Over the course of this Autumn, I’m going to set out some of the areas and arguments that I will be writing about while conducting my Leverhulme Trust funded project, ‘Self-Reflexivity, Class Consciousness, Culture Wars and Social Change in Britain’. One of my aims with the project is to relate the territorial break-up of Britain, as originally outlined by Tom Nairn in the 1970s, with a wider social, cultural and psychological break-up. I will have more to say about this over the coming weeks but a recent opinion column in the New York Times provides a nice opportunity for briefly noting how the devolution settlement within Britain, part of the above-mentioned territorial break-up, has become dragged into the ‘Culture Wars’. The article in question, by conservative columnist Ross Douthat, appeared on 6th September: ‘How America Made James Bond “Woke”’. The immediate point of reference is the ‘latest Bond book’, On His Majesty’s Secret Service by Charlie Higson, which has attracted some criticism in the right-wing British press. For example, Niall Gooch fulminated in the Spectator about ‘The terribleness of a progressive Bond’, a headline with the added tag that ‘The new Bond book has turned 007 into a Centrist Dad’. Amusing while the discussion of Bond is, Douthat’s wider point is that:
the progressive Bond also usefully illustrates an interesting feature of contemporary politics in the English-speaking world. It isn’t just that American progressivism supplies an ideological lingua franca that extends across the Anglosphere, such that what we call wokeness naturally influences the fictional MI6 no less than the real C.I.A. It’s that forms of progressivism that originated in the United States, under specific American conditions, can seem more potent among our English-speaking friends and neighbors than they do in America itself.
Actually, it is not clear from Douthat’s fleeting description what happens in the Bond novel that shows the influence of American progressivism, unless we assume that the default state of British politics without American influence would be old-school conservativism (the implication being that all progressivism is inherently American?). The point is that, for Douthat, the novel provides a handy peg to illustrate the apparent susceptibility of the English-speaking world to American progressivism, which chimes with his experience on recent visits to Canada and Britain. Of the latter, he notes: ‘In British conversations, the talk was all about how elections don’t have consequences and how notional conservative rule has done nothing to halt the resilience of progressive biases in government and the advance of American-style wokeness in the culture’. One wonders about what kind of people Douthat was talking to, if they believed that the Government should be able to control culture.
Moreover, his article is short of actual examples, apart from the factually inaccurate claim that ‘England’s deeply homogeneous history — well, since 1066, at least’ is being rewritten in schools ‘into an American-style nation-of-immigrants narrative’. But the fun really begins when he starts listing the reasons that he feels explain why the margins are absorbing the centre’s progressive discourse: ‘The first is a general tendency of provincial leaders to go overboard in establishing their solidarity and identification with the elites of the imperial core. Both Ottawa and London can feel like provincial capitals within the American imperium…’ Really!?! The second is that both ‘the British Isles’ (an interesting designation, which allows Ireland to be lumped into the story too) and Canada have lapsed further into secularisation than the Christian centre. While ‘the third point is that smaller countries with smaller elites can find it easier to enforce ideological conformity than countries that are more sprawling and diverse’.
This brings us to the part of the column that is of particular interest to thinking about the break-up of Britain in relation to culture wars. After claiming that the British nations and Canada are more elitist and less meritocratic than the USA (this question of meritocracy and education is one that I will return to later this autumn), Douthat goes on to argue that the elites of small countries (he means the ‘Celtic nations’ rather than Britain or Canada) are particularly susceptible to capture by ascendant ideologies:
A recent essay by the Cardiff academic Thomas Prosser makes a related point about other small Celtic polities, noting that Scotland and Wales, as well as Ireland, have governments that are more progressive than their voters, a pattern he attributes to the way that ascendant ideologies (neoliberalism in the 1990s and woke progressivism now) can sometimes achieve a kind of full elite “capture” more easily in smaller countries.
To an unusual degree, governments in Celtic nations (Ireland, Scotland and Wales) are more progressive than Celtic voters. Relevant measures reflect social justice ideology – recently, the Irish hate speech law has been controversial – yet have a wider basis than social justice ideology, the Welsh government regulating speeding and plastic bag use. This phenomenon is fascinating, shedding light on divisions between elites and voters which occur across the West.
So, to be clear, the only specific example given of ‘evidence’ underpinning Douthat’s claims of British elites being captured by American woke ideology is Welsh legislation on ‘speeding and plastic bag use’. In what way is this ‘policy capture’, as both Douthat and Prosser suggest? What is the evidence that governments in ‘Celtic nations’ are more progressive than ‘Celtic voters’? Given that the voters elect the governments, the real problem here seems to be with democracy enabling social change. The only American influence on the UK displayed in any of this is an attempt by the political Right to import the ‘anti-woke’ tactics deployed by those like Trump and De Santis in order to contest the legitimacy of such democratic decisions. Obviously, these types of articles are not worth devoting much energy to rebutting, reliant as they are on innuendo rather than anything approaching reasoned argument. However, their existence testifies to the existence of a terrain of difference which creates an audience for this type of innuendo. My working hypothesis is that the mechanisms of self-reflexivity maintaining that audience of people – who, for example, are prepared to see a reduced speeding limit or the concept of ‘the 15-minute city’ as manifesting the threat of woke ideology – are just as complex as the mechanisms of self-reflexivity that open people to progressive outlooks. Moreover, I think the differentiation in self-reflexivity precedes the ideology, or, in other words, these differences were not directly created by competing ideologies. The ideologies seem to explain the differences, but they don’t. Therefore, a lot of existing political discourse isn’t particularly helpful to us in trying to understand social change in Britain. Over the next few weeks, I intend to try and map out some of that ongoing social change in order to understand how and why it is being framed in terms of culture war, beginning with the questions of devolution, independence and the territorial break-up of Britain.
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 of 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.
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.
This extract from my PhD might appear to be a bit of a distraction from discussing MO’s book about the coronation but it is indirectly relevant. For a start, it picks up the story from the end of Part Three, when MO were apparently poised on the verge of becoming an activist movement and explains what happened next (spoiler: MO didn’t become an activist movement). It goes on to discuss some of the influence of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on MO and on Charles Madge in particular. At the time of writing the PhD, I saw Malinowski as the bad guy, and I went on to provide a critical account of functionalist anthropology. By the time, I wrote the book version, I’d come round a bit – not so much to Malinowski as to Madge, who becomes the hero of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life. Indeed, I am planning to go back to Madge and look again at his postwar ideas concerning social eidos, which were influenced by the work of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. As part of that, I want to reassess Madge’s relationship to anthropology in general and so posting this section of the thesis is a useful benchmark for me.
There is also an implicit point to this post, which is that if you just study a phenomenon like a coronation from an ‘objective’ perspective, as Malinowski advocates, then the result is that you end up with a false idea of its role in society. In effect, by appearing to be objective, you uphold and reinforce the ruling order. If you’re not careful, you end up like MO Director David Pocock (who was of course an anthropologist) and start claiming – as we saw in Part One of this blog series – that ‘kingship… [rather than constitutional monarchy] is an expression of a powerful human need’. When I wrote my MA dissertation, I wanted to situate MO as a Benjaminian Surrealist-type project contesting the forces of myth and ritual, as outlined in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. I still think this is a valid exercise (and I might even attempt it at some point, with the benefit of more experience and knowledge than I had in the mid 1990s) but at the time I was partly motivated by a chauvinistic desire to show that England could produce its own theory to match that of the continental Western Marxist tradition. To be fair to myself, I didn’t entertain this idea for any length of time: the very act of trying to set it out in writing made plain that it wasn’t going to wash as a proposition. I found different, more productive ways to talk about MO while still trying to indicate the parallels with a wider continental political struggle. However, rereading my MA dissertation makes me think that the similar ideas could be reworked to different effect in today’s different political context. In other words, the way that Jennings and Madge incorporated continental theory into an English idiom is actually testament to the inadequacy of the supposed native English radical tradition and an argument that the strong radical culture of the 1930s (that was to be aggressively repudiated in the more insular England of the 1950s) was the product of a genuinely international outlook. But this is all an argument for another day. When I wrap up this series in Part Five, I will come back specifically to the relationship between MO and the monarchy.
* * *
In March 1938, Madge wrote to the New Statesman: ‘I want to make it clear that Mass-Observation is not an organised faction. Unlike Buchmanites, Rotarians, Wandervogel and Nudists, Mass-Observers do not hold meetings: in the interests of science they are discouraged from doing so.’[i] The national conference for Mass-Observers in early 1938, so confidently promised the previous summer, had never taken place. All that remained of the Popular Poetry program was a big red question mark pencilled into the margin of an abandoned draft of First Year’s Work. The published version contains no trace of any commitment to ‘educate [the unconscious masses] into awareness of their own potentialities and so render them less vulnerable to anti-social propaganda’.[ii] This abrupt transition – an understanding of which is essential for any attempt to make sense of the history of Mass-Observation – was triggered by three vital factors: the commercial and critical failure of May the Twelfth, the subsequent departure of Jennings and the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski.
