Faber & Faber

'We are continually impressed by the discrepancy between what is supposed to happen and what does happen, between law and fact, the institution and the individual, what people say they do and what they actually do, what leaders think people want and what people do want.'

-- from First Year’s Work by Mass Observation (1938)

So wrote the founders of Mass Observation at the end of their first year. This was their second book and it provides a good introduction to some of the studies that they had already carried out. It includes, for example, an entertaining survey of contemporary press reactions to their work. Their very first book, May the Twelfth, was an anthology drawn from accounts of what people were doing on the day of King George VI’s Coronation in 1937. This combined the observations made of crowds in the London streets with the day diaries sent in by members of the newly recruited 'national panel', the volunteer Observers who went on to write full daily diaries for Mass Observation well into the 1940s and in some cases into the 1950s and 1960s.

Their third book, Britain, appeared in the new Penguin Special series in 1939. It too demonstrates their early eclectic preoccupations - the political crisis and the imminence of world war, astrology and belief in the supernatural, all-in wrestling, the 'cow’s head' festival held every year near Bolton in Lancashire, and people dancing the Lambeth Walk in London parks.

Between 1937 and the appearance of their last publication in 1959 (Britain Revisited), Mass Observation produced 25 books. More might have appeared had the war not intervened; paper was scarce and publishing was restricted; members of the core Mass Observation team were called into the armed forces and other war work. And yet just as the disruption imposed by wartime conditions curtailed some of Mass Observation’s ambitions, it also paradoxically provided it with extraordinary opportunities to develop its unique brand of observation and documentation (See War Begins at Home (1940)). For about a year, MO submitted reports on the nation’s morale to the department of Home Intelligence at the Ministry of Information. It went on to document in immense detail the experience of life in Britain over at least the next ten years.

As a result, the present archive at the University of Sussex constitutes one of the richest and most valuable resources on civilian life in this country during the Second World War. The publications inevitably represent only a tiny proportion of the whole archive. Many drafts remained unpublished and much of the raw material was probably never even read at the time, let alone analysed for books and reports.

Nevertheless the books they managed to publish deserve to reach a modern audience and it is exciting to welcome them in the Faber Finds series. They offer an extraordinarily vivid glimpse of a time which will soon not be accessible to living memory. Not only that, they provide evidence of how astutely Mass Observation pre-figured many later intellectual and methodological developments in social research especially in oral history and life history research, in feminist and working class history and in the kind of social research which privileges what we sometimes call the 'ordinary person' and the importance of studying everyday life.

Professor Dorothy Sheridan
Mass Observation Archive
University of Sussex
www.massobs.org.uk