Faber & Faber

Simon Garfield, author of many books including Our Hidden Lives, We Are At War and Private Battles: How the War Defeated Us - all written in collaboration with Mass Observation - here reveals how every new visit to the MO Archive at Sussex University meant the discovery of more new treasures.

A few years ago, a kindly editor asked me two leading questions: had I heard of Mass Observation, and would I like to visit it? My answers were ‘vaguely’ and ‘yes’, and when I turned up at Sussex University a fortnight later to take my first look at the archive it took me a while to retrieve my jaw from the floor. Here was something wonderful and untapped; I spent a good deal of the next three years there in a state of wonder and gratitude.

I edited three volumes of wartime and post-war diaries, and each time I visited the archive I discovered more treasures. The hundreds of people who contributed their daily thoughts to paper for three decades probably had little idea of the significance of their words to future generations, but the founders of Mass Observation clearly had an inkling. The diaries were only a part of the their aims, an ambition to form an ‘anthropology of ourselves’ by all means available - eavesdropping, reporting and photographing everyday events as experienced by ordinary people. If there was a hint of the patronising in these intentions, it was levelled by the tireless desire to get at something we may now call the greater truth.

I revelled in the diarists’ commonplace asides and utterances (what someone said to somebody while they were waiting for something, and when I first looked through the many large cardboard manuscript boxes I felt I had stumbled on something almost untouched.

In fact, many contemporary historians had been there before me, plucking out gems all around, and before them the founders of Mass Observation had produced many volumes themselves, mostly forgotten and long out of print. But now Faber Finds has found them again ...

When I answered ‘vaguely’ to the first of my editor’s questions it was because I had at home a disintegrating copy of Britain, the Mass Observation Penguin Special I had found useful when writing about professional wrestling; it was a little dry (the writing and the flaky binding both), but it was a fascinating timepiece. I was yet unaware of all the other MO publications that are now available afresh for the first time in half a century. I have in front of me a copy of Meet Yourself on Sunday (1949), a very rough guide to how we used to spend the day of rest. Mostly, we were bored blind: no shops, limited transport, most amusements closed. The book contains trips to Petticoat Lane and Church, and to the breakfast table. It concluded that more people had eggs on Sunday than any other day, and out of every twenty people in the population 14 listen to the radio and three go motoring. To one observer, tennis was ‘an abominable sin’, but walking was ‘permissible’. Despite this analysis, ‘Quite clearly it is impossible to say categorically whether people like Sunday or not’.

A vanishing age, but now visible to us once more.