The announcement in the Mass-Observation ‘Bulletin for September’ did not augur well: ‘On September 23, Faber published Mass-Observation Day-Survey: May 12 at 12/6. The high price was an unfortunate necessity, and we ask all Observers for whom it is too high to make an effort to obtain the book from a library…’[iii] According to Angus Calder and Dorothy Sheridan, the book only ‘sold a bare 800 copies’.[iv] It also attracted vitriolic reviews from G.W. Stonier in the New Statesman and Marie Jahoda in Sociological Review.[v] This has led Jeffery to state ‘Most critics have agreed that the book was something of a failure … Papers of the right found a leftist bias in M-O, while left-wing journals were generally extremely hostile.’[vi] However, this is inaccurate because there were good reviews in Life and Letters, New English Weekly and Left Review, demonstrating that the world of the literary left journals from which Mass-Observation sprang remained a sympathetic constituency.[vii] Nor was the book unappreciated in all scientific quarters.[viii] Nevertheless, within less than two months of publication, the ‘Bulletin for November’ was characterising the ‘May 12th book’ as representing ‘a stage of M-O that has now been left behind.’[ix] Given that they still conducted day-surveys up until 12 January 1938, it seems reasonable to conclude that the stage being left behind was the tripartite structure of Mass-Observation, outlined in the preface to May the Twelfth, in which Jennings had been responsible for presenting results. For Jennings had left Mass-Observation by this time, holding a one man show of paintings at the London Gallery in October and returning to work for the GPO Film Unit.[x] As suggested in the first two posts in this series, the departure of Jennings altered the balance of Mass-Observation and shifted it on to the Madge-Harrisson scientific axis as outlined in the second section of Mass-Observation.
The problem now confronting Madge and Harrisson was the need to gain recognition from the scientific community, for which purpose May the Twelfth was – as it has appeared in retrospective attempts to legitimate Mass-Observation as a social scientific organisation – something of a hostage to fortune. Therefore, the advent of Malinowski, as potential saviour, was eagerly awaited in the Bulletins of early 1938. The pending publication of First Year’s Work was delayed in January because Malinowski wanted to write a ‘real contribution’ and then again in February because ‘Professor Malinowski has been working hard on his contribution to the new pamphlet “First Year’s Work” and it was finished at midnight on Feb. 16th, having grown to 16 000 words in length.’[xi] That the move to a scientific outlook did not simply signify a shift of power towards Harrisson can be seen from the fact that it was Madge who organised this connection with Malinowski and who helped write the essay in ‘long sessions’ at Malinowski’s home.[xii] Therefore, ‘A Nation-Wide Intelligence Service’ can be read as a public act of recantation on Mass-Observation’s – or at least on Madge’s – behalf. The tone is set in the opening paragraphs, where Malinowski praises the ‘movement’ for ‘humility … in its readiness to co-operate with other scientific workers’ and ‘its ability to reconsider its aims and to reorganise its collective methods of research.’[xiii] It quickly transpires that Mass-Observation’s former heretical deviations, confusing the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity and thus being insufficiently scientific, are deviations from the true path laid down by Malinowski himself: ‘I feel that in a way I have been responsible to a large extent for the inevitable consequences in the development of the functional method of anthropology: I mean, for its definite move towards Anthropology Begins at Home.’[xiv] He sees Mass-Observation, once corrected in its errors, as having the potential to realise his own dream of ethnology determining ‘a correct theory of society for the future scientific guidance of human affairs’.[xv] These necessary corrections are that observers should be properly regarded as informants in the ethnographical sense[xvi] and that Mass-Observation’s investigations, questions and instructions to observers should always be oriented by function.[xvii]
The change in meaning entailed by the switch from the original conception of the observer to that of informant is subtle; analogous to the slippage between participatory and representative democracy. Malinowski’s position is that while the more subjective it is the better, the subjective data of the informants has to be subject to objective – disinterested – analysis by somebody outside the grouping in question; as opposed to Mass-Observation’s hitherto position of ‘confusion which would require the observer and the observed to be one and the same person’.[xviii] However, this was precisely the most radical element within Mass-Observation and the necessary condition for the possibility of collective independence in its practice of proletarian pastoral. From now on, to the extent that Madge and Harrisson accepted Malinowski’s criticism, this possibility of independence was limited to them as ethnographers above and beyond the society whose observations they studied.
Part Five, the last, to follow.
[i] Madge, letter, New Statesman and Nation, 5 March 1938, p.364.
[ii] Draft of First Year’s Work, M-O: Organisation and History, box 1, file: ‘Early Original Papers’, M-OA, pp.3-4.
[iii] Mass-Observation, ‘Bulletin for September’, 1937, FR A4, M-OA, p.2.
[iv] Angus Calder and Dorothy Sheridan, eds, Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology, 1937-49, London: Jonathan Cape, 1984, p.62.
[v] G.W. Stonier, ‘A Thousand Mass-Observers’, New Statesman and Nation, 9 October 1937, pp.532-534; Marie Jahoda, review of May the Twelfth, Sociological Review, XXX (2), April 1938, pp.208-209.
[vi] Jeffery, ‘Mass-Observation: A Short History’, p.24.
[vii] Various, review of May the Twelfth, Life and Letters To-day, 17 (10), Winter 1937, pp.166-168; E.C. Large, ‘The Coronation Mass-Observed’, New English Weekly, 30 December 1937, pp.231-232; Maurice Richardson, review of May the Twelfth, Left Review, 3 (10), November 1937, pp.625-626.
[viii] See unsigned review, supplement to Nature, 12 March 1938, pp.448-449.
[ix] Mass-Observation, ‘Bulletin for November’, 1937, FR A4, M-OA, p.4.
[x] See M-L Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p.16; Stansky and Abrahams, London’s Burning, p.85.
[xi] Mass-Observation, ‘Bulletin for January’, 1938; ‘Mass-Observation Special Directive Feb 1938’, Panel Directives 1937-8, box 2, M-OA.
[xiii] Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘A Nation-Wide Intelligence Service’ in Madge and Harrisson, eds, First Year’s Work, London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938, p.83.
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.
If Charles III was a Shakespeare play, would it be a history or a tragedy? This is the question that Mass Observation implicitly asked of George VI by prefacing the chapter of May the Twelfth describing his coronation procession with this Henry V soliloquy (from Henry V, Act IV, Scene I, l.238-293). If you can replicate the system by which the king maintains the peace ‘whose hours the peasant best advantages’ then it’s all set fair for ‘Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”’. If you get it wrong, then everything is going to go a bit Macbeth. The following analysis – the third post in my blog series on May the Twelfth – examines how MO unpick the mechanism within the 1937 coronation which legitimised George VI as King (with Humphrey Jennings positioning himself as a twentieth-century Shakespeare; although you have to imagine this bit yourself). The independence of the king resides in the independence of the masses in attendance. However, if you compromise that independence by, for example, asking everybody to swear allegiance during the coronation service, then you risk upsetting the entire process by which the English monarchy functions. Therefore, I don’t think the omens are good for Charles’s kingship. The somewhat desperate, pleading tone of the (muted) coronation preparations is setting the stage for sorry tale of hubris and downfall.
The material here is mainly from my PhD but the 2000 words or so on the coronation scenes from May the Twelfth were a reworked version of what was in my MA dissertation anyway. I’ve supplemented this by reinserting a dissertation paragraph (the one concerning people throwing sweets to the soldiers lining the route; I think I did restore it for the book version but it’s not in the PhD). I’ve invisibly edited what follows slightly more than the previous two posts because I’ve had to cut out most of the detailed references to Empson and Orwell, but you can still see the traces.
* * *
May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day Surveys 1937, edited by Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge,is in five parts; the first four of which are textual montages – one of press clippings and the other three of extracts from observers’ reports – concerning 12 May 1937, the day of the coronation of George VI. This material was primarily selected and presented by Jennings.[1] A fifth section consisting of complete and abridged day-surveys in succession (rather than montage) was edited by Madge. Other helpers with the editorial process, including William Empson, are listed on the title page. The account of the actual day in London including the Coronation itself and its procession fits many of the criteria of Empson’s theory of proletarian pastoral as outlined in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). Significantly, this section begins with the entire soliloquy from Henry V, Act IV, Scene i. Empson discusses the character of Henry in Some Versions of Pastoral, arguing that ‘there is something fishy about him’. The point is that ‘the Henries are usurpers; however great the virtues of Henry V may be, however rightly the nation may glory in his deeds’, Shakespeare has a ‘double attitude’ to him.[2] The soliloquy demonstrates Henry’s ironic acceptance of the conventions of kingship – thus giving him a level of self-awareness above that of the average yeoman:
But conversely, he is well aware of the free pleasures of living life beneath the ceiling of conventions and by understanding and acknowledging the importance of the independence of the common people in this respect, he achieves a level of personal independence and mastery that marks him out as the monarch:
Henry’s consciousness of this relationship, and his consequent agency, derive from his knowledge of himself as playing a part. Shakespeare’s own double attitude allows him to pose as critic or admirer depending on your viewpoint, safe from the charge of sedition, while at the same time proclaiming his own superior level of conscious agency as the person who writes the narrative.
Following this quotation, the chapter’s description of the scenes in London on coronation day, proceed like the Shakespearean double plot of heroic and pastoral – only with the heroic half missing. We see nothing of the king but only the crowds lining the procession route.
In respect of these crowds, Jennings and Madge were alive to the potential for political misuse of the ‘revival of a wartime atmosphere’ – obviously added to by the presence of large numbers of troops mobilized to line the procession – and the ‘curious record-hunting ascetic feeling’ revealed in the desire of people to queue through the night in order to be part of the proceedings.[5] The text refuses complicity in these processes by means of its technical composition. This is accomplished by intercutting a series of examples of the crowd reducing the threat of the military by their comments and behaviour – ‘There goes the Salvation Army’; ‘Where ’ave they ’oused all these soldiers?’ (footnote in text: ‘In spoken English you would more often talk of “housing” an emu or an elephant; the idea that soldiers are pet animals seems to crop up here.’); ‘feeding the troops’ by throwing sweets at them[6] – with a series of analogies that deflate the idea of taking part in a momentous occasion: ‘Some of these people look as though they were going to a funeral not a Coronation.’; ‘I heard one of my neighbours remark that she thought it was like dog-racing – something to see for a short time and then nothing for considerably longer.’; ‘…the route is lined with soldiers who are standing in front of a mass of people who look like refugees from Guernica.’; ‘One damned thing after another.’[7] But more subversively, by switching the focus entirely to the crowd, the monarchy – supposedly at the centre of attention – disintegrates into a precarious existence of glimpsed coaches and confused identity reflected in snatches of vigorous argument from the street lining crowd:
Woman: ‘No, not yet. I think the Duchess first.’
