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:

O Ceremony, show me but thy worth.

What! is thy soul of adoration?

Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,

Creating awe and fear in other men?

Wherin thou art less happy, being fear’d,

Than they in fearing.^[3]

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:

And but for ceremony, such a wretch,

Winding up days with toil, and nights with sleep,

Had the fore-hand and vantage of a King.

The slave, a member of the country’s peace,

Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wots;

What watch the King keeps, to maintain the peace;

Whose hours the peasant best advantages.^[4]

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.

Here is the link for Part Four.

---

[1] See Madge, Autobiography, p.72.

[2] Empson, Some Versions, p.87.

[3] Jennings and Madge, May the Twelfth, p.87.

[4] Ibid., p.88.

[5] Ibid., pp.91-92.

[6] Ibid., pp.139, 141, 147.

[7] Ibid., pp.117, 121, 122, 140.

[8]Ibid., p.134.

[9] See M-L Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p.16.

[10] Jennings and Madge, May the Twelfth, p.91.

[11]Ibid., p.138n.

[12]Ibid., p.131.

[13]Ibid.,  pp. 137-139.

[14] Ibid., pp. 286-287.

[15] Ibid., p.144.

[16] Ibid., p.145.

[17] See Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations,pp.219-220.

[18] David Pocock, ‘Afterword’ to Jennings and Madge, May the Twelfth (1987 edition), p.419.

[19] Michel Trebitsch, ‘Preface’ to Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1, London: Verso, 1991: p.xxiv.

[20] Mass-Observation, ‘A Thousand Mass-Observers’, undated but from internal evidence published in late July or early August 1937, M-O A.

[21] Jennings and Madge, May the Twelfth, p.348.

[22]Ibid.,p.14n.

[23] Mass-Observation, ‘A Thousand Mass-Observers’.

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 The Psychopathology 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?

Follow the link for Part Three.

---

[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.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Geoffrey Pyke, letter, New Statesman and Nation, 12 December 1936, p.974.

[5] Madge, letter, New Statesman and Nation, 2 January 1937, p.12.

[6] Madge, ‘Autobiography’, p.64, 2/1, C.M.P.

[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.

[8] Ibid., pp.210, 231-232.

[9] Ibid., pp.262, 278.

[10] Jennings and Madge, ‘Poetic Description and Mass-Observation’, p3.

[11] Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938, p.192.

[12] Harrisson, ‘Coconut Moon’, New Statesman and Nation, 2 January 1937, pp.12-13.

[13] See Madge, ‘Autobiography’, pp.19-23.

[14] Madge and Harrisson, Mass-Observation, London: Frederick Muller, 1937, pp.47-48.

[15] Jeffery. ‘Mass-Observation: A Short History’, p.23.

[16] Harrisson, Letter to Oxford, Wyck, Glos.: Reynold Bray, The Hate Press, 1933, p.69.

[17] Ibid., p.96.

[18] Harrisson, Jennings and Madge, letter, New Statesman and Nation, 30 January 1937, p.155.

[19] See Madge and Harrisson, Mass-Observation, p.28.

[20] Ibid., pp.13-14.

[21] Ibid., p.16.

[22] Ibid., p.18.

[23] Ibid., p.20.

[24] Ibid., pp.25-26.

[25] Ibid., p.27.

[26] Madge, ‘Magic and Materialism’, p.32.

[27] Ibid., p.33.

[28] Ibid., pp.39-40.

[29] Ibid., pp.29-30. Wigan Pier was first published in March 1937 so this could conceivably be a direct reference to Orwell.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid., pp.37-38.

[32] Quoted (presumably from the directive sent out, which is no longer in existence) in Madge, ‘Magic and Materialism’, p.34.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Jennings and Madge, eds., May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937, [1937], London: Faber and Faber, 1987, p.iv.

[35] Madge and Harrisson, Mass-Observation, p.30.

[36] Ibid., p.9.

‘…it was a crazy idea to have it edited by a whole bunch of intellectual poets.’

– Tom Harrisson on May the Twelfth[1]

In the run up to the coronation on 6 May 2023, it seems like an idea to run a series of posts on Mass Observation’s book on the last but one coronation on 12 May 1937. I’m drawing here on the text of my MA dissertation written in the last century (the book titles were still underlined old-school style but I’ve made the effort to switch them to italics). In subsequent posts, I’m intending to supplement this dissertation material with passages from my PhD (2002), but this extract still seems to function quite well without that. Some of this material has appeared in various conference papers over the years, and also in very revised and expanded form in my 2006 book, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life. Mass Observation, which is still very much an extant operation, no longer uses a hyphen and so I don’t use one these days and often abbreviate to MO, but I’m going to leave it as it is in this older writing. Where I have added comments while compiling this, I have marked them as editorial comments in square brackets. I’ve made some very minor changes to punctuation and syntax in the name of readability and clarified a few instances of ‘this’, but otherwise this is pretty much as it was. I anticipate writing (a) final post(s) setting this in context and updating on my own position, but for the meantime I, at least, am interested in hearing what 20C Hubble would say about the coronation.

            *          *          *         

May the Twelfth, edited by Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge, was published in September 1937 by Faber and Faber. While the book was clearly motivated by its subject date being that of the coronation of George VI, no mention of this event is to be found in the title (although presumably the public would be aware of the significance of the date), the preface, or the contents page. Instead, the work is presented as the culmination of Mass-Observation’s initial London-based activity which consisted of collecting the accounts of volunteers as to how they had spent their daily lives on the twelfth of each month, commencing with the February of that year. The book is divided into five sections, the first four of which are organised as montages – the first is of press clippings, the other three of segments taken from the accounts of the various volunteers or Mass-Observers – respectively covering: preparations for the day, the events in London, national activities, and individual reactions. The fifth section consists of a number of complete and abridged day surveys in succession, with no significant organising principle.

