Part One concerns the reception of May the Twelfth up until the 1990s.
Part Two concerns the ideas involved in the formation of MO and why they were interested in the coronation of George VI.
Part Three concerns MO’s account of the coronation procession in London on 12 May 1937 and the representation strategies they used to prevent their account simply being another part of the media hype.
Part Four concerns internal changes to MO following the publication of May the Twelfth and the relationship they developed with Bronislaw Malinowski.
For the purpose of this fifth and final post in the series, aside from a brief extract from the longer discussion of MO’s analysis of the Lambeth Walk dance craze in my PhD, I had a look at my 2006 book Mass-Observation and Everyday Life to see how I tied up some of the themes discussed in the first four parts of this blog series. In some ways, I did this by connecting the themes to aspects of the thinking of Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn. At the time, I was trying to tie MO in with the New Left, which seems like it should be a good fit because they both occupy similar political places at different times, but in practice doesn’t work because I don’t think the latter really understood the former and got influenced by the false reception history of MO as unscientific dilettantes. At one point I had (vague) ideas of writing an intellectual history which would reconfigure the British left bringing these different groupings together. Elements of that project could be viable, but it would need to be situated with respect to the needs of the twenty-first century rather than as an argument about what really happened in the twentieth century. I still think that the closing sentence of the first edition of the book, which is also the closing sentence of the post below, is correct in its identification of MO as an essential resource of hope that has not yet fully come into its time.
* * *
In his essay ‘Components of the National Culture’ (1968), Perry Anderson argued that Britain never produced a classical sociology, but only two displaced forms in the guise of social anthropology and literary criticism. MO, formed from the influences of the anthropology of Malinowski and Bateson and the literary criticism of Richards and Empson, can be seen as exactly that missing sociology, albeit perhaps not so classical as Anderson would like [!!]. Instead, as Ben Highmore suggests in Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (2002), MO should be considered part of a wider tradition of continental avant-garde sociology following from Simmel’s description of the ambiguous situation of the individual in the modern world. Like Simmel, MO tried to develop an understanding of society from within by using surrealist and documentary techniques to render everyday understanding.
The emphasis on MO as a primary historical source tends to prevent it being seen as a set textual interventions – i.e. the books it published – within 1930s literary politics. This split between text and context can also be seen to contribute to the rise of cultural studies, which in the trajectory running through T.S. Eliot becomes negatively defined against the high modernist poetry that is privileged over it. The later development by cultural studies of its own branch of poetics suggests that poetic perception is somehow constitutive of consciousness so that, for example, life writing can be seen as a continuous act of existential affirmation in a context in which grand narratives are viewed with suspicion. Yet in the process the forms of cultural poetics and poetry have become sundered in such a way that a figure like Madge is doubly excluded from cultural centrality: he is both too poetic to be cultural and too cultural to be canonical. The reason that this is a problem is that life writing on its own is not necessarily a vehicle for social transformation because it does not consistently produce images capable of transforming the symbolic order of society, as poetry does. Such claims have sometimes been considered elitist. Yet this is to miss the central anthropological point that symbolism affects all minds whether consciously or unconsciously. All cinema and advertising employ such means at some level, as do the tabloid newspaper headlines which Madge identified as forms of poetry. The point is not that one has to be ‘cultured’ to appreciate them or even necessarily resist them, but one has to be aware how they work in order to create a different liberated order. This is an awareness that MO tried to encourage in the 1930s by instructing their observers to record the images of the day.
While these images as collected in May the Twelfth could not in the end compete with the media myth of the coronation of George VI, MO did eventually manage to exert some influence on the popular representation of British identity through their 1939 Penguin Special, Britain by Mass-Observation, which revealed how Chamberlain lost public support during the Munich Crisis and advocated the Lambeth Walk dance craze as a genuine form of working-class popular culture and a model for anti-Fascist practice. As we shall see, their specific argument concerning the Lambeth Walk turns on a very similar structural argument to that underlying the idea behind May the Twelfth of using the coronation to show the independence of the masses.
Madge and Harrisson [the non-alphabetical order in which they were designated co-editors of Britain much to Harrisson’s subsequent oft-repeated indignation] argue: ‘As a symptom of changing social attitudes, the Lambeth Walk points the other way from Football Pools and Daily Horoscope.’ They saw it as a trend originating in the working class and not one foisted upon it. Therefore, it has potential as a model for the new type of intervention they are looking for ‘We may learn something about the future of democracy if we take a closer look at the Lambeth Walk.’[i] This argument is backed up by one of their longest and most thorough analyses. Early on the chapter is an account of the ‘native cockney culture … still vigorously existing’[ii] embodied in a darts club attached to a pub, which organises parties after closing time on Sunday nights in members’ houses:
Obs.: ‘What are some of the other dances called?’