Another: ‘That’s the Queen.’ Then, disappointed: ‘No.’
‘That’s Queen Mary.’
‘That’s Princess Marina.’
‘Princess Royal, that is.’
‘The Queen of Norway.’
‘I saw Marina.’
‘I’m sure Queen Mary’s next.’
Man shouts: ‘Hullo, George, boy. Well, Marina.’
Woman: ‘This is Queen Mary’s coach next.’
(It is evident that no one in the crowd actually knows who is who.)[8]
Hundreds of years of existence as the half-erased traces of a history written by the victors is overturned by a ‘camera’ shift. This is illustrated by Jennings’s own photographs taken on coronation day (not included in the book), which show jumbles of heads, legs and feet; against backgrounds of litter, leaves, London Underground arches, steps, scaffolding of stands, trees against the skyline, statues and lampposts.[9] Together, these form an exploration of the possible metamorphoses of public space which pays no attention to the king and stands as a direct challenge to a more conventional ‘news reel’ style depiction of a large flag-waving crowd perfectly foregrounding the important personages at the front – such as the photograph unfortunately chosen for the cover of the fiftieth anniversary reissue of the book in 1987.
This ambiguity – the possibility of either type of representation – is encapsulated in Mass-Observation’s introductory declaration that what is being presented is a ‘panorama of London, and especially of the route of the Coronation procession’.[10] The panorama was originally one of the means by which landscape was brought closer to humanity by technical reproduction. The landscape is ripped out of its function as a material reference point and can either be mythicised as a set of interchangeable units within a totality of exchange or rivally mythicised as liberated public space. Within the modern techniques of conventional mass media representation, the coronation procession, itself the remnant of a mythic hierarchy now secularised to situate humanity in a totality embodied in the symbolic public figure of the king, had the capability of inducing a previously unachievable total participation in the event. One way this was done in practice, despite the actual physical progress of the procession following a scheduled route, was through a system of loud-speakers relaying the cheering of the crowd from the point actually being passed by the procession around the rest of the route and so creating a dislocating shock triggering involuntary participation. This is felt by the observer 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’.[11] It is more strikingly shown in the account of another observer who says of her young daughter: ‘When the show was over I found Lydia (5) still croaking dreary and monotonous cheers until I stopped her.’[12]May the Twelfth fractures this temporally-induced dislocated participation temporally by appealing beyond dislocation to a heightened apperceptive awareness. We do not follow the procession, we follow a chain of observers around the route reporting on overlapping time spans. We do not perceive the disconcerting relayed roar of the crowd as a continuous burst of manifested total being; but as a series of relayed roars, a series of relayed injunctions not to throw streamers out of the windows, a series of repetitions from some other distant plane of existence that seem no more than a faintly ridiculous officiousness when compared with the immediate experience of beer drinking, singing, tree climbing and courting.[13] The technical effects of Surrealist-inspired montage have been used to create a narrative irony overlaying the irony of the coronation double plot.
There are fundamental questions as to what Mass-Observation’s carnivalesque demonstration of this momentary independence of the masses achieves. It could be argued that this independence exists only through the social relationship with the monarch: that the king’s pure consciousness of being-for-self, and hence his authority to rule, is guaranteed precisely by the independence of the masses’s being-for-others, and vice versa. Therefore, May the Twelfth holds the independence of the coronation crowds open at exactly the moment when its public manifestation is required in order to legitimate the new king; and in reality that moment was just converted back into information in the form of radio and television broadcasts and film reels flown round the country to be shown that very evening.[14] Everyday life resumed and the public crisis over the Abdication came to an end. The resistant plenitude identified was not ultimately a threat to the social order: it was the underpinning of that order.
However, such a reading would be blind to the strategies adopted by Jennings, who crucially is both in the text as one of the observers (CM1) and operating at a level removed as the editor. The independence of the masses depicted in the sequence is not a consequence of their social relationship with the king, but a consequence of their textual relationship with Jennings. The technique is analogous to that used by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, with Jennings using the interplay between his textual and editorial personas, to transfer his artistic independence into a collective independence. To these ends Jennings adopts a similar aesthetic of half-parody to that favoured by Orwell [Ed: e.g., in the account in Wigan Pier of the ideal working-class family in which ‘the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat’]:
At Hyde Park Corner Rovers are hurriedly putting up a metal barrier in the centre of the street where a lot of cardboard boxes (left by periscope and chocolate sellers) are lying on the ground in the rain. They are now as slippery as banana peels. A girl is lying on the ground in the arms of a policeman.[15]
It is the same mixture of a parody of lost plenitude and the last remaining vestiges of that plenitude, compiled in the same knowledge that the moment described is not going to last: ‘The open stands are empty. The statue of Byron shines in the rain. The police are reforming their units.’[16] These images (and Jennings’s photography) are, to use an analogy from Walter Benjamin, like crime scenes posing a challenge to the viewer.[17] Consequently, rather than the effect David Pocock has ascribed to the book of ‘putting the reader there as though she or he were watching from the top of a slow-moving bus’,[18] we are invited to become detectives but – with ‘no criminal’ to catch – in a case that can never be closed: an unrelenting investigation of everyday life which is ‘at once a rejection of the inauthentic and the alienated, and an unearthing of the human which still lies buried therein’.[19]
By mapping the moments of crisis and resolution, Mass-Observation had fulfilled their original intention of bringing some of the unconscious mechanisms of everyday life to light, which could then be used in analyses beyond the coronation situation. Madge used these to formulate a tentative theory of society, which was crucial to their work in the period during and immediately after compiling May the Twelfth, as confirmed by the following statement from the leaflet, ‘A Thousand Mass-Observers’:
The main study of Mass-Observation at present is in fact the impact of society on the individual. ‘Society’ is an abstract word but it represents concretely to every single person a whole number of other people who affect his life. These people are of three types – they fall into three areas. Nearest home, in what we term Area One, are his (or her) family, the people he sees every day in his home or lodging and at his place of work. Then comes Area 2: meetings with strangers. Outermost, but of peculiar power in influencing his life, is Area 3, filled by all those names of celebrities and public figures, film-stars, footballers, kings, mythical heroes, characters in news, history and fiction; people like Gracie Fields and Earl Baldwin, whom he may only see or hear at secondhand, on the wireless, on the screen, in the newspaper, in books; people who govern him, affect his actions and the way he parts his hair … M-O is studying the shifting relations between the individual and these three areas, thus seeking to give a more concrete meaning to the abstract word, ‘society.’[20]
This concept of the three social areas – illustrated in May the Twelfth with a diagram of three concentric circles[21] – is, as Empson would say, worked from the same philosophical ideas as proletarian pastoral. Area 1 is the everyday part of life not governed by social conventions. Area 2 is the public sphere where conventions do hold sway. Area 3 is the realm of leaders and celebrities, which appears to have been constructed by Mass-Observation through an exploration of the analogy between the relationship between the king and his subjects and that of the modern relationship between the media and the masses:
The King is the archetype of all the personages in area 3. On the great public occasion of his Coronation he exhibits himself in the flesh to his subjects. This is obviously of the greatest importance as a means of establishing his position at the centre of the entire social system. Hence it is that broadcasting plays so vital a role, in enabling the contact between areas 1 and 3 to be effected on a far wider scale than has ever been possible hitherto.[22]
For Mass-Observation, the independence of the king, like the independence of Shakespeare’s Henry V, is the independence of Empson’s third level of ‘comic primness’ [Ed: a term Empson uses in Some Versions of Pastoral]: the ability to accept and revolt against convention at the same time. Monarchy is only one possible expression of this independence and no longer the model for all other relationships in society. However, the very fact of its anachronistic survival allows the media’s role in determining societal relationships to be made visible. The dilution of the dialectical nature of the relationship between the king and the people to just one moment among a chain of differences demonstrates the ability of the media to bridge the gap between areas 1 and 3, thereby eroding the role of area 2. By analysing the contradictions so momentarily visible, Mass-Observation were unearthing changes akin to what Jürgen Habermas later described as the structural transformation of the public sphere.
Therefore, by the summer of 1937, Mass-Observation had built up an organisation, prepared a huge work on their coronation day-surveys due to be published in September and formulated a potentially productive theoretical framework for their further investigations. Through their fundamental commitment to incorporating the subjectivity of their volunteer observers – observation of the masses by the masses for the masses – they were poised to advance beyond merely signifying the possibility of a new class alignment, towards actively promoting it. To this end, Mass-Observation announced in July: ‘Early in 1938 a conference will be held to which all Observers who have worked for over six months will be asked to come. A series of local conferences has already begun.’[23] The Popular Poetry programme of 1936 [see Part Two of this series] was still on course to meet its objectives of helping to realise a new society.