This was Mass-Observation’s first book-length publication. According to the preface, the roles of the three main founding figures were as follows: Charles Madge ran the network of observers around the country, Tom Harrison ran an intensive survey of a single town (Bolton, although it was referred to briefly as ‘Northtown,’ and subsequently as ‘Worktown’), and Humphrey Jennings was ‘responsible for the business of presenting results.’[2] It was a position to which Jennings was not best suited according to the historians of Mass-Observation, Angus Calder and Dorothy Sheridan [Ed: Another historian of MO, James Hinton, has subsequently gone on to argue in The Mass Observers (2013) that Jennings should not be considered one of the founders at all – I disagree with that assessment]:

Mass-Observation’s first book, May 12, a study of George VI’s Coronation Day, had not been a success – it seems to have sold a bare 800 copies. Humphrey Jennings had been the main compiler – his methods were odd, amusing and infuriating, and only a few critics, Evelyn Waugh being one, were really appreciative of them. This was Jennings’s first and last major job for M-O – thereafter he dropped out from the organisation, though he remained in touch with Madge and Harrisson and carried Mass-Observation’s broad aims forward in the remarkable documentary films which he directed during the war.[3]

This account, which constitutes virtually the only mention of the enterprise (and of Jennings) in a book-length anthology, is at variance with Mass-Observation’s own book, First Year’s Work: 1937-38, which summarises the reviews on publication of May the Twelfthas ‘45 favourable and 16 unfavourable’.[4] Moreover, at least some of these ‘favourable’ reviews are ‘really appreciative’ of the compositional effects: including, for example, this one in Life and Letters:

One really seems to hear the people speaking, and to look into their lives – like passing backyards in a train.[5]  

Maurice Richardson’s review in the November 1937 edition of Left Review of reveals a unified, but uneasy, blend of social realism and revolutionary experience:

If you try and read it for entertainment only you will inevitably be overwhelmed at times by the mass of detailed incidents, so many of which are almost identical, but the cumulative effect is extraordinarily vivid and almost uncomfortable in its realism. From a political point of view it is interesting, but not in any way startling….From an anthropological point of view some of the aspects of crowd-behaviour noted are fascinating.[6]

Despite his appreciation of the vividness, Richardson inevitably finds that ‘first impressions are mixed’ and ends up looking ‘forward eagerly’ to the publication of the single town survey in the Mass-Observation pipeline, as potentially less overwhelming and enabling a more intelligible overview [unfortunately, of the four planned volumes on Worktown, only The Pub and the People, largely compiled by John Sommerfield, was published belatedly in 1943 – although more recent publications have resurrected material on Blackpool and religion]. Richardson’s attitude indicates to us why it is that the contemporary response to May the Twelfth can appear as less enthusiastic than it was. For while the seized images obviously provided an initial invigorating experience, nobody could reconcile this on second thoughts with the dominant left wing totalizing overview that strove to make sense of mass-movements: social realism simply cannot comprehend that anything can be more real than it. Therefore, contemporary commentators [and many since] immediately looked to the more familiar sociological element of Mass-Observation as a way forward out of this impasse without considering that by doing so they were separating out the original mix; and leaving behind the part that had initially excited them. Not only this of course, they were also discarding the original possibility of counterpointing revolutionary experience against totality as a means of rupturing reification in a revolutionary manner [Ed: at which point, I should note that the full title of my MA dissertation was ‘Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Mass-Observation’ and it entailed an idiosyncratic Western Marxist reading, which I’ve only mostly stripped out for the purposes of these posts].

This separation of the original Mass-Observation mix allowed Harrisson, writing about Mass-Observation in the 1960s, to identify the two strands at work: ‘From the industrial north, a more objective aimed approach; from London in the south, a literary and documentary one…’[7] The history of Mass-Observation can now be represented as always having been a stark contrast between ‘objective’ sociological study and the ‘literary’ activity of ‘a bunch of intellectual poets’. The fact that both strands are entwined in May the Twelfth (and the founding statements of Mass-Observation) disappears from history along with the existence of supportive reviews. By 1985, Calder can simply dismiss the project as ‘a book which the founders themselves came to see as misguided’.[8] It is obvious that Harrisson, almost from the point of publication, saw the book as misguided, as witnessed by the virtual lack of reference to it in First Year’s Work despite it being the major work undertaken to that date. Instead, pride of place is given to Harrisson’s own Worktown operations. Of course, this in itself is not particularly significant – in an organisation with several projects, it would be necessary to fight one’s own corner in order to ensure sufficient resources for one’s own project – it is pointless to blame Harrisson for being the best at fighting his own corner. However, Harrisson was still only one of three founders of Mass-Observation and therefore his misgivings cannot be taken as representative of the whole. To see how the founders can be represented as regarding May the Twelfth as misguided, it is worth looking at a 1990s account of Mass-Observation:

Mass-Observation was the brainchild of Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson….

            ….From the beginning, Mass-Observation went in two quite different directions. First, Madge gathered an ever changing group of volunteer correspondents….This ‘national panel’ kept diaries and responded to a multiplicity of ‘directives’ – questions asked by the Mass-Observation office in London. The first effort led to May the Twelfth, a collection of one-day diaries kept on the day of the coronation of George VI. Madge believed that these correspondents would provide grist for the collective study of the ‘collective unconsciousness of the ordinary men and women in the land.’ Second, Tom Harrisson organised a community study of Worktown (and Blackpool)….

       ….In 1940, Madge and Harrisson worked for the Ministry of Information doing a study of the impact of the Blitz on civilian morale. By 1941, Madge broke from Harrisson to join John Maynard Keynes in investigating consumption and saving patterns. In 1950, he joined the sociology faculty at Birmingham University. Meanwhile, in 1941, Mass-Observation shifted from the Ministry of Information… and did research for the Advertising Service Guild….

            ….The war and ‘cool careerism’ (as Charles Madge wrote in 1961) turned M-O and its leaders from their idealism of the late 1930s to market research.

            Yet, in 1960, Tom Harrisson returned to England and gathered a group to write an update, Britain Revisited (1961). In 1970, with the founding of the Mass-Observation Archive at Sussex University, he returned to the manuscripts from the Worktown study (among other projects).[9]

If Jennings simply disappears from the equation, then the history of Mass-Observation can be shown as a straightforward progression. The initial recklessly enthusiastic idealism of the ‘dropouts from Cambridge’[10] evolves into a sober maturity demonstrated by their rise to academic respectability. May the Twelfth is relegated to the status of a footnote by this teleological version of events which gains ascendancy due to its self-legitimating function as the very guarantor of Mass-Observation’s hard won institutional status.

If May the Twelfth is regarded as an aberration in relation to the main activities of Mass-Observation, that hasn’t prevented attempts to salvage the constitutive raw material for proper sociological and anthropological use. These attempts began immediately after publication with Bronislaw Malinowski’s essay, ‘A Nation-Wide Intelligence Service’, which comes at the end of First Years Work. Malinowski finds the volume ‘interesting’, but with the reservation that ‘we cannot be sure that the editors oriented their instructions by a theory of what the function of the crowning ritual is for the institution of monarchy, and what monarchy means for the nation’.[11] Of course, there is absolutely no indication that the editors did anything of the sort. The less than subtle implication is that an anthropological study of the rituals of monarchy is what the book should really have been about. Malinowski calls for a brief historical survey of coronations, and analysis of the ceremony (‘every detail… charged with a mysticism which is yet connected with the concrete functions of monarchy and charged with practical import…’[12]) and various aspects of the event which ‘would require an expert in economics, collective psychology and political science – or a group of experts – to translate the general problems into tangible questions’.[13] He seems completely oblivious to the fact that all of this would take space away from, and run counter to the spirit of, the presentation of the various experiences of the volunteers gathered on the day, that was the day of the coronation, and which made the book so exciting to the reviewers in Left Review and Life and Letters. This indifference to the actual project is compounded by the manner in which Malinowski singles out the book’s analysis of the expenditure on preparations as good: thus highlighting the one section of the book compiled from newspaper reports and not the accounts of observers.