A.: ‘We’ve never known the names. We just do’em ourselves. For instance, the chap who’s just gone out to sign on, he wants to be a dog. If he’s half drunk, he wants to be a dog. He wants to bark. . . . Then we has bloomers and blouses, we dresses up in them. . . . The other night we had the women on the floor, fighting over her like two dogs. We don’t do it very legal you know. I come home with a black eye.’[iii]
Madge and Harrisson are interested in how the Lambeth Walk has spread from such origins to ‘Mayfair ball-rooms, suburban dance-halls … Scotland … New York … Paris … Prague’.[iv] They identify the immediate source of the popularity of the craze as the December 1937 show, Me and My Girl. This involved the cockney comedian, Lupino Lane, playing a Lambethian who ‘inherits an earldom but cannot unlearn his cockney ways. At a grand dinner party he starts “doin’ the Lambeth Walk” with such effect that duchesses and all join in with him and his Lambeth pals’.[v] Empson’s analysis of pastoral is invoked to point out that the show is essentially about ‘the contrast between the natural behaviour of the Lambethians and the affectation of the upper class.’[vi] The show includes a scene mocking the Coronation with Lane in his peer robes, at one point lying on the floor as though to suggest a state funeral. This sounds like the perfect example of Empsonian pastoral with Lane at the third level of comic primness. It is not clear if he is satirising, accepting or simply innocent of the importance of traditions: he has complete freedom of action. However, the dance craze was the result of the managing director of the Locarno Dance Halls seeing Lane’s typical cockney walk – ‘a swagger and roll of the shoulders’ – and getting his ‘ace’ dancing instructress to elaborate it into a dance.[vii] Tellingly, this became so popular that she had to teach Lane how to do it.[viii] Madge and Harrisson provide a list of the stages that the Lambeth Walk has gone through, which can be summarised:
1) The native cockney culture and related cockney walk.
2) Lupino Lane and the show.
3) The Dance Hall manager who had the walk developed into a dance.
4) The BBC and press which gave the dance publicity.
5) The masses who took up the dance with enthusiasm.
They conclude:
Of these five factors, 2, 3 and 4 represent the Few who cater for the Many – in this case successfully. Factors 1 and 5 represent the influence of the Many. The cockney world of Lambeth – its humour, its singing and dancing, the way it walks – is a mass-product with a special local character. But this character is strong enough to appeal to a much wider mass of people as soon as it is made known on a wide scale.[ix]
I wrote much more analysis of this in both PhD and book and there are also excellent discussions of MO’s utilisation of the dance craze by Ben Highmore and of the Lambeth Walk in general by Raphael Samuel. So, I won’t go further here other than to say that, to my mind, MO’s analysis of the Lambeth Walk repeats some of the strengths and weakness of their analysis of the coronation in May the Twelfth. They do very successfully show how the dance craze is an expression of genuine popular agency on behalf of the people but, nonetheless, there is nothing to stop the appropriation of this phenomena to a ‘rival myth’ [to refer to Empson’s anticipation in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) of Roland Barthes’s postwar analysis of myth]. Although, thankfully, the anti-fascist deployment of this particular myth proved to be more successful than any fascist alternatives, this doesn’t mean that any such process of appropriating popular culture is always going to come out on the side of goodness and light. Indeed, some of their wartime work for the Ministry of Information also demonstrates this ambiguity as does the entire concept of ‘The People’s War’, which MO is often incorporated into – most notably by Angus Calder’s 1969 book, The People’s War (which drew in part on his tracking down of the MO archive). Therefore, one of my conclusions in Mass-Observation and Everyday Life tries to quantify this ambiguity: ‘While M-O ultimately failed in the attempt to convert everyday life itself into a public site of contradiction and contestation on the model of politicised theatre, they certainly subverted the theatrical expression of public politics, which was so characteristic of the 1930s’ (229).