Part Two in a series of posts on Mass Observation’s book, May the Twelfth, on the last but one coronation on 12 May 1937. Following up on Part One which deals with the reception of May the Twelfth up until the 1990s (there have been more appreciative responses since then, as I will discuss in a subsequent post), I’m drawing now on the text of my PhD thesis (2002) to discuss the ideas involved in the formation of MO and why the crisis surrounding the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 led them to want to make a ‘weather map’ of public feeling about the coronation of George VI. There are parallels of course with the forthcoming coronation following a succession of crises surrounding, first, Diana and then Harry, as well as the squalid behaviour of Andrew. We should remember that the 1930s were in some ways the most modern decade of the twentieth century (the net effect of the War over time has been reactionary in a number of respects) and people recognised the monarchy for the outdated feudal institution that it is. MO was expecting to chart the cracks in the façade and to find these reflected by a surge in public consciousness leading to liberating social change. However, Jennings and Madge weren’t naïve. They understood only too well how the mass media worked and therefore May the Twelfth was designed to resist those totalising tendencies. Hence, the sustained effort that has gone in to marginalising the work in MO reception as discussed in the previous post. The great lie of twenty-first century Britain, is that no one ever questioned anything back in the old days or at the time of the War, but this is the reverse of the truth. Instead, the forces of reaction and progress have been fighting back and forth over modernity since at least the late Victorian period and this struggle will go on until either we break free, or we’re forced back into the pre-Reform-Act past.
* * *
The intellectual trajectory leading to Mass-Observation shows how what began as a Surrealist technique used to regain meaning from an emergent engulfing media totality, had to move beyond literature because all the possible positions of the artist are already inextricably compromised by that media totality. Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge by virtue of their dual positions in the literary avant garde and as everyday workers in the modern media (documentary film-maker and journalist respectively) were both in place to see this; and in a place from which to do something about it. The undated notes jotted down in a notebook by Madge under the title ‘Popular Poetry’, which have only been available to scholars since the donation of the Madge papers to the University of Sussex in 1999 and remain hitherto unwritten about [ed: at that point: I have written further about them in my article, ‘Charles Madge and Mass Observation are At Home: From Anthropology to War and After’ in new formations 44 (2001) and in Mass-Observation and Everyday Life (2006)], are significant because they suggest both that the plans behind Mass-Observation predate the Abdication crisis of which the notes make no mention and that the original conception was of a political movement.[1] The notes call for ‘Coincidence Clubs: groups in colleges, factories, localities’ that would study the press and advertisements, and be involved in ‘exercises for imagination’. Under a list of ‘Plans for PP’ come ‘First Text Book of PP’ and lectures, training courses, ‘mimeographed record sheets’, delegate conferences and ‘PP Newspaper on mass basis’. Possible slogans include ‘Newspaper Active’ and ‘Mass Science’. The concepts ‘Materialism’ and ‘Class Consciousness’ indicate the Marxist objectives of the putative organisation, while Jennings and Madge’s vision of England remains important: ‘English people must learn to like their surroundings before they can change them.’
It could be that the Left Book Club started by Gollancz in the Spring of 1936 was partly the inspiration for the project; but, as is the case with that organisation, it is clear that ideas worked out in the Labour movement and especially in the Communist Party – with whom Madge had gained plenty of practical experience in organising meetings, running branches and editing newspapers – were a major influence.
The particular impetus for the transition of the organisation from paper plans into being was the crisis triggered by the abdication of Edward VIII. Many years later Madge described his personal experience in an account of ‘The Birth of Mass-Observation’.
As a reporter on the Daily Mirror, I was in 1936 one of many journalists helping to ‘cover’ the events leading up to the abdication of Edward VIII. Deployed now here, now there by my news editor, I stood little chance of an overall view of what was going on, but at least what I did know was at first hand, and of potentially more historical interest than the largely fabricated and contradictory accounts that appeared in the newspapers, including my own. This experience was for me one major precipitant of the idea that history and social self knowledge could be served by organized collective observation.[2]
Madge’s discussion of his concerns with Jennings and other friends led to their thinking about ‘the possibility of enlisting volunteers for the observation both of social happenings like the Abdication and also of “everyday life,” as lived by themselves and those around them.’[3] In December 1936, the group prepared a questionnaire which, as well as asking for people’s specific responses to the possibility of the King marrying Mrs Simpson, asked ‘do you pay any attention to coincidences?’ Also that December, a letter to the New Statesman from Geoffrey Pyke raised the issues of whether the press was responding to, or moulding, public opinion about what he described as the ‘sexual situation’ (i.e. the prospect of Mrs Simpson becoming Queen). Pyke pointed out that, as the response of primitive tribes to sexual situations was one of the main interests of anthropologists, the contemporary situation provided ‘some of the material for that anthropological study of our own civilisation of which we stand in such desperate need.’[4] This served as the stimulus for Madge to reply, in a letter published by the New Statesman on 2 January 1937, that such a study was already underway:
English anthropology, however, hitherto identified with ‘folk-lore,’has to deal with elements so repressed that only what is admitted to be a first-class upheaval brings them to the surface. Such was the threatened marriage to the new ‘Father-of-the-people’ to Mrs. Ernest Simpson. Fieldwork, i.e., the collection of evidence of mass wish-situations, has otherwise to proceed in a far more roundabout way than the anthropologist has been accustomed to in Africa or Australia. Clues to this situation may turn up in the popular phenomenon of the ‘coincidence.’[5]
It is clear from the repetition of the term in these early writings that the concept of the ‘coincidence’ was highly important to Madge and Jennings’s understanding of what Mass-Observation was about, predating the response to the Abdication crisis and then subsequently combined with it. Madge expands on this slightly in his autobiography: ‘Neither Humphrey nor I were inclined toward Jungian ideas of a collective unconscious, but we had read Freud’s essay on the coincidence, which had led to an interest among certain French surrealists, especially André Breton, in coincidental happenings of various kinds.’[6] Breton, with whom Jennings had been in contact during the London International Surrealist Exhibition of the previous summer, had recently described the political position of Surrealism as being in line with Marx’s demand to create ‘more awareness’:
The question ‘How does something become conscious?’ may be advantageously replaced, Freud says, by this question: ‘How does something become preconscious?’ The answer: ‘thanks to the association with the corresponding verbal representations’…
Now these verbal representations, which Freud tells us are ‘mnemonic traces stemming from acoustic perceptions’ are precisely what constitutes the raw material of poetry.[7]
Breton’s argument is that in a situation where society, itself, and the Left in particular have run out of energy tantalisingly close to the threshold of a new society, it is necessary to create a collective myth.[8] This is similar to William Empson’s idea of the possibility of creating ‘rival myths’, which he discusses in the ‘Proletarian Literature’ chapter of Some Versions of Pastoral. What is required is that ‘poetry must be created by everyone’ and ‘the organisation of perceptions with an objective tendency around subjective elements.’[9] It is this model that we see in Popular Poetry and in Jennings and Madge’s early Mass-Observation article for New Verse, ‘Poetic Description and Mass-Observation’, where they explain that through Mass-Observation what is subjective becomes ‘objective because the subjectivity of the observer is one of the facts under observation.’ Therefore, ‘what has become unnoticed through familiarity is raised into consciousness again.’[10] It appears that the Freud essay they were interested in is chapter twelve of ThePsychopathology of Everyday Life, ‘Determinism, Chance, and Superstitious Beliefs’. Here Freud discusses the unconscious recognition of unconscious processes as manifested in the phenomena of paranoia and superstition. He writes ‘for example, the last paranoiac seen by me concluded that there was a general understanding among people of his environment, because at his departure from the railway station they made a certain motion with one hand.’[11] Freud suggests that everything has a meaning but that the paranoiac projects his own unconscious fears on to the actions he so acutely notices. Mass-Observation effectively set out to observe with the attention of paranoiacs – hand movements at railway stations is an entirely plausible subject for one of their directives – but by recording the observer’s own subjective feelings they hoped to be able to identify unconscious projection as well as the unconscious motives behind seemingly insignificant behaviour and so open up to consciousness huge swathes of everyday life. Superstition is a more specialised – frequently collective – form of paranoia in which unconscious fears are projected on to chance external events. Freud sees the opportunity arising from the sudden experience of a superstitious moment in oneself, or a coincidence or a feeling of déjà vu or some such sensation, as being that some of one’s unconscious activity is brought to surface consciousness and so can be analysed. This was exactly the opportunity Mass-Observation saw at a mass rather than individual level in the symbolic crises arising in 1936 over the Abdication and the burning down of the Crystal Palace.
Madge’s letter in the New Statesman attracted the attention of Harrisson, reading in Bolton public library, owing to the coincidence that it was immediately adjacent to his poem ‘Coconut Moon’, printed in the same issue.[12] He wrote to Madge, met him and Jennings and various others and agreed to join forces. The end result was another letter, appearing in the New Statesman on 30 January 1937, from this reconfigured grouping, of which ‘Mass Observation’ (as yet unhyphenated) now appeared as the name. Now, given that Madge and Jennings had already been working on ideas revolving around Surrealism and Popular Poetry for some months at least and that there was to be a sharp division in 1937 between their work on day-diaries and Harrisson’s organisation of the Worktown project, it is tempting to assume that Mass-Observation was fatally fissured from the start – as seems to be born out by the subsequent acrimonious disputes between Madge and Harrisson in 1940 but this wasn’t the case [Ed: here my argument had evolved from my MA dissertation into the more sophisticated position that Harrisson, Madge and Jennings were actually reasonably aligned in 1937 and that it was only after the subsequent fall out between Madge and Harrisson – although even after that they did collaborate on occasion – that the origins of MO were rewritten in retrospect to suit their divergent career paths].
