Of all the fields of historical enquiry, there seems to me to be nothing more challenging and nothing more rewarding that trying to understand how ordinary people lived their lives and what they were thinking. When I was an undergraduate I cheerfully wrote essays extrapolating the values of everyday ancient Athenians from religious carvings and the plays of Aristophanes. Now, in my old age (well, shall we say the approach to middle age), I realise how ridiculous this was. Social history is the narrative that hides behind political history, but which in many respects is more key to understanding human events. How can I have neglected it for so long?It was these feelings that so excited me when I first discovered Mass Observation. Mass Observation is a social research project which aims to gage the thoughts, feelings and values of the nation. It was founded in 1937 in the wake of the Abdication Crisis of 1936. In the final months of 1936 Edward VIII, the youthful and popular King had been forced by the giants of his family, his Government and the Church to abdicate the throne sooner than make a Queen of the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. The affair between Edward and Wallis had been kept out of the newspapers and so when the story went public in the run up to Christmas 1936, it was a massive shock to almost the whole of Britain. Some people agreed with the then Archbishop of Canterbury that Edward represented some kind of moral rot. Many idealised Edward and saw him as a victim of the unpopular Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. The secretary of the Communist Party probably spoke for many when he declared “there is no crisis in all this for the working class, let the King marry whom he likes”.
The complexity and downright confusion of what the nation thought about the abdication crisis led to the foundation of the Mass Observation project. The organisers appealed for volunteer observers and asked that they contribute their own diaries and answers to open ended questionnaires on an ongoing basis. Data was collected on all areas of life – food, sex, work, growing up, giving birth, the list is endless. The enormous archive of information collected is now stored at the University of Sussex and anyone can read it (I have consulted some of the archive for research but if you are interested, please remember that you have to make an appointment).
A good taster is the excellent book that I have just finished Wartime Women: A Mass Observation Anthology 1937 – 1945 edited by Dorothy Sheridan. This is a collection of diaries and responses from women all over Britain during the Second World War. The book is well organised into different themes and periods but it feels far more intimate than your average social hist
ory. It is not a dry discussion of possibilities, but an introduction to a range of larger than life characters such as Nella Last, a Barrow-in-Furness housewife, the plucky young Norfolk sisters Muriel and Jenny Green and the Leeds based nurse Amy Briggs. By setting out individual voices, the editor Dorothy Sheridan shows the strange interplay of continuity and disruption of life during wartime. The pattern of domesticity is radically changed, but much remains. We learn through poor Amy Briggs that a bad marriage in peacetime is a bad marriage in wartime too.So it is a good read, and it is ground breaking stuff, in its way. Mass Observation was not a perfect answer to the problem of gathering social history data of course. It will be obvious that it appealed far more to women than to men and so it is rather one sided for that reason. Much effort was made to get working class women to contribute, but inevitably it was easier for middle class women to do so. Nevertheless, it is a marvellous archive of material and lets hope that there may be a few more anthologies in the pipeline somewhere.