Harrisson, in Britain Revisited, seeks to integrate May the Twelfth into part of a continual study by Mass-Observation of ‘royal occasions and of attitudes to royalty’.[14] He pairs extracts from May the Twelfth with reports from the 1953 coronation to show the similarity of both in terms of ‘official and unofficial behaviour’.[15] This follows survey results indicating that in both 1956 and 1960, ninety per cent of the population supported the monarchy in preference to a republic.[16] The inevitable conclusion is not lagging far behind: ‘it seems unlikely that existing attitudes to royalty will be drastically or lastingly changed’[17] – although here Harrisson is at least chiefly restricting himself to comment on the probable effects of Princess Margaret’s marriage to a commoner. No such circumspection is to be found in Philip Ziegler’s Crown and People.

Ziegler uses material from the Mass-Observation Archive, and May the Twelfth in particular, as the principle source in his book studying the attitude of ‘the man in the street’ to the British monarchy.[18] Therefore it is odd that as a ‘statement of the ideals and principles’[19] underlying Mass-Observation’s work, he provides, as an appendix, a report on the first ten years of the organisation by Harrisson which makes no mention of May the Twelfth. Ziegler also manages the singular feat of quoting extensively from the bookwithout once mentioning Jennings’s name, even in the notes. He uses the material to demonstrate the undoubted widespread participation in the coronation activities nationally, and to comment on the ‘commonly encountered’ patriotism, ‘sometimes almost unwillingly expressed…’[20] Actually, the phenomenon of unbidden tears rising to eyes in moments of overwhelming emotion is quite rare in the book. An account that literally concurs with Ziegler’s assertion is that of the man who reports: ‘The most stirring incident was the unreasonably (so it seemed) fervent cheering I felt compelled to give with others to the King and Queen on their return.’[21] Moments such as these are precisely part of the strength of May the Twelfth and illustrate the way it breaks up the official narrative of the coronation. When Ziegler invokes the ninety per cent pro-monarchy statistic in order to state, that in the event of a referendum on becoming a republic, no one could ‘seriously doubt that those weeks would be dominated by the thunderous roaring of the royalists… and that… Britain’s electorate would prove by their votes what they had demonstrated by their cheers in 1937, 1953 and 1977’[22], it obviously doesn’t occur to him that many of these votes might be ‘almost unwillingly’ cast due to the same kind of compulsion that operated on the volunteer observer in the account given above, and that this prospect might give cause for concern. Instead, we are informed (‘temperately’) that ‘the British want the royal family, that their reasons for doing so are sensible, even meritorious, and that our national life would be impoverished if the monarchy were to be eliminated.’[23]

The development from May the Twelfth of this strain of facile celebration, of the undying devotion of the British public to the monarchy, would be a mere curiosity if it were not for its final culmination in the 1987 republication of the book with a new afterword by David Pocock, the then Director of the Tom Harrisson Mass-Observation Archive. Here we find the same themes as in Harrisson and Ziegler, but without the laboured attempts at empirical and statistical justification. Instead, we are presented with an apparently effortless account that appears to embody all that is essentially natural and human about British subjects. There is a pleasurable expression of surprise at the ‘not just similarities but apparently identical features in the reactions on that Coronation Day and those reported in the Day Diaries written for Mass-Observation on 29 July 1981, the wedding day of Their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princess of Wales.’[24] We even learn of the young man who ‘sedulously and even ostentatiously avoided anything to do with the Royal Wedding’ until he heard something about it on the BBC World Service and ‘was unexpectedly moved…Felt absurdly, nicely, English’.[25] This is contrasted with a report by a (female) typist in May the Twelfth. According to Pocock, ‘Her feelings also changed as she was seduced by the public celebration and if , at thirty-nine, she was more suspicious of these awakened emotions, it is not surprising’.[26] Her ‘suspicions’ are concisely stated, ‘It [the pageantry of the coronation] is too dangerous a weapon to be in the hands of the people at present in power in this country’ [Ed: a sentiment that applies equally, if not more so, in 2023].[27] Quite what relevance Pocock thinks the woman’s age has for her political opinions is open to question; but the relevance ascribed to the continued presence of the same reactions to the monarchy is more than transparent. It is to be found in the ‘deep roots in the human psyche’, that ‘kingship… [rather than constitutional monarchy] is an expression of a powerful human need’.[28] 

For Pocock then, the value of May the Twelfth is that it is ‘quite simply, “full of human interest”’[29] and this interest is intrinsically that of the Mass-Observation material in its raw state. The book is therefore a collection of ‘abundant quotation’,[30] and Jennings (who Pocock, in keeping with other academics officially linked to Mass-Observation, dutifully gives a brief mention) is assigned the status of a collector: ‘For him…. the material was to speak for itself, guided minimally by the hand of the producer’.[31] The republication of May the Twelfth in 1987 was as a collection showing ‘that in a half-century that has witnessed dramatic changes in our daily lives, underlying attitudes [to royal occasions] have changed remarkably little’.[32] The reason why is kept simple for us:

There is no constitutional requirement for the monarch’s family, other than her immediate successor perhaps, to play any part, let alone be invested with the distinctive glamour of royalty; no presidential figure could evoke the insatiable curiosity about its private life that the Queen evokes – all this is the creation of the public, it is what we wish to be so.[33]

The uneasy blend of sociological study and revolutionary experience that characterized the foundation of Mass-Observation, and which was also revealed in the initial reviews of May the Twelfth, therefore comes to an unexpected end that is most clearly neither sociology nor revolution. We have seen that progressively less and less significance has been accorded to the presentation of the text in the constructions given to it at subsequent historical conjunctures: first, by ignoring it; second, by stripping the images away from their counterpointed totality and (unsuccessfully) trying to insert them into a social realist narrative as quantitative statistical data; and finally by simply letting the images break free and speak for themselves. The resultant political intervention, on one level, has operated fairly crudely to change what is on the surface a neutral (often sceptical) study into a jingoistic celebration of the British monarchy. But, on another level, something else must be going on in order to allow this intervention to effect itself so naturally.