While Harrisson might have had an inflated view of his own personal ability to interpret facts, he never subscribed to the simple position that facts speak for themselves. He was more consistently hostile throughout his career to empirical positivism than Madge, who had read widely in ethnology, sociology and pyschology while at school and even written an unpublished book [Ed: Arethusa or The Future of Enthusiasm presumably targeted at the Kegan Paul To-day and To-morrow series] dealing with ‘applied psychology in the context of industrial society’.[13] The personal statements of Madge and Harrisson in the booklet Mass-Observation illustrate the problems of trying to construe their relationship as a simple opposition between interpretation and positivism:
Tom Harrisson believes that Mass-Observation by laying open to doubt all existing philosophies of life as possibly incomplete, yet by refusing to neglect the significance of any of them, may make a new synthesis … The whole study should cause us to reassess our inflated opinions of our progress and culture, altering our judgements on others accordingly ….
In the other author’s opinion, Mass-Observation is an instrument for collecting facts, not a means for producing a synthetic philosophy, a super-science or super-politics … It is each man’s job to find his own salvation as best he can. Mass-Observation merely proposes to acquaint him with relevant scientific facts.[14]
There has been a tendency for critics to surreptitiously reverse these statements in order to suit their purposes, as Jeffery does for example: ‘One strange thing about these two statements is that one would have expected the latter statement to have been written by Tom Harrisson, even if Charles Madge could never have written the first. Harrisson was always the scientist, he was determined to collect facts …’[15] It would be more truthful to acknowledge that Harrisson always transcended a positivist approach and anticipated Mass-Observation concerns as, for example, in his 1933 analysis of the ‘Physical Ox’ [i.e. Oxford rower etc]:
The Physical Ox talks very largely about extraordinary episodes connected with copulation: these are generally known as dirty jokes, and there can be no question that they are dirty. The psychology of smut is interesting. It is partly a frustration, a continuously offered insult to sex. More than that it is a way of belittling that factor, sex, which is inescapable even in the most civilised man or woman, and which offers a special impertinence to the athlete’s controlled body. It is interesting that dirty jokes are an important feature of many savage communities and it is questionable whether the man who cannot bear a little dirt is not the unhealthy specimen. In Britain dirty jokes have in a queer way become localised and specialised in certain strata of the community; they are entirely absent in many. The presence or absence of dirt, and the type of dirt, provide master keys to the understanding of these strata.[16]
Harrisson was able to share in the founding of Mass-Observation with Jennings and Madge in a genuine moment of common interest rather than an ill matched marriage of convenience, because of his sense of everyday life: ‘Life is exciting if only people will see it so. Not wonderful; just life … nothing emotional or romantic … Keep on building up the structure from little things, from words and looks and lines and sudden incidents; not emotionally, but in a romantic-plus-rational way, neither one or the other.’[17] His advent to Mass-Observation meant that there were now two people with experience in organisation and planning. At a practical level, the relative independence of Madge and Harrisson with respect to each other was to make the whole operation possible. Madge ran the national projects from London while Harrisson ran the Worktown project in Bolton. Each knew what he wanted to do and both had the connections to produce published results. Through Eliot, Madge was able to get Faber and Faber to commission May the Twelfth; while from Gollancz, Harrisson received advances for four books (of which only one was ever to see the light of day in 1943) with which he was able to employ full-time observers. Thus, in the beginning there was no need to argue over resources and no real opportunity for friction to occur in the day-to-day running of the organisation.
The joint letter of 30 January 1937 contained the promise that ‘observers will … provide the points from which can be plotted weather-maps of public feeling in a crisis.’[18] Weather maps are a means of plotting non-linear sequences (chaos theory originated from research into the weather) – thus they provide a means of countering the linearity of schedule and calendar time while remaining relatively simple to understand and to act on. The cover of the booklet Mass-Observation, designed by Jennings, consists of typed extracts from observers’ reports detailing the weather first thing in the morning and thereby incorporating the subjective experience of being up and about early, suggesting a refreshing everyday perspective.
The inset on the front cover of the first edition of my Mass-Observation and Everyday Life is the cover of the Mass Observation booklet designed by Jennings.
Inside, a brief introduction is followed by a section dated January 1937,[19] written by Madge and Harrisson together in the immediate enthusiasm following the founding of Mass-Observation. The theme throughout is a detailed engagement with superstition, which they argue has its roots in ‘the earliest days of prehistoric man’ and is ‘infinitely adaptable’[20] – something which had become ever more apparent with the onset of modernity.
The more recent acquisitions – electricity, the aeroplane, the radio – are so new that the process of adaption to them is still going on. It is within the scope of the science of Mass-Observation to watch the process taking place – perhaps to play some part in determining the adaption of old superstitions to new conditions. These forces are so new and so terrific that they are commonly thought of as kinds of magic power that can only be wielded by a few men, the technicians. Hence there is a widespread fatalism among the mass about present and future effects of science, and a tendency to leave them alone as beyond the scope of the intervention of the common man. The technician on the other hand, is not concerned with the implications of his activity or its effect on the masses.[21]
The situation is portrayed as a Wellsian choice, in the age of gas and the bomber, between scientific and anti-scientific attitudes, which Madge and Harrisson reduce to a simple question: ‘which gives us most hope of surviving?’ Taking the answer for granted, they discuss how the mass can be educated scientifically. Historically the problem had been that while the industrial revolution created the conditions enabling mass education and literacy, it ‘had a disruptive effect on the morals and beliefs of the working class’ throwing up two strands – effectively, respectable and tavern – equally resistant to science: ‘It is only gradually that the prolongation of industrialism has made more numerous a third type who has looked for a solution in terms of science rather than of religion.’[22] Madge and Harrisson further relate this class to a more rational attitude to gender equality and are clearly seeking the emergence of a form of scientific consciousness. The main remaining problem is the mass media: ‘In 1937, the advertising agencies and daily newspapers employ the best empirical anthropologists and psychologists of the country. These great organisations base their work on the assumption that the human mind is suggestible and they aim their suggestions at the part of the human mind in which the superstitious elements predominate.’[23] So the scene was now set for Mass-Observation to take on the media and prove themselves to be better empirical anthropologists and psychologists.
However, we can see that the relationship to superstition has already changed from the initial surrealist-inspired approach. It is no longer seen as an opportunity to bring the unconscious to the surface for analysis, but is something to be identified and combated in the name of science. On the one hand, we are told that this science is subsuming art, which flourished previously only because it could attempt to answer the questions that science was not yet ready for.[24] Yet, at the same time, we are informed: ‘In certain branches of science and of art, the individual scientist or artist becomes absorbed in a collective activity which is purely human in type, and which excludes neither of the two categories.’[25] Rather than inconsistency, this represents the ambiguity of the project as it is now being formulated. It is not clear if the science proposed is to be an all-encompassing method that must be adhered to, or something to be built up from the close observation of everyday life. Nor can this dichotomy be assigned to the divide between Madge and Harrisson, as Madge’s article ‘Magic and Materialism’ (1937) published that February makes clear. Here, he repeats the same two positions albeit with different nuances. He acknowledges that science will supersede poetry but in a way that emphasises poetry’s freedom from superstition: ‘Poetry deals, not with the inexplicable, but with what has not yet been explained. It lights up by fitful flashes, a scene on which the full day of science will presently dawn.’[26] At the same time, he tries to reconcile socialist science with socialist realism:
The wishes and needs of mankind are rendered accessible, on a class-basis, to the artist-scientist, but the nature of his field of inquiry, as scientist, or his subject-matter, as artist, is found to extend beyond himself as observer. His observations must be mass-observations, his data mass-data … His problem is not to raise to the level of his own consciousness aspects of humanity hitherto concealed or only guessed at, but he has to raise the level of consciousness collectively of the whole mass, he has to induce self-realisation on a mass scale.[27]
These positions suggest an equal overall ambiguity. However, this state of affairs could not indefinitely persist. The career trajectory of Madge is readily decipherable from the earlier poetic position to the later mass science position and on into the heart of planning the post-war state. The particular interest of these writings appears to be that they catch exactly the pivotal moment of equilibrium before the impetus of transition takes over. But what is even more significant, and part of the fundamental importance of Mass-Observation, is that this fruitful moment of dual perspective was held open for nine months by a combination of method and organisation.
The reasons for this become clear from the third section of Mass-Observation, concerning what the organisation is actually intending to do. Here, they discuss the importance of presenting results so that both academicism and ‘the facile temptations of popular exposition’ are avoided and science reaches the mass in the form of ‘the completely objective fact’.[28] The actual examples of presentation methods given suggest that this concept of the ‘fact’ is not as straightforward as it appears. Firstly, there remains a distinct aesthetic component that promises to bring a new perception to ‘even the drab and sordid features of industrial life’ indicating an approach more akin to Orwell than the mainstream documentary tradition: ‘His squalid boarding-house will become for the observer what the entrails of the dog-fish are to the zoologist – the material of science and the source of its divina voluptas.’[29] Secondly, the metaphor of the detective, suggestive of the discovery of clues and traces, comes with a surrealist twist: ‘In the detection which we intend to practise, there is no criminal and all human beings are of equal interest.’[30] Finally, it emerges that the object of detection will be the image, ‘something between an idea and a sensation’, for which purpose the observers will be trained: ‘We intend to issue series of images, like packs of playing cards, and to suggest various exercises which can be played with them.’[31] The idea was to spread the expertise of painters and poets in the use of imagery to the mass-observers, thus liberating their perceptions from externally imposed sense associations and creating a sense of the possibility of change. This is clearly linked to Mass-Observation’s early standing directive for observers to record the dominant image of each day:
The observer is to ask himself at the end of each day what image has been dominant in it. This image should, if possible, be one which has forced itself on him and which has confirmed its importance by recurrence of some kind. the image may occur in a series of varying forms or may take the form of a coincidence. For example, the same name or object may forcibly strike the observer’s notice from within or without, several times on the same day.[32]
It was these images that Mass-Observation wanted to plot across their weather maps.[33] So in a sense these were intended as ‘facts’, in that they would comprise neither academic nor journalistic report, but not as facts functioning as the points of reference in a controlling discourse. Instead these ‘facts’ would present both their own meaning and the potentiality of its transformation into other meanings.
