‘…it was a crazy idea to have it edited by a whole bunch of intellectual poets.’
– Tom Harrisson on May the Twelfth[1]
In the run up to the coronation on 6 May 2023, it seems like an idea to run a series of posts on Mass Observation’s book on the last but one coronation on 12 May 1937. I’m drawing here on the text of my MA dissertation written in the last century (the book titles were still underlined old-school style but I’ve made the effort to switch them to italics). In subsequent posts, I’m intending to supplement this dissertation material with passages from my PhD (2002), but this extract still seems to function quite well without that. Some of this material has appeared in various conference papers over the years, and also in very revised and expanded form in my 2006 book, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life. Mass Observation, which is still very much an extant operation, no longer uses a hyphen and so I don’t use one these days and often abbreviate to MO, but I’m going to leave it as it is in this older writing. Where I have added comments while compiling this, I have marked them as editorial comments in square brackets. I’ve made some very minor changes to punctuation and syntax in the name of readability and clarified a few instances of ‘this’, but otherwise this is pretty much as it was. I anticipate writing (a) final post(s) setting this in context and updating on my own position, but for the meantime I, at least, am interested in hearing what 20C Hubble would say about the coronation.
* * *
May the Twelfth, edited by Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge, was published in September 1937 by Faber and Faber. While the book was clearly motivated by its subject date being that of the coronation of George VI, no mention of this event is to be found in the title (although presumably the public would be aware of the significance of the date), the preface, or the contents page. Instead, the work is presented as the culmination of Mass-Observation’s initial London-based activity which consisted of collecting the accounts of volunteers as to how they had spent their daily lives on the twelfth of each month, commencing with the February of that year. The book is divided into five sections, the first four of which are organised as montages – the first is of press clippings, the other three of segments taken from the accounts of the various volunteers or Mass-Observers – respectively covering: preparations for the day, the events in London, national activities, and individual reactions. The fifth section consists of a number of complete and abridged day surveys in succession, with no significant organising principle.
This was Mass-Observation’s first book-length publication. According to the preface, the roles of the three main founding figures were as follows: Charles Madge ran the network of observers around the country, Tom Harrison ran an intensive survey of a single town (Bolton, although it was referred to briefly as ‘Northtown,’ and subsequently as ‘Worktown’), and Humphrey Jennings was ‘responsible for the business of presenting results.’[2] It was a position to which Jennings was not best suited according to the historians of Mass-Observation, Angus Calder and Dorothy Sheridan [Ed: Another historian of MO, James Hinton, has subsequently gone on to argue in The Mass Observers (2013) that Jennings should not be considered one of the founders at all – I disagree with that assessment]:
Mass-Observation’s first book, May 12, a study of George VI’s Coronation Day, had not been a success – it seems to have sold a bare 800 copies. Humphrey Jennings had been the main compiler – his methods were odd, amusing and infuriating, and only a few critics, Evelyn Waugh being one, were really appreciative of them. This was Jennings’s first and last major job for M-O – thereafter he dropped out from the organisation, though he remained in touch with Madge and Harrisson and carried Mass-Observation’s broad aims forward in the remarkable documentary films which he directed during the war.[3]
This account, which constitutes virtually the only mention of the enterprise (and of Jennings) in a book-length anthology, is at variance with Mass-Observation’s own book, First Year’s Work: 1937-38, which summarises the reviews on publication of May the Twelfthas ‘45 favourable and 16 unfavourable’.[4] Moreover, at least some of these ‘favourable’ reviews are ‘really appreciative’ of the compositional effects: including, for example, this one in Life and Letters:
One really seems to hear the people speaking, and to look into their lives – like passing backyards in a train.[5]
Maurice Richardson’s review in the November 1937 edition of Left Review of reveals a unified, but uneasy, blend of social realism and revolutionary experience:
If you try and read it for entertainment only you will inevitably be overwhelmed at times by the mass of detailed incidents, so many of which are almost identical, but the cumulative effect is extraordinarily vivid and almost uncomfortable in its realism. From a political point of view it is interesting, but not in any way startling….From an anthropological point of view some of the aspects of crowd-behaviour noted are fascinating.[6]
Despite his appreciation of the vividness, Richardson inevitably finds that ‘first impressions are mixed’ and ends up looking ‘forward eagerly’ to the publication of the single town survey in the Mass-Observation pipeline, as potentially less overwhelming and enabling a more intelligible overview [unfortunately, of the four planned volumes on Worktown, only The Pub and the People, largely compiled by John Sommerfield, was published belatedly in 1943 – although more recent publications have resurrected material on Blackpool and religion]. Richardson’s attitude indicates to us why it is that the contemporary response to May the Twelfth can appear as less enthusiastic than it was. For while the seized images obviously provided an initial invigorating experience, nobody could reconcile this on second thoughts with the dominant left wing totalizing overview that strove to make sense of mass-movements: social realism simply cannot comprehend that anything can be more real than it. Therefore, contemporary commentators [and many since] immediately looked to the more familiar sociological element of Mass-Observation as a way forward out of this impasse without considering that by doing so they were separating out the original mix; and leaving behind the part that had initially excited them. Not only this of course, they were also discarding the original possibility of counterpointing revolutionary experience against totality as a means of rupturing reification in a revolutionary manner [Ed: at which point, I should note that the full title of my MA dissertation was ‘Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Mass-Observation’ and it entailed an idiosyncratic Western Marxist reading, which I’ve only mostly stripped out for the purposes of these posts].