Follow the link for Part Two.                                                                                                  

---

[1]Quoted in David Pocock, ‘Afterword’ to Jennings and  Madge (eds.), May the Twelfth (Faber and Faber, London, 1987), p.418.

[2]Jennings and Madge, op. cit., p.x.

[3]Calder and Sheridan, “Speak for Yourself”: A Mass-Observation Anthology 1937-49 (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984), p.62.

[4]Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, First Year’s Work: 1937-38 (Lindsay Drummond, London, March 1938), p.52.

[5]L.A.Z. (A woman reader), Life and Letters Vol.17 No. 10 (Kraus Reprint, New York, 1967), p.167.

[6]The Left Review: October 1934 – May 1938, Vol. VII (Frank Cass, London, 1968), p.626.

[7]Tom Harrisson, Britain Revisited (Victor Gollancz, London, 1961), p.15.

[8]Angus Calder, ‘Mass-Observation 1937-1949’ in Martin Bulmer (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.129.

[9]Gary Cross, “Introduction” to Cross (ed.), Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930’s (Routledge, London, 1990), pp.1-3.

[10]Ibid.

[11]Madge and Harrisson, op. cit., pp.111-112.

[12]Ibid., pp.112-113.

[13]Ibid., p.115.

[14]Harrisson, op. cit., p.230.

[15]Ibid., p.233.

[16]Ibid., p.231.

[17]Ibid., p.251.

[18]Philip Ziegler, Crown and People (Collins, London, 1978), pp.9-13, 212-213.

[19]Ibid., p.11.

[20]Ibid., p.46.

[21]Jennings and Madge, op. cit., p.128.

[22]Ziegler, op cit., p.197.

[23]Ibid., p.203.

[24]Pocock, op. cit., p.420.

[25]Ibid., p.421.

[26]Ibid.,

[27]Jennings and Madge, op. cit., p.305.

[28]Pocock, op. cit., pp.422-423.

[29]Ibid., p.417.

[30]Ibid., p.419.

[31]Ibid., pp.415-416.

[32]Jennings and Madge [1987], op. cit., backcover notice.

[33]Pocock op. cit., p.423.

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 that 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, which lasted nine days from the 4^th to the 12^th of May. To mark the 96^th 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 [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.

This was the seventh volume of The Decades Series to be published; you can read about two earlier volumes on the Bloomsbury Literary Studies Blog: ‘British Fiction of the 1950s and 1960s’.

[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.

I was in Brighton in order to do some research in the Mass Observation Archive at the Keep and so I took advantage of the opportunity and trekked out to Hove Museum in order to see the Mantelpiece Observations exhibition of Richard Slee’s ceramics (until 25 January 2022) and Slee’s selection of a number of Humphry Spender’s late-1930s photographs of Bolton and Blackpool. I’ve put up some photos on twitter and instagram. This exhibition was originally at Bolton Museum and the catalogue includes a very good essay by Curator of Art, Matthew Watson as well as an interview with Slee, conducted by Sonia Solicari.

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.

Hurdley, Rachel (2013) Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging: Keeping Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hynes, Samuel (1976) The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. Princeton University Press.

This is an edited version of a review that first appeared in 20TH Century British History, 27, 3 (2016).

Worktown: The Astonishing Story of the Birth of Mass-Observation by David Hall. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015, 323pp.

The subtitle of David Hall’s Worktown is misleading in that Mass-Observation, the social research organisation founded in January 1937, was born not in Bolton, which they were to call ‘Worktown’, but rather at Blackheath in the leftish intellectual circles surrounding the GPO documentary film unit. However, it is undoubtedly true that if Tom Harrisson, sitting in Bolton Library, had not read Charles Madge’s letter to the New Statesman advertising the Blackheath group and so not become involved, the two would not have been able to shape Mass-Observation into a national force, nor would it be so well-known today. The Worktown study (1937-9) led by Harrisson arguably became the key factor in Mass-Observation’s capacity to overcome the North-South class divide and so articulate a progressive, inclusive idea of Britishness that contributed in part to the social changes underpinning the 1945 political settlement.

As Hall notes, ‘the commonly held view that the Worktown project involved a bunch of young middle-class intellectuals engaged in a quest to get in touch with the working classes’ is ‘misconceived’ (5-6). Not only did Harrisson appoint working-class men – such as Walter Hood, an unemployed miner from the North East, and Joe Wilcock, originally from a weaving family in nearby Farnworth – as full-time researchers, but he also involved many local people on a part-time basis. Therefore, Hall sees Mass-Observation as playing a groundbreaking role in the erosion of the class divide and paving the way for those, like him, ‘from a Northern working-class background, who went to university in the 1960s’ (6). While Hall’s account draws liberally, and sometimes uncritically, on existing Mass-Observation scholarship, especially James Hinton’s 2013 history, The Mass Observers, this sense of the organisation as exemplifying a wider long-term social change lends Worktown an engaging impetus.

One reason why Worktown has not gained the recognition of its distant American cousin, Middletown (Muncie, Indiana), is that Mass-Observation failed to publish their results in the way that Robert and Helen Lynd managed so successfully in the 1920s and 1930s. Planned books on ‘How Religion Works’, ‘Politics and the Non-Voter’ and the leisure behaviour of Worktowners in Blackpool failed to materialise. As Hall explains, this was because those due to produce them had no real writing experience and, in any case, Harrisson was reluctant to cede any autonomy to his team. The only Worktown book that did appear, albeit not until 1943, was The Pub and the People, largely drafted by the writer John Sommerfield. Author of the experimental proletarian novel, May Day (1936), and a veteran of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, Sommerfield had the credentials to gain Harrisson’s respect and therefore more freedom than other mass observers. Hall notes that Sommerfield’s innumerable pub reports benefit from his having ‘an eye for character and an ear for dialogue’ (157) and draws generously on his accounts.

Therefore, it is disappointing when Hall simply repeats, rather than examines, the criticisms of historians such as Hinton and Peter Gurney that Sommerfield exemplified a masculine contempt for women that was widespread among mass observers. Hall cites the artist Graham Bell, who is also Hinton’s main source, on Sommerfield’s ‘constant smutty talk about women’ (174) but fails to put this allegation in the context of Bell’s virulent disdain for Mass-Observation as a whole. Later in Worktown, Hall reveals that Bell was only in Bolton for three weeks, most of which time he seems to have devoted to writing long letters of complaint to his girlfriend (238-44). The class condescension in his characterisation of Hood is typical: ‘We share the house with Walter, almost the ugliest man in history and a dreadful bore. He tells me every day several times that when he was 18 he was union secretary over 1,800 men’ (242).

