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but as we know, until 1875, the onus was on the registrar and his deputies to be on the ball in regards to new births in the district.

The actual wording of the act was that the registrar "is hereby required to inform himself carefully of every Birth and every Death which shall happen within his District".

Records of correspondence in the RG files at TNA make it clear that there was no expectation that the registrar was supposed to go out walking the streets asking about births and deaths or to be knocking on people's doors.

He was required to live within his district and to make his address (and times of availability) known by having a sign "in some conspicuous place on or near the outer door of his own dwelling house".

Announcements placed by registrars in the newspapers of the time advertising times for registering are also quite common.

With young infant deaths in the early/mid Victorian period, although there should be both a birth and a death registration, it isn't uncommon to find only the death recorded by the registrar.

A birth should be registered (in E/W) within 42 days i.e. 6 weeks. That has applied since 1837, and still does today.

In 1901 the fee (not a fine) that became payable for a late registration was 2s 6d to the registrar and 2s 6d to the superintendent registrar, BUT that only became payable if the birth wasn't registered within 3 months of the birth.

So, in effect, the "free" period for registering was 3 months.

I don't see what else you'd get from a full certificate unless I'm missing something.

Apart from the missing headings, the only difference is that digital images don't (usually) show any marginal notes that may be on the entry - pdf and paper copies do. Otherwise they are identical.

As you can see from Audrey’s certificate there is an ‘A’ for Occasional Copy A certificates.
Audrey was registered with both names in 1917, Koselj and Weigand and similarly in 1919, Weigand with mmn Weigand.

To clarify things slightly :

The 1917 entry for Audrey is indexed only under Wiegand. The entry is in the printed index ( with mother's maiden shown as Weigand), but not on FreeBMD. GRO has the entry ( St Marylebone vol1a p647) and has no maiden name shown for the mother which suggests  that there is no father named on the entry.

The 1917 entry also has been noted as Occasional Copy A indicating a copy was submitted to GRO outside of the usual quarterly returns process. That may be connected to the 1919 entry, but may not.  The "A" shouldn't appear on any certificate - it is purely an indexing note.

The 1919 entry is a re-registration to add an unmarried father to an entry - although they have married since the birth they weren't at the time, so they have both signed the entry as "joint informants", and you get the "now the wife of" wording. This predates the Legitimacy Act of 1926 so isn't the same as the more common re-registrations done after that. GRO have indexed the 1919 entry under Koslej and shown a mother's maiden name of Weigand( which technically they shouldn't).

There was one for Italians near where I was brought up in Lancashire. They were put to work on farms in the area and quite a few decided to stay after the war and married locally. A boy I was at school with was the son of one of the POWs.