The regions at work
Agriculture remained highly important in Cambridgeshire, occupying almost a third of the labour force. However, in both Durham and Lancashire, agriculture gave employment to fewer than three per cent of the workforce, a figure well below the national average.
Conversely, manufacturing provided jobs for only about 15 per cent of the Cambridge workforce, compared with nearly 30 per cent in Durham and as much as 46 per cent in Lancashire. Plainly, Cambridgeshire was far less industrialised than the other two counties. However, to use the figures on manufacturing employment to suggest that Durham was less highly industrialised than Lancashire is misleading. Durham had almost a quarter of its labour force employed in mining, a far higher proportion than occurred nationally.
If mining and manufacturing are taken together, then both Durham and Lancashire had around half their labour forces employed in industrial work. Such variations in the nature and extent of industrial activity are associated with the natural advantages of site that some regions enjoyed, including local coal supplies, as well as the location advantages they could acquire, such as skilled labour forces and the growth of support industries. The service industries were well represented in all three counties, a reflection of their widespread importance, though the proportions employed in the two industrial counties fell somewhat short of the national average.