This separation of the original Mass-Observation mix allowed Harrisson, writing about Mass-Observation in the 1960s, to identify the two strands at work: ‘From the industrial north, a more objective aimed approach; from London in the south, a literary and documentary one…’[7] The history of Mass-Observation can now be represented as always having been a stark contrast between ‘objective’ sociological study and the ‘literary’ activity of ‘a bunch of intellectual poets’. The fact that both strands are entwined in May the Twelfth (and the founding statements of Mass-Observation) disappears from history along with the existence of supportive reviews. By 1985, Calder can simply dismiss the project as ‘a book which the founders themselves came to see as misguided’.[8] It is obvious that Harrisson, almost from the point of publication, saw the book as misguided, as witnessed by the virtual lack of reference to it in First Year’s Work despite it being the major work undertaken to that date. Instead, pride of place is given to Harrisson’s own Worktown operations. Of course, this in itself is not particularly significant – in an organisation with several projects, it would be necessary to fight one’s own corner in order to ensure sufficient resources for one’s own project – it is pointless to blame Harrisson for being the best at fighting his own corner. However, Harrisson was still only one of three founders of Mass-Observation and therefore his misgivings cannot be taken as representative of the whole. To see how the founders can be represented as regarding May the Twelfth as misguided, it is worth looking at a 1990s account of Mass-Observation:
Mass-Observation was the brainchild of Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson….
….From the beginning, Mass-Observation went in two quite different directions. First, Madge gathered an ever changing group of volunteer correspondents….This ‘national panel’ kept diaries and responded to a multiplicity of ‘directives’ – questions asked by the Mass-Observation office in London. The first effort led to May the Twelfth, a collection of one-day diaries kept on the day of the coronation of George VI. Madge believed that these correspondents would provide grist for the collective study of the ‘collective unconsciousness of the ordinary men and women in the land.’ Second, Tom Harrisson organised a community study of Worktown (and Blackpool)….
….In 1940, Madge and Harrisson worked for the Ministry of Information doing a study of the impact of the Blitz on civilian morale. By 1941, Madge broke from Harrisson to join John Maynard Keynes in investigating consumption and saving patterns. In 1950, he joined the sociology faculty at Birmingham University. Meanwhile, in 1941, Mass-Observation shifted from the Ministry of Information… and did research for the Advertising Service Guild….
….The war and ‘cool careerism’ (as Charles Madge wrote in 1961) turned M-O and its leaders from their idealism of the late 1930s to market research.
Yet, in 1960, Tom Harrisson returned to England and gathered a group to write an update, Britain Revisited (1961). In 1970, with the founding of the Mass-Observation Archive at Sussex University, he returned to the manuscripts from the Worktown study (among other projects).[9]
If Jennings simply disappears from the equation, then the history of Mass-Observation can be shown as a straightforward progression. The initial recklessly enthusiastic idealism of the ‘dropouts from Cambridge’[10] evolves into a sober maturity demonstrated by their rise to academic respectability. May the Twelfth is relegated to the status of a footnote by this teleological version of events which gains ascendancy due to its self-legitimating function as the very guarantor of Mass-Observation’s hard won institutional status.