This is a point that I need to come back to, but not in this series of posts. Instead let us fast forward to the heady days of the 1970s, in which we find Tom Harrisson newly installed at the University of Sussex, ostensibly to sort out the MO archive, but instead quickly resuming MO activities such as taking a team of observers to the Bromsgrove byelection – where Labour were to gain the seat on a 10% swing that was seen as an expression of public hostility to the Common Market. Harrisson published the results of his investigation in the New Statesman in 1971 and concluded: ‘More than anything else in the M-O Archive I was reminded of the reactions after the retreat from Dunkirk. There was then an intense relief: relief that we had got back, more or less intact, out of Europe, safely behind the white cliffs of Dover’. He was forthright in denouncing the anti-foreign undertones of this ‘Little England’ as ‘racialist’. It is possible to see Harrisson’s work in the 1970s as a form of late guerrilla war against the Dunkirk spirit [unfortunately he lost]. As he wrote in the New Statesman in 1975, there was much ‘badness’ in the war ‘which it is deadly dangerous to glorify for the unborn’. His untimely death in a road accident the following year left us with his preface to the posthumously published Living Through the Blitz (1976):
It has proved something of an advantage to this writer, co-ordinating and necessarily selecting from a mass of old records, that he had an unusually wide experience of living through the blitz. It has been a greater advantage, however, that he has not been subject to the subsequent three decades of brain-washing.
…. In the past some critics have tried to discount the whole of M-O as leftist or dilettante. The records of the men and women, active in the work both then and since, refute this fallacy. If any such charge is repeated in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, it may only be because some Britons, especially responsible ones, cannot face the full facts about their ‘finest hours’.
…. At no time in World War II generally and in the blitz particularly were British civilians united on anything, though they might be ready to appear so in public on certain issues (13-5).
Although the book discussed the above-mentioned ‘full facts’ in detail, such as ‘trekking’ – the daily refugee cycle of mass-migration from target cities to seek shelter in the countryside (165-8) – its effect came not so much from revelation as from its tone, which debunked both official and popular versions of the war. Therefore, it helped pave the way for a subsequent wave of revisionist history led by Angus Calder’s The Myth of the Blitz (1992), in which ‘myth’ was used in the sense defined by Roland Barthes and the ‘blitz’ as a referent to a whole series of symbolically linked events from the period 1940-1941, including the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk and the aerial Battle of Britain as well as the actual German bombing raids. Calder argued that these events have never been seen as part of the wider European and World history of the time, because Britain was never invaded and they happened before the entry of the USSR and USA into the war. They ‘have acquired [an] … aura of absoluteness, uniqueness, definitiveness …. these were events in which the hand of destiny was seen’ (1). In particular, Calder took care to show how his former construction of the People’s War had become complicit with the Myth and to examine how the Left had not captured history in 1940 so much as to allow history to capture them. However, as the Myth was above all a myth of British unity which came to encompass the working-class majority of the population, the Left quickly came to have the biggest stake in it. The net effect remained ‘a juster and friendlier society’ despite the fact that the Myth had subsumed the more radical transformatory dynamic of the People’s War: ‘If a disastrous conflation of state with community produced an excessively bureaucratic welfare state out of control by the People whom it professed to serve, at least the Myth had fostered the notion of the mutual responsibility of all for the welfare of all’ (272). [In retrospect, Calder was still being too optimistic here and Harrisson’s harder position stands up better to subsequent events].
This idea of a poised tension between the People’s war and the Myth of the Blitz neatly captures the sense of MO’s ambiguous position in the war (reflected through their ambiguous cultural politics), caught in a situation where the more they pressed for accelerating the pace of social change, the more their own reports on morale registered everyday resistance. While the models of representation that MO pioneered in the late 1930s, especially in Britain, and which were continued not just by them but by the whole constellation that Stuart hall described in 1972 as ‘The Social Eye of Picture Post’ (1972) were able to incorporate these everyday images into a unified narrative of Britishness, external pressure could always change the direction of that narrative. These internal dynamics of MO have subsequently been played out in the subsequent histories of MO [i.e. the differences between Hinton’s and my history are really just a continuation of the internal arguments that Madge and Harrisson had in 1940 as to what the purpose of MO actually was].
The advent of the archive opened up a new dimension because it suddenly made all of those everyday images of the war available as a primary source for incorporation into new narratives of wartime Britishness, and by extension Britishness per se, designed to respond to new contexts in a manner exemplified by either of Calder’s war books. The launch of the new MO project in 1981 established an ongoing project of ‘Writing Ourselves and Writing Britain’ and suggested that, as an astute reporter concluded in the New Statesman in 1987, ‘the people’s war continues, based in Sussex’.
