail cried in 2014, for example. So let’s look at the actual research.

Sir Joseph Bazalgette, mastermind of London’s sewer network; his great-great-grandson Sir Peter Bazalgette is an arts and broadcasting luminary today. The surname Bazalgette is one of those studied by Greg Clark and Neil Cummins in terms of its intergenerational association with wealth