If May the Twelfth is regarded as an aberration in relation to the main activities of Mass-Observation, that hasn’t prevented attempts to salvage the constitutive raw material for proper sociological and anthropological use. These attempts began immediately after publication with Bronislaw Malinowski’s essay, ‘A Nation-Wide Intelligence Service’, which comes at the end of First Years Work. Malinowski finds the volume ‘interesting’, but with the reservation that ‘we cannot be sure that the editors oriented their instructions by a theory of what the function of the crowning ritual is for the institution of monarchy, and what monarchy means for the nation’.[11] Of course, there is absolutely no indication that the editors did anything of the sort. The less than subtle implication is that an anthropological study of the rituals of monarchy is what the book should really have been about. Malinowski calls for a brief historical survey of coronations, and analysis of the ceremony (‘every detail… charged with a mysticism which is yet connected with the concrete functions of monarchy and charged with practical import…’[12]) and various aspects of the event which ‘would require an expert in economics, collective psychology and political science – or a group of experts – to translate the general problems into tangible questions’.[13] He seems completely oblivious to the fact that all of this would take space away from, and run counter to the spirit of, the presentation of the various experiences of the volunteers gathered on the day, that was the day of the coronation, and which made the book so exciting to the reviewers in Left Review and Life and Letters. This indifference to the actual project is compounded by the manner in which Malinowski singles out the book’s analysis of the expenditure on preparations as good: thus highlighting the one section of the book compiled from newspaper reports and not the accounts of observers.
Harrisson, in Britain Revisited, seeks to integrate May the Twelfth into part of a continual study by Mass-Observation of ‘royal occasions and of attitudes to royalty’.[14] He pairs extracts from May the Twelfth with reports from the 1953 coronation to show the similarity of both in terms of ‘official and unofficial behaviour’.[15] This follows survey results indicating that in both 1956 and 1960, ninety per cent of the population supported the monarchy in preference to a republic.[16] The inevitable conclusion is not lagging far behind: ‘it seems unlikely that existing attitudes to royalty will be drastically or lastingly changed’[17] – although here Harrisson is at least chiefly restricting himself to comment on the probable effects of Princess Margaret’s marriage to a commoner. No such circumspection is to be found in Philip Ziegler’s Crown and People.
Ziegler uses material from the Mass-Observation Archive, and May the Twelfth in particular, as the principle source in his book studying the attitude of ‘the man in the street’ to the British monarchy.[18] Therefore it is odd that as a ‘statement of the ideals and principles’[19] underlying Mass-Observation’s work, he provides, as an appendix, a report on the first ten years of the organisation by Harrisson which makes no mention of May the Twelfth. Ziegler also manages the singular feat of quoting extensively from the bookwithout once mentioning Jennings’s name, even in the notes. He uses the material to demonstrate the undoubted widespread participation in the coronation activities nationally, and to comment on the ‘commonly encountered’ patriotism, ‘sometimes almost unwillingly expressed…’[20] Actually, the phenomenon of unbidden tears rising to eyes in moments of overwhelming emotion is quite rare in the book. An account that literally concurs with Ziegler’s assertion is that of the man who reports: ‘The most stirring incident was the unreasonably (so it seemed) fervent cheering I felt compelled to give with others to the King and Queen on their return.’[21] Moments such as these are precisely part of the strength of May the Twelfth and illustrate the way it breaks up the official narrative of the coronation. When Ziegler invokes the ninety per cent pro-monarchy statistic in order to state, that in the event of a referendum on becoming a republic, no one could ‘seriously doubt that those weeks would be dominated by the thunderous roaring of the royalists… and that… Britain’s electorate would prove by their votes what they had demonstrated by their cheers in 1937, 1953 and 1977’[22], it obviously doesn’t occur to him that many of these votes might be ‘almost unwillingly’ cast due to the same kind of compulsion that operated on the volunteer observer in the account given above, and that this prospect might give cause for concern. Instead, we are informed (‘temperately’) that ‘the British want the royal family, that their reasons for doing so are sensible, even meritorious, and that our national life would be impoverished if the monarchy were to be eliminated.’[23]