The origins of the new 1981 project lay in the decision of Philip Ziegler, who was using material from the archive to write Crown and People, for publication in the queen’s silver jubilee year of 1977, to collect new material through friends and former mass-observers. This inspired David Pocock, the Professor of Social Anthropology who had become Director of the Archive following Harrisson’s death, to launch the ‘Mass-Observation in the 1980s’ Project with a directive addressing a number of issues including the forthcoming ‘Royal Wedding’ between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. This was quickly followed by the announcement of a day-survey for the wedding, reinforcing the extent to which the birth of the new project replicated the original MO’s concern with royal events. Indeed, the concern of reincorporating the founding project into ongoing studies has a long history within MO [a statement which is just as true today as it was over 20 years ago when I first wrote it].
The chapter on ‘Royal Occasions’ in the one-off 1961 MO book Britain Revisited 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’ (233). Survey results indicate that in both 1956 and 1960, ninety per cent of the population supported the monarchy in preference to a republic (231), leading eventually to the conclusion: ‘it seems unlikely that existing attitudes to royalty will be drastically or lastingly changed’ (251). It was very much in this tradition that Ziegler used material from the MO Archive, and May the Twelfth in particular, for his book studying the attitude of ‘the man in the street’ to the British monarchy, which I discussed in the first post in this series along with his conclusion 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.’ (203).
As I also discussed in the first post in this series, this trend was continued by the1987 republication of May the Twelfth with an afterword by Pocock, who expresses pleasurable surprise at the ‘apparently identical features in the reactions on that Coronation Day and those reported in the Day Diaries written for M-O on 29 July 1981, the wedding day of Their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princess of Wales’ (420). The back of this paperback reissue of May the Twelfth announces [absurdly] ‘that in a half-century that has witnessed dramatic changes in our daily lives, underlying attitudes have changed remarkably little.’ Pocock concludes his afterword by analysing why the same reactions are always present:
Kingship is an institution much older and more complex than constitutional monarchy and more primitive, in the sense that it is an expression of a powerful human need. For evidence of this we have only to contrast the rational demands of constitutional monarchy with the popular insistence on royalty. 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.
Sometimes one reads the comment that the British Royal family is to be likened to one or the other of the unending television serials about some wealthy family [Ed: this was before The Crown]. The judgement could not be more superficial: it is rather the reality of royalty and the distinctive complex of emotions which royalty alone can evoke, that accounts for the popularity of coloured shadows (423).
Whereas the original publication of May the Twelfth reveals how the media diluted the formerly unique relationship between the king and the people to just one moment in a chain of differences, Pocock’s argument tries to show that the presence of many media moments highlights the uniqueness of the relationship between king and people. Thus, where anthropology had been used to show the reality of social change, social change was now being used to demonstrate the reality of anthropology.
Therefore, it is hardly surprising that Tom Nairn’s The Enchanted Glass (1988) has taken Crown and People and May the Twelfth as demonstrating M-O’s complicity in constructing what he has called ‘the People’s Monarchy’, a configuration in which the royal family’s status as neither ‘Them’ nor ‘Us’ serves to embody a collectively unconscious Britishness. The ‘glamour’ of this monarchy operates as ‘an interface between two worlds, the mundane one and some vaster national-spiritual sphere associated with mass adulation, the past, the State and familial morality, as well as with Fleet Street larks and comforting daydreams’ (p.27 in the 1994 paperback edition). Yet, Nairn argues, the reality of this glamour is no more than ‘our collective image in the mirror of the State’ (13). This is true, but it is also what MO were trying to show at the time. May the Twelfth tried to liberate this collective image in an unequal battle against the media. Britain combined what had been learnt from that project with what had been learnt from the Worktown project and created a fairy-tale resolution by way of Me and My Girl and the Lambeth Walk, which allowed the working-class majority to embody national identity in an inverse relationship with the monarchy that became part of the wartime myth of Britishness. The saving virtue of the relationship lay in its effectiveness at the time in sustaining the anti-fascist fight, but it has left hostages to fortune as Nairn implies.
Therefore, just as it has remained connected to the linked paradigms of People’s War and Myth of the Blitz, MO remains connected to the linked paradigms of monarchy and media. The dominant collective self-definition of observers participating in the new project is that they are ‘ordinary’. This ordinariness is most typically constructed as a supplement to the media. That is to say, people write for the current project because they feel that ordinary voices are not represented in the media (see James Thomas, Diana’s Mourning: A People’s History,2002: 38; Dorothy Sheridan et al, Writing Ourselves, 2000: 214-9). However, this ordinariness could also be seen as a supplement to the monarchy in the same way as the relationship was constructed by Ziegler and Pocock. The nature of an archive is that it potentially makes those ordinary voices always available for that kind of appropriation, regardless of the fact that the current organisation would not actively support such uses. This is why MO publications and their original emphasis on presentation should be considered as central to the MO legacy as the archive material.