The importance of this third section of Mass-Observation is brought out by the preface to May the Twelfth, dated August 1937: ‘The main development of Mass-Observation has been two-fold, firstly the network of Observers all over the country; secondly an intensive survey of a single town. Charles Madge runs the former, Tom Harrisson the latter. Humphrey Jennings is responsible for the business of presenting results. These three activities are closely linked.’[34] This tripartite operational division is common to both accounts and it is how Mass-Observation functioned from January to September of 1937. Thus, it can be seen that there is a potential division in the text of Mass-Observation between the ambiguously poised mass science position of Madge and Harrisson, and the operational structure which also included Jennings. However, in practice the tripartite structure held the mass science position at its moment of equilibrium, because with Jennings presenting results there was no question of the poetic, image-based technique collapsing into an all-encompassing scientific narrative. When Jennings left Mass-Observation, this tripartite structure simply ceased to exist and the equally originating mass science position of Madge and Harrisson was released from the tensions that held it at a point of fruitful equilibrium.
The first major ‘weather map’ Mass-Observation had it in mind to produce was one of public feeling in the abdication crisis.[35] So, while Harrisson organised the intensive study of Bolton, Jennings and Madge instigated day-surveys to take place on the twelfth of each month, in which the observers (recruited from the New Statesman letters and sympathetic articles in the popular press) recorded all that they did and saw on that day. These were an end in themselves – and ran throughout 1937 – but the first three in February, March and April were also trial runs for that to take place on 12 May 1937, the Coronation of George VI. Mass-Observation was explicit in its understanding of the abdication crisis as a breakdown in the symbolic order: ‘Millions of people who passed their lives as the obedient automata of a system now had to make a personal choice, almost for the first time since birth.’[36]The unwritten questions with respect to the coronation were: in what manner will the symbolic order be restored? And how can the emergent elements be prevented from disappearing in this process?
[1] This notebook was started 9 December 1934, but the notes on ‘Popular Poetry’, which are the last entry in the book, obviously come from much later. However, they must precede 30 January 1937 because by that date the name ‘Mass Observation’ was definitely in use and it seems further reasonable to assume that they precede the Abdication crisis (because they make no mention of it), so I would place them as being written sometime in the autumn of 1936. See 10/-, C.M.P.
[2] Madge, ‘The Birth of Mass-Observation’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 November 1976, p.1395.
[7] André Breton, ‘Political Position of Surrealism’ [1935], in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trs. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1998, pp.229-230.
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.
[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.
This is the day diary I submitted to the Mass Observation (MO) 12 May 2022 day-diary project. This year I didn’t post it immediately as I did in 2020 and 2021 because I didn’t feel like it and it seemed at the time to have too much academic-job-related content (which is a bit of an occupational hazard). However, as we are on the eve of the biggest strike in British university history, it seems like a good moment. A lot of this blog is directly or indirectly related to MO (there is an index to posts specifically on MO and ageing here) and the question of self-reflexivity and so what I did, and wrote about, on that day is as relevant as anything else. Here is my day diary:
I am 57 years old, a university academic and live in Aberystwyth with my partner ‘A’ (53), and our youngest son (15).
I was woken this morning by shouts of ‘Dad! Dad!’ because my son was stuck in the bathroom after his shower. The inside door handle fell off two weeks ago and although the door can be opened and shut, it does mean that if the bolt in the handle swivels a bit, then there is no handle inside the room to twist it back in order to let oneself out. I have not been entirely idle in that I have bought a replacement door handle set but I haven’t yet fitted it. But getting shouted at earlyish in the morning is an incentive to get on and do that (over the weekend maybe!). Anyway, I did let him out and he got dressed and went off to school.
I went back to bed, dozed a bit, and then investigated my phone for details of the results of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the periodical assessment of the quality of research produced by British universities. The previous one was REF2014 and this was REF2021 (the process and results were delayed by the pandemic, hence only being announced today). The REF has become a massive industry in itself, which ties up hours and hours of labour in terms of both the preparation of the entries and the effort required by the respective subject panels to assess the work. This is all on top of the vast amount of work that has gone into actually producing the research. So, before any other considerations, there is the question of whether all this work is really the most efficient use of the time involved. Without it there would be more time for doing research and/or teaching. It’s also problematic because it generates league tables of winners and losers, and supports gamification by the universities (although most of the ways this happened in 2014 have been stopped by changes in the regulations). In general, it is part of the culture of metrics and data that instrumentalises individuals rather than holistically supporting everyone. Furthermore, certainly in some departments and universities, there is the situation where the time for full-time academics on permanent contracts to do their research is created by using PhD students and precariously employed early career academics on fixed-term teach-only contracts, or hourly rate contracts, to do the teaching. There is an unacceptable dependency within the sector on a high level of exploitation of young and aspiring academics. Some of these criticisms were trending highly on twitter on the hashtag #REF2021. There were also criticisms connected to other problems with Higher Education in the UK, such as the gender pay gap and the still very raw spot for all academics in pre-1992 universities (i.e. the ones that weren’t formerly polytechnics) that we have had our pensions slashed for no good reason: the benefits have been significantly reduced and the accrual rate diminished.
For a variety of good reasons, therefore, there are a lot of academics – at whatever stage of their career – very angry with the system. Because of this – and because for some to win, many more have to lose – it is not generally the done thing for individual academics to promote the good REF results of their own institution (if they were good). It’s left to the various institutional and departmental social media accounts to flag achievements or spin the results. However, while I am cynical about the REF and the triumphal proclamation that Britain produces oodles of world-leading and first-class international research, there is also the case that for a number of people the difference between the department they work in being kept open or closed is dependant on these results, and for many more the continuation of their jobs is affected by the outcome on an individual level. Universities are currently looking to shed academic staff, so the stakes are high. As someone who works in a subject area in which we have been officially notified in the past that we will all receive redundancy letters (and then been reprieved at the eleventh hour because the financial calculations turned out to be incorrect), I am alive to this threat. Therefore, despite all the considerations above, I was pleased to see that my subject area had significantly improved its results on 2014. Of course, virtually everyone else had also done this but if we hadn’t improved then we would have plummeted down the rankings and therefore lost income, with the result that we would be more vulnerable. As it is, we are slightly better positioned than previously. What exactly that will mean in terms of income is not clear to me yet but given that we have been one of the most successful subjects in my university, I assume that we are not immediately in the firing line (but given the coming recession, who knows what will happen over the mid to longer term). To be clear, this doesn’t keep me awake at night (because of reasons I’ll explain in a minute) but it does worry many and creates a level of anxiety and tension throughout the sector – and some would say that the purpose of exercises like the REF, and metrical measures of performance, and micro-management of that performance, is precisely to induce this level of anxiety so that the workforce is more compliant and pressured into working long hours week in and week out (through the summer months as well as the teaching term time).
There is a further reason why I describe this at length and spent most of the morning looking at the figures, and talking on the phone to a colleague, and reading emails and the internal statements from my own university, and that is because until I was forced to stop due to ill health at the beginning of October 2020, I was the lead for the REF submission for my subject. ‘Why?’, you might ask. Well, because (a) I was being made to do some form of major role and this one was more interesting than the other ones on offer and (b) I really did think I could do a much better job than in 2014 when our submission was a complete dog’s dinner because the person in charge of it was all bluff and bluster (it was so bad that apparently it has featured in presentations on how not to do the REF). But from the point of being ill and having to relinquish the role (I was completely off work for three months and then had to make a phased return so there was no way I could continue), I’ve thought of the whole thing as being a monumental failure. Because the whole process is confidential, from that point on I knew absolutely no more about it until today and so I haven’t had any ‘closure’ on it. Reading the results was quite cathartic in that respect and gave me a chance to process the whole experience a bit more. This however was quite emotionally exhausting and so I went back to bed for a bit to lie down (and watch an incredibly slow and boring stage of the Giro d’Italia on the Global Cycling Network app on my phone).
A came home in the afternoon and after we talked about our various REFs, we had sex (#academiclife). I had a shower and drove into town in order to drop A off outside the opticians so that she could pick up some new glasses that were in for her. I parked the car so that she could drive back home and I walked back circuitously, along the seafront, getting a bit wet as a random shower swept in from Cardigan Bay. At home I cooked a pasta Bolognese for dinner for the three of us and then took a mug of tea out into the garden to sit on the perch (my seat half way up the garden) and read some of a book I have just been given for my birthday: Richard King’s newly-published Brittle with Relics: A History of Wales 1962-1997, an oral history covering the period from the beginning of ‘the extensive civil disobedience that eventually succeeded in ensuring that Wales is a now a visibly a bilingual country’ (as Richard Wyn Jones puts it in a recent Guardian article) to the point at which the devolution referendum was won. It’s a fascinating telling of a story not widely known outside of Wales and a testament to what non-violent direct action can achieve. It certainly contains a lot to think about for me, as someone currently reading and trying to write about the possible constitutional futures of an independent Wales and also still recovering from having failed to be elected as a town councillor for Plaid Cymru a week ago. (Standing in a ward I don’t live in, I wasn’t particularly expecting to be successful, but the experience was certainly interesting for reflecting on what I want and how that dovetails with the wider community).