Such boorish middle-class attitudes were very much the exception in Mass-Observation and Hall is at his most compelling when he describes the cross-class relationships that were forged over the course of the Worktown study. He describes how middle-class observers such as Brian Barefoot, who took a job with Harrisson while waiting to take up a place studying medicine at university, were amazed at the intelligence and wide-ranging knowledge of working-class observers such as Tom Honeyford, who had left school at 14 to work in a cotton mill. Sometimes such encounters could be uncanny reversals of social expectations as when Barefoot met Bill Naughton, who became involved with Mass-Observation because their Davenport Street headquarters was on his delivery route as a coalman: ‘[Barefoot] clearly thought that they had been getting on as equals so it came as a surprise when Naughton told him before leaving that it had been interesting to meet him, because one didn’t often get the chance of talking to people of a different class’ (87). Directly through his work with Mass-Observation, Naughton was to become a very successful author and playwright, perhaps best known for Alfie.

These cross-class relationships reached their zenith after Harrisson and Madge switched roles in the autumn of 1938, with the former moving to Blackheath and the latter taking over control of operations in Bolton. Madge’s arrival broadly coincided with the arrival of two trained sociologists, Dennis Chapman and Gertrude Wagner, an Austrian refugee. Wagner had a strong personality and shifted the focus of research from pubs and politics to household economics, an area generally controlled by housewives. However, she was only able to access working-class homes and gain invitations to tea once she was in a relationship with Naughton. Although Hall does not say so, it was this household research that paved the way for Madge’s subsequent research in 1940 for John Maynard Keynes, which underpinned the 1941 Budget and the extension of Income Tax to the industrial working classes. Chapman, meanwhile, became involved with Joyce Mangnall, a mill worker, who later had a successful career as a social worker in Melbourne. These personal connections were kept hidden at the time, but in retrospect they confer more authenticity on the qualitative value of the research than some of the supposedly scientific reports. For example, Hall describes how Harrisson wrote an article for the News Chronicle on public attitudes to air-raid precautions, complete with percentages that were based solely on one observer, Gerald Edwards, going to get his hair cut and interviewing the barber, the tram conductor and three other passengers (283).

Information continues to emerge about Mass-Observation. All Hall can tell us of Edwards is that, according to Chapman, he was a ‘mysterious character […] employed as a drama organiser by Bolton Corporation’ (274). However, Edward Chaney’s 2015 biography of Edwards, Genius Friend, reveals him to be a former member of the circle around John Middleton Murry’s journal, The Adelphi, who went on to write a well-known novel, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (1981). Living at the Davenport Street HQ over the 1938-39 winter, the bisexual Edwards fitted in to the organisation perfectly both in terms of his bohemian lifestyle and in his indifference to class divisions when interacting with others. This typical combination of social nonconformity, creative self-reflexivity and openness to intersubjective experience arguably constitutes the enduring value of Mass-Observation as much as the data it collected.

As Hall argues at the outset of his book, it is by ‘focusing on the lives and the stories of some of the people who were involved rather than just reproducing or analysing the reports they wrote for Mass-Observation, [that] we are able to see how, whatever their social background, they had common cause with the broad currents of progressive, anti-fascist policies’ (8). This focus on the intra-personal dynamics of the organisation allows us to see in microcosm the social changes that eventually reshaped class-bound pre-war Britain into the fluidly egalitarian Britain of the 1960s and 1970s, which Hall and his contemporaries felt so privileged to be the first generation to benefit from fully. Therefore, while Worktown does not add significantly to what is already known to Mass-Observation scholars, it does succeed in bringing together the lives and experiences of various mass observers within the shared context of Bolton in order to tell a coherent story of how Mass-Observation, itself, is part of British history.

This is a tidied-up and slightly expanded (and with links added) version of the paper, based on research from my British Academy funded project ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’, that I gave to the ‘Using Mass Observation’s Covid 19 Collections’ Seminar Series on 16 June 2021. A recording of this is available to watch on Mass Observation’s YouTube channel (my paper starts at 31.15 but I recommend you listen to Ben Highmore’s paper first – the first seminar in the series from 19 May is also available to watch here). This seminar series is part of ‘The Learning to Live with Risk and Responsibility: Understanding Popular Responses to COVID-19’ project (project blog here), led by Nick Clarke (Southampton) in collaboration with Clive Barnett (Exeter). The project is funded by the British Academy Special Research Grants: Covid-19 scheme and runs from 2020 to 2022. Both my and Nick and Clive’s projects draw on resources from the Mass Observation Archive and in particular from the contemporary Mass Observation Project, which has been collecting additional responses to the Covid-19 pandemic alongside the writing of its regular panel.

Self-reflexive Writing, Everyday Life and Social Change in Mass Observation Narratives

Prof Nick Hubble (Brunel University London)

What can Mass-Observation (MO) tell us about how people adapt to social change in the 21^st century? In my 2019 blogpost for the British Academy, I explained how autobiographies, memoirs and diaries, such as those kept during the Second World War for MO, reveal – sometimes as though in real time – how ordinary people developed new values and ways of thinking that opened up transformed futures for them beyond the conflicts that seemed to be governing their lives.  In my British Academy funded project ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’, I have been developing approaches and methodologies from my past research that could also be used for analysing autobiographical narratives now, in the 21st century, so that we might see the emergence of new socio-cultural values and structures of feeling as they form in the reflections of individuals.

As explained in the introductory post on this blog, the project has been exploring the role of narrative self-reflexivity in helping people understand and adapt (sometimes retrospectively) to two key periods of change, 1939-43 and 1981-4, through research into the MO Archive (based at The Keep, Falmer, Brighton) and the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies (held within the Special Collections of Brunel University Library).

As I will be discussing, these time periods mark paradigm shifts in British social history. The Second World War saw an abrupt change between modes of democracy. As Ross McKibbin (1998) notes:

In the 1930s, the ruling definition of democracy was individualist and its proponents chiefly a modernised middle class; in the 1940s the ruling definition was social-democratic and its proponents chiefly the organised working class. (533)

Whereas, the early years of the Thatcher Government saw ‘A revolution in the head’ according to Andy Beckett (2016) which established Thatcherism as a ‘national story’ but also broke with traditional deference.

Note also that both periods coincide with Mass Observation activity. The original 1937-1949 project not only recorded but arguably contributed to the shift from interwar individualism to the postwar social democracy of the welfare state. The contemporary Mass Observation Project founded in 1981 has recorded the experience of neoliberal, deindustrialised Britain, in which the memory of the three postwar decades and their values remain strong but at odds with the overriding economic imperatives of the 40 years it now covers. I’m not arguing that the contemporary Mass Observation Project has contributed to this second shift but I think it is illustrates some of the ways in which that shift functions, as I will go on to discuss.