The importance of this was upheld by one of the most recent publications to be based on archive material: James Thomas’s Diana’s Mourning: A People’s History (2002). Although the title suggests another addition to the annals of the People’s Monarchy, this particular organisation of ordinary voices transcends mere ordinariness, to show how the events around the death and funeral of Diana did provide, however temporarily, a public space in which ideas and values were contested. As Thomas observes: ‘Diana’s mourning far from serving as a basis for a new national identity, marked a serious challenge for most people to the idea of “Britishness”’ (3). He cites the concerns of one observer: ‘I hate to think how the whole “Diana death” business will become, has already become, a homogeneous myth, like the ‘chirpy cockney in the blitz’ myth along the lines of “a nation mourns”’ (7). This sets the book up to use observer’s voices to contest exactly such myths and although he ends over-pessimistically on the note that ultimately the media myth did swamp out the real democratic public debate that actually took place, the very existence of his book serves to contest that myth retrospectively. The key point he makes is that the effect of the whole Diana saga has been to ‘negatively reposition’ the royal family as ‘Them’ (47). The consequences of this unbalancing of the People’s Monarchy paradigm have yet to be felt, but they will have huge consequences for British society as a whole and for MO in particular [round about now presents a good opportunity to see how correct I am in this assertion]. The need for MO’s founding vision of a transformed participatory mass society based on a dialectical combination of collective independence and individual agency is now greater than ever.
As Ben Highmore argues, M-O was precisely at its most productive and radically democratic when it blurred – as opposed to either upholding or dissolving – the distinction between ‘native’ informants and participant observers: ‘It is here that Mass-Observation can be seen to fulfil the promise of Surrealist ethnography: the potential for everyone (academic ethnographers, capitalist industrialists, working men and women, and so on) to become “natives”’ (Highmore 2002: 87). It was in this sense that Harrisson argued that ‘one had to be completely ordinary’. Yet this is only fun for those who do not have to remain ‘ordinary’, in the way that the influence of the media forces the current MO diarists to describe themselves. MO’s description of the attraction of the Lambeth Walk was misleading in its suggestion that ‘the working classes like to be Lambethians because Lambethians are like themselves’. The real pleasure came from a carnivalesque liberation similar to that of the coronation. However, the experience of writing up Britain must have been even more enjoyable for Madge because, as was the case with Jennings and the coronation, he was writing partly about his own experiences of participating in the carnival and enjoying the ‘transvestitism and class-conscious songs’. Empson describes a scene from The Beggar’s Opera in which a character is at ‘the first level of comic primness and the author at the third’ (1995 Penguin edition of Some Versions of Pastoral: 175). On this model, one can simultaneously enjoy being the ‘native’ and the ‘ethnographer’ and so combine the everyday pleasures of being ordinary with a philosophical independence which guarantees agency. The technical limitations [i.e. the limitations on who could have access to the texts that MO collected, which at the time were restricted to Jennings, Madge, Harrisson and a few others] which existed until very recently made this impossible, but now it really is possible for new kinds of web-based M-O projects, allowing reports to be pooled and collectively edited into different configurations [or, indeed, as I didn’t anticipate in 2005, for reports to be treated as data and subject to corpus analysis]. In the years between publishing Mass Observation and Everyday Life and assembling these posts, I have sometimes put the period of my original analysis of MO – which in fact was about nine years of my life – down to a ‘youthful’ naïve idealism. However, looking at it all again this week, I find that I’ve come back to the same idea I had then that only (Popular) Poetry can save us, which is to say that we need an activist MO-type movement now more than ever. Therefore, in the words of the final sentence of the first edition of Mass Observation and Everyday Life (2006): ‘In the future M-O, everyone will be both “native” and “ethnographer” and in possession of a poetic kind of thinking powerful enough to change reality in order to meet their collective mass social needs’ (229).
[i] Madge and Harrisson, Britain by Mass-Observation, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939, p.140.
[ii] Ibid., p.143.
[iii] Ibid., p.144.
[iv] Ibid., p.139.
[v] Ibid., p.140.
[vi] Ibid., p.157.
[vii] Ibid., p.141.
[viii] Ibid., p.161.
[ix] Ibid., pp.141-142.
Social Humanities 