Later, I wandered back indoors after feeding the rabbit, and was just sitting down to write some of this when my son reminded me that I needed to drive him to basketball at the leisure centre (which only reopened earlier this year after being requisitioned as a field hospital at the beginning of the pandemic). When I got back from this short trip, I checked my email and found out that I had been awarded research leave for the autumn term, which I experienced as another shock requiring ‘processing’. I had applied for this, but I wasn’t necessarily expecting to get it nor to hear until later. Obviously, I was delighted on the one hand because this is what I wanted, and it enables me to carry out some research plans (I have a defined programme to achieve) and also makes some other parts of my life easier for the rest of the year. On the other hand, I also feel slightly guilty, especially after feeling positive about our REF result earlier, for being doubly affirmed. I’ve had some bad times with (Covid-related) postviral fatigue syndrome (PVS) over the past couple of years and at the point when writing a three-line email sent me back to bed for the rest of the day, I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to do research and writing again. It really does knock your confidence (and this is why I haven’t been losing sleep over the fate of the HE sector, because I’ve been too busy worrying if I’m going to make it through the next week, day, hour without further ‘post-exertional malaise’). So, as I say, I feel affirmed in the face of what has been a monumental, dogged struggle to recover as much as possible. Yet, I’m participating in the zero-sum game of HE winners and losers, when it would be better if we had a completely different system that was universal and inclusive. It doesn’t get any easier to square that circle. I used to take the view that education was a straightforward public good but now I increasingly think that it has been reconfigured ideologically in the UK to trap people in a neoliberal system of deadlines, assessments, metrics etc.
Therefore (after picking up my son again from his basketball), I assuaged my guilt by completing my tweet thread on fiction representing or responding to the General Strike of 1926 [2025 Edit: this no longer exists because I shut down that twitter account], which lasted nine days from the 4th to the 12th of May. To mark the 96th anniversary of the Strike, I have been tweeting on each of the nine days on a book or books that fit this category. This has turned out to be a bigger undertaking than I originally envisaged and led to an extremely long tweet thread overall, which led me to some useful thoughts that I hope to expand on in the future. I managed to get the last tweet of the thread off at 23:58 and then went to bed.
In MO’s call for day diaries this year it says that ‘reflections … on how you felt while keeping the diary are welcome’, while last year the call noted that ‘Diaries can record 12th May and reflect back over the past year and look forward to the future and life beyond this year.’ I think that now these two functions have become completely combined so that 12 May is for me the day that I reflect on my life. This is partly due to the fact that MO is important to me personally and also because 12 May is only a few days after my birthday. Moreover, given that I now have 12 May diaries for 2010, 2020, and 2021, it is very easy for me to make direct comparisons and this in turn forms part of an ongoing project exploring self-reflexivity in general and my own self-reflexivity in practice (see my 2019 blogpost for the British Academy and find brief details of the upcoming extension of the project here). The downside of that I suppose is that this is no longer entirely a normal day, but nonetheless it still includes normal things such as the school routine and having to do work. On the other hand, the significance of the day also seems to be taking on a self-fulfilling prophecy. That 12 May this year coincided with both the REF results and news of my upcoming research leave lends itself to reflection on past and future (and also puts a rosier complexion on things than would otherwise be the case).
Looking at last year’s day diary for #12May 21 in comparison to the one for #12May20, I was clearly happier because I knew what was wrong with me (PVS), I seemed to be slowly getting better, and I was envisaging things to look forward to. In some ways that was correct because I had a good summer, I went down to part-time hours in September 2021 as I had planned and things were going well. By October, I felt the best I had since before the pandemic and was commuting in to work again and thinking it is all going to work out … Then on the train home one week in mid-October, I started feeling ill and that was that. I think that was Covid again. Neither A nor I tested positive for either lateral flow or PCR but our son did at that time. I certainly had classic symptoms (this is a joke because the symptoms seem to change all the time and now include any kind of indicator of bad health whatsoever): I was coughing so continuously I couldn’t sleep for several nights. I got over it, struggled on for a bit but then I had a further bout of ‘post-exertional malaise’ which left me off work for the rest of the term, and then working the spring term from home on medical advice. Getting through to Easter was a real struggle, but I took leave for 3 weeks to ensure I had a proper rest, and since then I have been feeling better. I’m hoping I feel good over the summer like last year [Nov 2022 Edit: in fact, I had Covid again in July] but this time I hope it continues through to the end of the year and I don’t get set back again by some nasty virus.
Looking back at last year, I was still preoccupied with Covid restrictions and how they were impacting life. They are clearly impacting much less this year – as they have mostly been removed – and so there is less need to speculate about how they are going to play out over the coming months. There is still some need in respect to work because of the continued mixed messages we receive. On the one hand, we now get a regular blog from the executive committee (whoever they are) and about the last five have all been very heavily about how great it is to be back in in-person meetings (hint, hint), and various messages have seeped down that everything is supposed to be on campus now. On the other hand, we also have been reminded quite strongly that there are supposed to be no more than two people in an office at one time, which inhibits any attempt to pretend things are normal. All these kinds of things were being said last summer before the beginning of the 21/22 academic year, but when I first made my 450 mile round trip commute to work last September, I spent most of the trip sitting on my bed in the hotel room with my laptop on my lap in online meetings because that was all that was going on and I couldn’t access them from the PC in my office (eventually, like most of my colleagues, I had to buy my own usb camera in order to zoom from the office). We’re being told that teaching is being expected to be in person but at the same time we’re asked to fill in forms detailing details of how students can access material both in person and remotely. So, there’s no consistency. This past year we ended up being made to provide a hybrid delivery although that wasn’t staff preference at all (partly, because there is limited technical support for this). Again, this forthcoming year, we (staff in my subject area) would very much prefer to teach in person with no simultaneous hybrid access (but with access to recordings and other support for students unable to attend). But I’m not holding my breadth on that. Also, I wouldn’t rule out the return of some form of Covid restrictions as rates will inevitably increase in the autumn. However, as I’m not actually teaching this autumn, I don’t have to factor in these considerations when thinking about the rest of the year. I think for many people, out-of-control inflation, the ‘cost-of-living crisis’, and social instability are going to be bigger problems going forward.
I must say that have reflected on these matters, I feel better about, and more in control of, my life. That is the value of this kind of life writing: it’s not just recording a day in the life once a year for posterity, it’s also a beneficial form of practice in itself. If things aren’t going well, it’s often tempting to try not to think about it and keep one’s head down, but I don’t think that’s a good long-term strategy. If I have to confront reality, then the advantage of writing about it is that it gives me a chance to regain some control over my own narrative.
I donate my 12th May diary to the Mass Observation Archive. I consent to it being made publicly available as part of the Archive and assign my copyright in the diary to the Mass Observation Archive Trustees so that it can be reproduced in full or in part on websites, in publications and in broadcasts as approved by the Mass Observation Trustees. I agree to the Mass Observation Archive assuming the role of Data Controller and the Archive will be responsible for the collection and processing of personal data and ensuring that such data complies with the DPA.
Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor, eds, The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
Ten years ago, very few people were predicting that we would move into a period of populism, crisis and political instability that would make comparisons with the 1930s a commonplace. However, these trends were already very much apparent in 2017 when we began work on what at the time was the latest volume to be published in Bloomsbury’s ‘Decades Series’, covering the modern British fiction of the 1930s. Therefore, we decided from the start that we wanted this collection to move beyond a sepia-tinted version of the 1930s and look at those aspects of the decade’s literary culture which are relevant to us today in the twenty-first century. We set out to show that the 1930s was a key decade of socio-cultural change, marking the final transition from traditional nineteenth-century hierarchies into a twentieth-century mass democracy, in which both women and the working class had full political and cultural representation.
In keeping with the most up-to-date scholarship on 1930s literature, we have moved beyond the former close association of the decade with writers from the public-school educated ‘Auden generation’ to consider a much wider range of working-class, women’s, experimental and queer writing of the decade. Following the volume’s introduction, the first chapter provides an overview of 1930s literary contexts and concerns in relation to two well-known writers of the time who have since suffered critical neglect: the daughter of a post office sorting clerk, Ethel Mannin, and the former Durham coal miner, Harold Heslop. The success of these two writers, which would have been unimaginable before the First World War, demonstrates the unprecedented processes of cultural democratisation during the period. The intricate blend of personal and public moral concerns in their work points towards the intersectional politics demanded by the situation of the world today.
This is not to say that there is a straightforward march of progress from the literary culture of the 1930s to the present day. The nonnormative temporality of the queer writing of the decade provides a perfect illustration of how cultural transmission is not always straightforwardly visible to the historian’s gaze. For example, E. M. Forster originally drafted Maurice in 1912 and it was only published in 1971, after his death and the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, but it was in the 1930s that he revised the text and first corresponded with Christopher Isherwood about it. Similarly, aspects of Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, which for years has appeared to be a period piece, filtered through the public imagination via its musical adaptation into Cabaret, may also be viewed as very much in line with today’s sex worker advocacy. Where formerly the interest in the working class of Isherwood, and his public-school Oxbridge-educated peers, was derided as voyeuristic slumming or worse, it can now be seen that it was his modern queer identity that allowed him to successfully cross class barriers and make new alliances.
We have forgotten how much the British perception of history is shaped by a powerful and apparently progressive narrative of victory over fascism in the Second World War, followed by the establishment of the Welfare State. However, analysis of 1930s novels such as Storm Jameson’s In the Second Year and Clemence Dane’s The Arrogant History of White Ben reminds us of how there was a very real fear in the decade that the English upper and middle classes would instigate a fascist coup. The latter of these novels is a very disturbing satire in which a scarecrow comes to life and becomes dictator of England. With his hair literally a mop, it is very difficult not to think of White Ben as satirising a recent former Prime Minister. The most chilling aspect of the novel is the way in which supposedly English radical traditions, such as the idea of freeborn yeomen roaming the countryside and upholding the legacy of Magna Carta, lead to the worst excesses of violence committed in the name of the new regime.