My ‘Understanding Social Change’ project was conceived before the Covid-19 pandemic but with the supposition that we are currently experiencing a twenty-first century paradigm shift in which new socio-cultural values and structures of feeling are emerging; the major example being changes around Brexit. To be comparable with those two earlier historical paradigm shifts would require there to be a major transformation in the way the British state is organised politically and economically. Arguably this is happening. For example, in last weekend’s Sunday Times (13 June 2021), in a somewhat breathless article on ‘How the Tories weaponised Woke’, Tim Shipman quotes an anonymous informant on the current opportunity to realign British politics: ‘“Westminster likes to bracket people as left and right,” they said, “but the real gap in the political market that Boris [Johnson] identified and has successfully filled is people who lean left on spending and public services but are culturally conservative”’. It is not necessary to agree with the political line of the Sunday Times, to accept that something is happening here. The idea of a ‘return’ to a culturally-conservative corporate State, which has evolved in response to the EU referendum of June 2016 and the supposed causes and drivers of the leave vote, has become real during the Covid pandemic, which has seen billions of pounds of public expenditure, including unprecedented levels of social spending, such as on the furlough scheme. In this respect, the Covid-pandemic is not an isolated, relatively unprecedented natural emergency, but a phenomenon that has been shaped by a pre-existing emergent form of politics. What has happened is a complete reversal of not just the austerity politics of ten years ago but also of the politics of the Brown, Blair, Major, and Thatcher administrations.

As an undergraduate, I remember a lecturer who repeatedly talked about a woman in Norwich who ‘went mad’ when Charles I was executed as an example of how powerful and destructive social change can be. Her understanding of how the world worked was destroyed and so nothing made sense anymore. There is a lot of talk in the media about the mental health effects of the isolation and lockdown resulting from the pandemic, as well as the anxiety generated by fear of the virus, but I suspect some of this is also due to ongoing paradigmatic social change; the world no longer works in the same way that it did in the closing decades of the twentieth century. There is a struggle to ensure that our stories of ourselves continue to make sense – and I don’t think the real brunt of this has yet been felt. This is where self-reflexive writing, whether in the form of diaries or writing for MO or similar projects, is important. My project has been concerned with the propensity of self-reflexive writing to help people to adapt to social change, not just in terms of making sense of that change but also in terms of actively shaping that change by developing new understandings and values. My aim has been to show the kinds of ways this happened by looking at the original MO project of the 1930s and 1940s, and the revived project in the 1980s and afterwards.

Alongside this, I am also looking at the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies at Brunel and working on areas such as working-class autobiography and proletarian autobiografiction because in the 1930s – as part of the same general cultural constellation that led to the formation of MO – there was a huge increase in working-class writing, both autobiographical and fictional. In To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (2006), the cultural historian, Christopher Hilliard, argues that it was the support of established publishers and left-wing intellectuals that made the 1930s not only especially important to the long-standing tradition of British working-class writing but also for the democratisation of culture in Britain. Rather than just write autobiography, which had the constricting effect that the lives written about were shaped by the oppressive social class relations of Britain, some working-class writers fictionalised their autobiographies and thus found a different way to write about their lives. The prime example would be D.H. Lawrence and the writers from mining areas that he inspired, such as Harold Heslop. There were also working-class women writers such as Ethel Mannin, the daughter of a Post-Office letter sorter, who wrote both autobiographies, such as Confessions and Impressions (1930) and autobiografictional fiction such as Crescendo (1929) and Ragged Banners (1931) which she described herself as ‘a kind of creative auto-intoxication … It was all flashy and provocative and the succession of books form a more and complete and illuminative record of my mental evolution than any diary could have conveyed.’ (Privileged Spectator, 1939: 21). These changes are all happening in the 1930s and feed in to MO; some of these writers, such as Walter Allen, a member of the Birmingham Group of Writers and later a well-known postwar literary critic, wrote proletarian autobiografictions in the late 1930s at the same time as writing for the MO panel. So, the different prongs of this project link up.

At which point, I should also note that the project as I proposed it to the British Academy, includes a commitment on the behalf of the researcher to be equally self-reflexive concerning their own practice. Therefore, I shall break the academic equivalent of the fourth wall and reveal that the pandemic has quite significantly affected my project. I was expecting to do much of the archival research at MO in the spring and summer of 2020 before completing by the end of September 2020. In the event, however, it was impossible to travel and, in any case, I wasn’t in the best state to carry out research. Like many people, I was affected by the pandemic. I felt anxiety and had some difficulty sleeping etc and had occasional bouts of ill health which felt like having a virus; but given the lockdown and social distancing, where was I catching this? By the time September arrived I had made no progress and so I applied for the maximum twelve-month extension for the grant and this came through just as I started feeling really ill. I was diagnosed – at first over the phone but eventually in person – as suffering from post-viral syndrome as a result of having a virus in March, which was probably but not necessarily Covid. At the time, I didn’t think it was Covid because I didn’t have the right symptoms and I didn’t seem to be ill enough. But last autumn, I ended up being off work for three and a half months before making a phased return in mid-January this year. And since then, until a couple of weeks ago, I’ve just been trying to get through the rest of the academic year. So, on the one hand, my project still hasn’t got much further and I’ve got just over three months to get on top of the formal outputs. On the other hand, though, I have made a lot of progress with the self-reflexive element because I have spent 15 months keeping a diary throughout the Covid pandemic period, which at times was the only thing I was capable of writing, and in the process I have learned quite a lot about how self-reflexive writing works for the person who is keeping the diary rather than for the person who is writing about the person keeping the diary.

In my British Academy blogpost linked at the top of this post, I wrote that ‘lives lived with the knowledge that what happens will soon be written about become shaped by the stories their writers wish to tell’. In other words, the attraction of MO to people who aren’t otherwise writers (like Mannin or Woolf) is that it gives them a chance to become the authors of their own lives in a way that hadn’t been open to them before. Conversely, over the years it has enabled some well-known writers to write themselves as ordinary people. Naomi Mitchison wrote for MO from its inception, describing, for example, a trip to Woolworths to buy sweets with her daughter for the 12 December 1937 day diary (see Mitchison 1986: 53-4). Given that her most recent novel, We Have Been Warned (1935), which combined representations of ‘female stream of consciousness, fascist uprisings and socialist politics with free love, rape and abortion was “universally despised” by critics’ (Hubble 2021: 45) and her literary reputation had been (most unjustly from a twenty-first century perspective) destroyed, writing anonymously about everyday things must have been enormously liberating for her. She went on to keep a diary throughout the war for MO, published as Among You Taking Notes… (1985), and to contribute to the contemporary MO project throughout the 1980s (see Hubble 2016).