The development from May the Twelfth of this strain of facile celebration, of the undying devotion of the British public to the monarchy, would be a mere curiosity if it were not for its final culmination in the 1987 republication of the book with a new afterword by David Pocock, the then Director of the Tom Harrisson Mass-Observation Archive. Here we find the same themes as in Harrisson and Ziegler, but without the laboured attempts at empirical and statistical justification. Instead, we are presented with an apparently effortless account that appears to embody all that is essentially natural and human about British subjects. There is a pleasurable expression of surprise at the ‘not just similarities but apparently identical features in the reactions on that Coronation Day and those reported in the Day Diaries written for Mass-Observation on 29 July 1981, the wedding day of Their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princess of Wales.’[24] We even learn of the young man who ‘sedulously and even ostentatiously avoided anything to do with the Royal Wedding’ until he heard something about it on the BBC World Service and ‘was unexpectedly moved…Felt absurdly, nicely, English’.[25] This is contrasted with a report by a (female) typist in May the Twelfth. According to Pocock, ‘Her feelings also changed as she was seduced by the public celebration and if , at thirty-nine, she was more suspicious of these awakened emotions, it is not surprising’.[26] Her ‘suspicions’ are concisely stated, ‘It [the pageantry of the coronation] is too dangerous a weapon to be in the hands of the people at present in power in this country’ [Ed: a sentiment that applies equally, if not more so, in 2023].[27] Quite what relevance Pocock thinks the woman’s age has for her political opinions is open to question; but the relevance ascribed to the continued presence of the same reactions to the monarchy is more than transparent. It is to be found in the ‘deep roots in the human psyche’, that ‘kingship… [rather than constitutional monarchy] is an expression of a powerful human need’.[28]
For Pocock then, the value of May the Twelfth is that it is ‘quite simply, “full of human interest”’[29] and this interest is intrinsically that of the Mass-Observation material in its raw state. The book is therefore a collection of ‘abundant quotation’,[30] and Jennings (who Pocock, in keeping with other academics officially linked to Mass-Observation, dutifully gives a brief mention) is assigned the status of a collector: ‘For him…. the material was to speak for itself, guided minimally by the hand of the producer’.[31] The republication of May the Twelfth in 1987 was as a collection showing ‘that in a half-century that has witnessed dramatic changes in our daily lives, underlying attitudes [to royal occasions] have changed remarkably little’.[32] The reason why is kept simple for us:
There is no constitutional requirement for the monarch’s family, other than her immediate successor perhaps, to play any part, let alone be invested with the distinctive glamour of royalty; no presidential figure could evoke the insatiable curiosity about its private life that the Queen evokes – all this is the creation of the public, it is what we wish to be so.[33]
The uneasy blend of sociological study and revolutionary experience that characterized the foundation of Mass-Observation, and which was also revealed in the initial reviews of May the Twelfth, therefore comes to an unexpected end that is most clearly neither sociology nor revolution. We have seen that progressively less and less significance has been accorded to the presentation of the text in the constructions given to it at subsequent historical conjunctures: first, by ignoring it; second, by stripping the images away from their counterpointed totality and (unsuccessfully) trying to insert them into a social realist narrative as quantitative statistical data; and finally by simply letting the images break free and speak for themselves. The resultant political intervention, on one level, has operated fairly crudely to change what is on the surface a neutral (often sceptical) study into a jingoistic celebration of the British monarchy. But, on another level, something else must be going on in order to allow this intervention to effect itself so naturally.
Follow the link for Part Two.
[1]Quoted in David Pocock, ‘Afterword’ to Jennings and Madge (eds.), May the Twelfth (Faber and Faber, London, 1987), p.418.
[2]Jennings and Madge, op. cit., p.x.
[3]Calder and Sheridan, “Speak for Yourself”: A Mass-Observation Anthology 1937-49 (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984), p.62.
[4]Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, First Year’s Work: 1937-38 (Lindsay Drummond, London, March 1938), p.52.
[5]L.A.Z. (A woman reader), Life and Letters Vol.17 No. 10 (Kraus Reprint, New York, 1967), p.167.
[6]The Left Review: October 1934 – May 1938, Vol. VII (Frank Cass, London, 1968), p.626.
[7]Tom Harrisson, Britain Revisited (Victor Gollancz, London, 1961), p.15.
[8]Angus Calder, ‘Mass-Observation 1937-1949’ in Martin Bulmer (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.129.
[9]Gary Cross, “Introduction” to Cross (ed.), Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930’s (Routledge, London, 1990), pp.1-3.
[10]Ibid.
[11]Madge and Harrisson, op. cit., pp.111-112.
[12]Ibid., pp.112-113.
[13]Ibid., p.115.
[14]Harrisson, op. cit., p.230.
[15]Ibid., p.233.
[16]Ibid., p.231.
[17]Ibid., p.251.
[18]Philip Ziegler, Crown and People (Collins, London, 1978), pp.9-13, 212-213.
[19]Ibid., p.11.
[20]Ibid., p.46.
[21]Jennings and Madge, op. cit., p.128.
[22]Ziegler, op cit., p.197.
[23]Ibid., p.203.
[24]Pocock, op. cit., p.420.
[25]Ibid., p.421.
[26]Ibid.,
[27]Jennings and Madge, op. cit., p.305.
[28]Pocock, op. cit., pp.422-423.
[29]Ibid., p.417.
[30]Ibid., p.419.
[31]Ibid., pp.415-416.
[32]Jennings and Madge [1987], op. cit., backcover notice.
[33]Pocock op. cit., p.423.
Social Humanities 