In summation, rather than see the 1930s as an isolated literary decade, this volume positions it as central to understanding the literary culture of Britain and its constituent nations. A key overall argument is that it is the democratisation and politicisation across the spectrum of 1930s writing from canonical works to thrillers and women’s magazines, as opposed to solely the legacy of literary modernism, which is crucial to the subsequent development of British culture across the rest of the twentieth century and into our own times.
An extract from the draft version of my chapter, ‘You’re not in the market at Shielding, Joe’: Beyond the Myth of the ‘Thirties’, which sets out an alternate literary history of the 1930s to the old one presented in terms of the ‘Auden Generation’, can be found on this blog here.
[Edit: since I wrote this post, I have received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in order to conduct this project on ‘Self-Reflexivity, Class Consciousness, Culture Wars and Social Change in Britain’. This runs for 12 months from September 2023. The project description is as outlined below.]
The landslide election victory of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in December 2019 is most frequently interpreted as due to their success in ‘getting Brexit done’ and thus appealing to a silent majority, including the northern working-class inhabitants of former ‘Red Wall’ areas, ‘who lean left on spending and public services but are culturally conservative’ (Shipman 2021). From this perspective, Britain’s departure from the EU potentially enables a return, at least symbolically, to the postwar heyday of a ‘Great Britain’ characterised by political consensus, social deference, a common culture, full male employment, and a rigid gender binary; a context that is often equated with so-called traditional working-class values. However, apart from any political criticisms of such a formulation, ‘traditional’ is a misleading term in this respect because the working class is a product of the uneven development of industrial modernity. Since the onset of modernity, according to the sociologist Margaret Archer (2007), self-reflexivity (the capacity of people to consider themselves in relation to their social contexts and vice versa) is the primary means by which people relate to the social world ‘which can no longer be approached through embodied knowledge, tacit routines, or traditional custom and practice alone’ (5). Archer’s central idea is that ‘there is a relationship between patterns of social mobility and different modes of reflexivity’ (86), which are determined by the individual’s choice to maintain or break with ‘contextual continuity’. The maintenance of ‘traditional’ working-class consciousness is therefore dependent on what Archer calls ‘communicative reflexivity’ tirelessly maintaining that contextual continuity in an environment in which accelerated social change requires everyone to exercise ever more and more reflexivity over increasingly greater tracts of their lives. By tracing self-reflexivity, through published and archival autobiographical (non-fiction and fiction) narratives since 1919, this project will reassess how we understand class consciousness and how this affects our understanding of Britain and Britishness. Centring self-reflexivity as the primary determinant of British social history allows consideration of its role (rather than external factors) in the generation of cultural division, understood as the default condition of modernity, rather than as a deviation from a supposedly organic common culture.
This project follows on from ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’ (2018-21), funded by a British Academy Small Research Grant, for which I researched autobiographical writing from the 1930s and 1980s from the Mass Observation (MO) Archive in Brighton, the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies at Brunel, and selected published sources in order to investigate the role of self-reflexive writing both autobiographical and fictional, in the aligned development of both women’s and working-class cultural agency during the 1930s, which has been seen (Hilliard 2006) as a key prerequisite for the cultural and social democratisation of postwar Britain. This phase of the project has led to preliminary publications (Hubble 2021, 2022) with some more in the pipeline. However, what hasn’t been researched in detail before is how these trajectories of self-reflexive working-class and women’s writing continue following the political shift in the 1980s away from the common culture of the immediate postwar decades. What I found from analysing my source material was that differences emerge in this period between the social values expressed in women’s autobiographical writing and that of (in particular) older-working-class men – who display views associated with ‘Brexit’ and the 2019 General Election (Ford et al, 2021) – despite both being equally self-reflexive (Hubble 2023; see also Hinton 2016). Self-reflexivity, which had enabled an aligned development of cultural agency after WW1, was now apparently generating a sharp cultural division.
I shall be critically investigating these processes over the coming months and reporting and reflecting on some of that here. The idea is that the self-reflexivity aspect of the project applies to me as much as anyone else. Indeed, part of ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’ involved me reflecting, through a diary and posts on this blog, on my own position, as a university professor in my late 50s from a (London suburban) working-class background working in a changing Britain. One of the things that struck me was that cultural division intensifies with the breakdown of the mid-20C link between literature and working-class experience (as exemplified by the work of Raymond Williams) which has both underpinned my own career and been central to my research interests. Therefore, a focus of this project will be on the changes in the relationship between literature and working-class experience since the First World War because I think this will cast a lot of light on the emergence and relative dominance of social and cultural values over the course of that century. This part of the project will, in effect, involve reconceptualising the history of what is currently called English literature. To this end I will draw on my experience as a series and volume editor of Bloomsbury’s ‘The Decades Series’, which is now 80 per cent of the way to charting a century over which the literary and cultural landscape was utterly transformed. Over the coming months, I will post descriptions of the books in that series as a first step towards a wider cultural mapping of the period, beginning with what in many ways was the pivotal decade: The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction.
Works Cited
Archer, Margaret (2007). Making our Way through the World: Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Ford, Robert et al, eds (2021). The British General Election of 2019. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hilliard, Christopher (2006). To Exercise Our Talents. MA: Harvard UP.
Hinton, James (2016). Seven Lives from Mass Observation. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Hubble, Nick (2021)‘“You’re not in the market at Shielding, Joe”: Beyond the Myth of the “Thirties”’ in Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor, eds, The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, London: Bloomsbury, 17-57.
Hubble, Nick (2022) ‘“Class Lives”: Spatial Awareness and Political Consciousness in British Mining Novels of the 1930s’ in Simon Lee, ed., Locating Classed Subjectivities: Intersections of Space & Working-Class Life in 19th, 20th, and 21st-century British Writing. New York: Routledge, 77-92.
Hubble, Nick (2023)‘Everyday Life, Class Consciousness and Social Change in Mass Observation Narratives’ in Lucy Curzon and Ben Jones, eds,Mass Observation: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses, London: Bloomsbury – forthcoming. Shipman, Tim (2021) ‘How the Tories Weaponised Woke’. Sunday Times, 13 June.
It’s a great exhibition, well set out in three large rooms on the ground floor of the museum, and definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area. The combined effect of the oversized ceramic objects (clocks, candlesticks, envelopes, matchboxes) on large stylised mantelpiece-like white plinths with Spender’s photos on the walls is brilliantly effective in illustrating the interaction between surrealism and everyday life that lay at the heart of the original Mass Observation movement. As Watson notes, the ‘Mantelpiece Directive’ (asking respondents to describe the objects on their mantelpieces), was the first Mass Observation directive sent out to national panellists in 1937. This ‘gave MO a route into the private life of households’. Watson cites Rachel Hurdley (2006, 2013), on how the mantelpiece automatically confers a certain value on what is displayed there, and Rodney Harrison (2014), on how MO were probably hoping to get an insight on the relationship between taste preferences and social class. Furthermore, as Watson highlights, mantelpieces formed an important part of the MO investigation into how families coped with the process of relocation from the city centre to out-of-town local authority housing estates, which was ongoing during this period. The mantelpiece might combine symbols of a new technological future, such as a radio, alongside nostalgic keepsakes from a Victorian past.
Watson quotes Samuel Hynes (1976) to the effect that ‘nostalgia and apocalyptic apprehension, the sad look back and the depressed look ahead’ were the dominant characteristics of the late 1930s. I wouldn’t entirely agree with Hynes that the future was seen as a matter for depression. The promise of ‘the naked democracy of the swimming pools’ that Orwell describes in The Lion and the Unicorn might have been largely a feature of the more prosperous Midlands and South of England but one of the things that MO undoubtedly achieved in their Worktown study of Bolton was to show the inadequacy of a negative, homogenous depiction of the northern working class as victims of the ‘hungry decade’. There is no doubt that it was a time of acute social change and anxiety as Watson explains: ‘It was a period marked by anxieties about joblessness, economic decline (the slow death of the textile industry in places like Bolton), the rise of fascism and the approach of another catastrophic war in Europe.’ Of course, it is this that interests me from the point of view of my project, Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative. My focus is on thinking about what people actually wrote for MO as a means of self-reflexively coping with change and anxiety, while simultaneously bringing new cultural values and structures of feeling into being. However, mantelpieces can also be seen as a way of doing this; in a sense they were mini-exhibitions curated by ordinary people.
I found it interesting that Slee was determined to avoid nostalgia in his selection of Spender’s photographs (in which he was successful – the signifying effect is very much of modernity, which in itself is indicative of the fact that even in Worktown there was much hope for the future – see also my review of David Hall’s Worktown and my forthcoming post on Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer’s newly-published Class of ’37). In this respect, Slee’s Chicken Air, which turns the chicken feet that boys are playing with in one of Spender’s photographs into yellow ceramic aeroplanes (based on the Lockheed 14 aircraft that brought Chamberlain back from Munich in 1938) is playfully evocative of not only all sorts of hopes and fears, but also of the ceaseless transformations of everyday life itself.
References
Harrison, Rodney (2014) ‘Observing, Collecting and Governing “Ourselves” and “Others”: Mass-Observation’s Fieldwork Assignments’. History and Anthropology, 25:2, 227-245.
Hurdley, Rachel (2006) ‘Dismantling Mantelpieces: Narrating Identities and Materialising Culture in the Home’. Sociology, 40: 717-733.
Social Humanities 