While being an academic is hardly so prominent a position as Mitchison occupied in the 1930s, there are several reasons why it seems to preclude us from having authentic public views (by which I mean we’re not considered to be representative of ordinary people). One of these reasons is the notional goal of objectivity and the related idea that academics should write analytically in a non-partisan and impersonal manner. Another is that within universities themselves much more value is now put on engaging with public audiences and having an impact on policy, rather than engaging with or having an impact on academic audiences. In other words, academics are no longer valued at an institutional level.  Furthermore, in post-Brexit Britain, academics are now portrayed as part of an unrepresentative metropolitan elite, whose liberal values are simultaneously both an affectation and an expression of a particular professional bubble. My point is not to complain about these facts of academic life but to explain the attraction I felt to writing a diary as just another person on the street. One consequence of the Covid pandemic – despite the role social inequality has played in its impact – has been the almost universal experience of many, many people being made aware of their own mortality; their own fragility as human bodies susceptible to contracting a potentially deadly infection from other human bodies. There has been a shift of perspective as this new feeling of vulnerability has enabled a new kind of sensibility and self-understanding for those who have reflected on their own experiences. This doesn’t just apply to people who have kept diaries or written about themselves in some other way but I think it is possibly felt most acutely in those groups (and also it is within the writing of such people that that these changes are visible to sociologists, historians and other researchers interested in examining and charting such processes). Therefore, one value of the MO Covid collections is that they give us a window on to this opening-up of subjectivity.

I don’t think we can yet see where this process is leading us – that’s something that will emerge through more analysis, and over time because these processes are still unfolding. But we can look back and see how similar processes played out in World War Two. In his book about the wartime diaries – c.400, of which c.100 were kept for the entire direction of the war, including those of Mitchison and Nella Last – kept for MO, Nine Wartime Lives (2010), James Hinton argues that ‘Mass-Observation offered a discipline and a context which transcended the purely private, meeting a need to frame individual quests in relation to larger public purposes’(6). The diaries, Hinton suggests, ‘take us as close as a historian can hope to get to observe selfhood under construction’ and, in particular, reveal to us the everyday unfolding of what, following the work of Charles Taylor, he takes as the central process of modernity: the radical disembedding of individual subjectivity from received sources of meaning (7).

If we take the example of ‘Muriel Green’, who is not one of the diarists Hinton analyses but features in Dorothy Sheridan’s Wartime Women (1990), we see a young woman of 18 at the outbreak of the War writing about everyday activities in the village she lives in, which would all be perfectly ordinary apart from her strong understanding that she was part of an extraordinary collective practice that everyone ought to have heard of:

Afternoon – Jenny and I went to Lynn … We went to W.H. Smith’s and son’s best and biggest bookshop in Lynn, to buy a Penguin book and asked if they had War Begins at Home just to see if they had. I did not expect they had as I had never seen it there, and if the girl had produced it I was preparing to say it was too expensive. Anyway she had not got it. Nor Britain. I felt insulted and offended with the shop. She did not even seem to have heard of them either which was all the more annoying …

Before we caught the bus home we went in the town library to ask if they had got ‘our’ book. (We always call it ‘ours’, hope MO doesn’t mind, but you see we’ve never had anything we’ve written in print before and claiming 14 lines and J. 25 lines we feel a proprietary interest in the publication, and that everybody ought to sell and read it.) Were delighted to see that the paper cover was pinned up inside the main entrance with other new books they had bought this month for the library. (19 April 1940)

This sense of belonging to MO repeatedly occurs in her diary culminating in her account of an impulsive trip to the organisation’s London office, when she meets Tom Harrisson at the door. Harrisson, despite being too busy to stop and talk for more than a few moments, comes across as polite and friendly:

I then came away and for the next half-hour could do nothing but laugh to myself about it. I wondered what TH really thought and how he probably was cursing inwardly all the time he was being nice and polite. I expect he was terribly annoyed but I was triumphant that I had actually been and not quite got kicked out. He also had thanked me so much for doing the MO directives, etc. I thought him very charming and did not mind at all being got rid of, as I expected it. I was very glad I went, however he and the MO in general would be about it. (10 May 1941)

The diarist’s ability to provide not only her own unspoken thoughts but also those of Harrisson as well generates an equivalence between the two that is amplified by the fact that the description of the encounter is then fed back to MO and Harrisson by being submitted as part of her monthly instalment. The potentially endless reflexivity of this process captures the logic of MO that if everyone were a Mass Observer than the observation of another would always be in some way an observation of oneself and so, therefore, the divisive boundaries between people – between classes, between genders – would dissolve. It is this inherent logic that makes an MO diary, at least potentially, collectively self-reflexive in a way that exceeds the self-reflexivity of a normal diary.

This self-reflexivity beyond self-reflexivity affects the way that we need to read these diaries. Muriel, on a brief trip home from her war job as a gardener in the South West, realises that she can never go back to her life as a garage girl amidst the vibrant pre-war modernity, which George Orwell described in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) as ‘a rather restless, cultureless life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine’. She does not just recognise the loss entailed in growing up or that caused by the war but both of those things combined with a implicit recognition that the self-reflective act of writing a diary as part of a collective enterprise is irrevocably distancing her from her younger less reflective self:

There are very few cars on the road and absolutely none pulling in the garage sweep. This life would soon get on my nerves if I was at home again while the war is on. There seems no one about at all. (15 June 1942)

My last day’s leave. Tonight I cried bitterly. I had not cried for ages. It was not about going back … I cried because of the war. It has altered our life which can never be the same. To see the desolate emptiness of the seaside upsets me. When you are away and Mother writes to say the latest desecration, the latest boy missing, the latest family to sacrifice, it is just words. But in the home it is mortifying. Life will never be so sweet as before the war and the last two summers and early ’39 were the most perfect years of my life when all seemed young and gay. (16 June 1942)

What such painful self-recognition highlights is how fundamentally the process of disembedding oneself from the past in order to move into the future is part of everyday life. It was the particular form of self-reflexivity generated by the practice of writing about themselves for MO that allowed the diarists to realise that they were agents of history, which is to say that they became aware of themselves making history through the process of going about their everyday lives, and thereby gave them the confidence to pronounce on public matters with an authority they would not otherwise have had in a hierarchical society. This authority and sense of agency can be seen in Green’s reflections on the 1945 General Election:

