Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

With few dissenting voices, the historiography of twentieth-century British civil society has been relayed through a prism of continuing and escalating elite disengagement. Within a paradigm of declinism, academics, politicians, and social commentators have contrasted a nineteenth and early twentieth century past, offering a richness of social commitment, against a present characterized by lowering standards in urban governance and civic disengagement. Put simply, as we entered the twentieth century the right sorts of people were no longer volunteering. Yet the data for such claims is insubstantial for we lack detailed empirical studies of social trends of urban volunteering across the first fifty years of the twentieth century. This dataset fills that void. It offers details of those involved in local politics, who were magistrates or poor law guardians, or who helped manage or represent one of 34 voluntary associations serving one ‘typical’ large city - Nottingham - and the surrounding county between 1900 and 1950. The sample covers a range of voluntary activities from the smallest to the largest of charities and associations. Three quarters of people captured by the data set lived within the city boundary. The clear majority of those sampled were middle class, only 10 per cent being working class, and 1.5 per cent upper class. Within this middle class there were major disparities in wealth, income, status, lifestyle, and self-view. Broken down, about 29 per cent of the sample overall were upper middle class, 43 per cent middle middle class, and 17 per cent lower middle class. Middle-class numbers in Nottingham, at about 22.5 per cent of the population, were roughly comparable with other Northern or Midland industrial cities. Its occupational distribution also approximately mirrored that of England.