I feel that at last the working classes of this country have begun to think for themselves and wake up. They have not been fooled by the bogey of voting ‘National’ or by Churchill’s smiling face. They do not want to get back to 1939. The conscription and shortages have taught them democracy and that all men are really equal. I feel confident that a better world is going to be the result of this election and that the future in spite of so many difficulties is bright. Now is the chance of the Labour Party to show the world what they can do and what can be done. Churchill is an old man and as a war leader against Japan not irreplaceable. It is for the young people of this country to support the new government to success. (31 July 1945)

This is a statement that I don’t think she would have been able to make at the beginning of the War. At one level, she is responding to the social and political changes that took place over the duration of the war but the reason she is not only aware of these changes but also self-aware enough to discuss them in this manner is because of the fact that has been self-reflexively keeping a diary for the past five and a half years. Therefore, what Muriel Green’s diary shows is how one person adapted to change through self-reflexive writing and not only came to espouse new values but contributed to their generation (as one amongst millions). Collectively that story was part of the ‘People’s War’ paradigm, to use the title of Angus Calder’s 1969 book and MO was initially seen as a fundamental part of that paradigm and the social and political ‘Road to 1945’ (i.e. to the establishment of the welfare state and the postwar social-democratic settlement) to use the title of Paul Addison’s 1975 book – both Addison and Calder being PhD students at Sussex and part of the story of how the mouldering MO papers were transformed into an archive. However, by the 1990s, Calder had revised his earlier more utopian view of history in The Myth of the Blitz (1991), written in hindsight gained from the bitter experience of the Thatcherite deployment of the war in an early deployment of the ‘make Britain great again’ strategy which underwrote the aggressive economic reforms of the 1980s.

Stuart Hall (1988) analysed Thatcherism as a form of nostalgia for the bygone proletarian style of life displayed by those who were moving out of the working class:

What Thatcherism as an ideology does, is to address the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community; to the social imaginary. (166-7)

As Raphael Samuel (1998) concurs, part of the allure of Thatcherism was that it offered those unsettled by the social changes of the 1960s – such as women’s liberation, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the abolition of the death penalty, and anti-racial discrimination policies that enshrined the multicultural nature of London and the other big cities – a Thatcherite version of history from below ‘which gave pride of place to those who she called “ordinary people”’ (348). As Hall discusses, rather than contest such a construction of the working class, the Labour Party reinforced it during the 1987 election by proclaiming its desire to appeal to the ‘traditional Labour voter’ and presenting the party’s leader, Neil Kinnock ‘as a manly “likely lad” who owed everything to the welfare state’ (263). I’d love to be able to say at this point that this is all history but we can see more or less the same manoeuvres being carried out over the last couple of years with Keir Starmer outlining his working-class background and seeking to embrace family, faith and flag in order to win back to Labour, the former ‘red-wall’ working-class voters who have apparently embraced Brexit and Boris Johnson. (In this context, see the picture of Starmer on social media posing in an England shirt with a pint during the 2021 Euros quarterfinal between England and Ukraine on 3 July).

Hall talked about those who were moving out of the working class due to embracing Thatcherite values such as home ownership but from a viewpoint of identity, they haven’t moved out of the working class. What has happened is that the horizon of possibility envisaged by the idea of working-class politics and identity – as expressed by Muriel Green, for example – has shrunk since 1945. In 1990, Part One of the MO Spring Directive asked respondents to write about ‘Social Divisions’. The directive and some of the responses to this are available online as part of the ‘Observing the 80s’ project. Here are a couple of extracts:

Middle class people are mean compared to working class people and middle class people do not have the great sense of humour that the working class have … Business men and women are middle class and they are a very nasty lot. (496)

I would describe myself as belonging to the group ‘working class’. To define ‘upper middle class’ as apart from ‘lower middle class’, the division is based wholly nowadays on earning power. It used to be based upon all sorts of things like one’s family background and the schools and universities one had attended. (1002)

What these quotes suggest is a change in the construction of the working class over the 1980s to perhaps a more essentialist or even defensive configuration as Thatcherite economic reforms undid the social-democratic paradigm created as a result of the 1945 settlement. This had defined British public and everyday life up until the end of the 1970s, including a period of nearly two decades from the mid-1950s when average male working-class income increased year on year, thus significantly reducing social inequality to a point at which Britain was by some metrics the most socially equal country in the world in 1977 (see Beckett 2010: 409-10). The brutal and deliberate reversal of this progress had a direct effect on how class was understood and portrayed.

If we fast forward to the early twenty-first century, we can see further changes in working-class identity by briefly examining the case of the mass-observer called ‘Len’ by James Hinton (and ‘Dick’ in Growing Old with the Welfare State) in his Seven Lives from Mass Observation (2016), who is described as representative ‘of the experience of large numbers of people caught between the hammer of the 1980s and the anvil of the 1960s’ (93). That is to say he was equally alienated and upset by the sexual and feminist revolutions of the 1960s and the Thatcherite era of privatisation, financial deregulation and destruction of the unions and manufacturing industry. Len, as an example of a wider body of skilled manual labour, manifests a nostalgia for pre-1955 Britain (or possibly even earlier). As I have discussed in Growing Old with the Welfare State (2019):

Whereas the older way of life he values was once supported by the welfare state, it is the welfare state in practice which in practice has undermined those values by enabling the social changes of both the 1960s and the 1980s to take place (this latter suggestion may seem counter-intuitive, but it would have been impossible for the Thatcher Government to triple unemployment in the early 1980s without a safety net in place to largely catch the resultant social consequences). To satisfy [Len], it would logically require the combination of a collectivist welfare state with the repeal of some or most of the socially liberalising legislation of the 1960s and the 1970s [and that of the early 2000s up to and including the 2010 Equality Act]. (142)

It is the configuration, that this kind of analysis identifies, which was described in the Sunday Times article I quote above as a ‘gap in the political market that Boris [Johnson] [has] identified’ of appealing to ‘people who lean left on spending and public services but are culturally conservative’. In other words, it is possible to map the roots of the ongoing paradigm shift within the narratives of the contemporary MO Project.

Therefore, my provisional conclusion for my British Academy project on ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narratives’ – formed during the process of writing this paper – is that the reason there was paradigmatic social change in 1939-1943 is because working-class consciousness and identity changed and the reason why there was paradigmatic social change in 1981-1984 is because working-class consciousness and identity changed again. We’ll see how happy the British Academy are with that in due course!

But how does this social and cultural change in working-class consciousness and identity apply to the use and consideration of MO’s Covid collections. I think one significant difference between this Brexit-Covid time we live in now and even the Thatcherite revolution of 40 years ago, is that it is much more widely seen as an opportunity for consciously triggering a paradigm shift in social values. We hear in the media about the potential for a ‘Covid reset’ and, following the recent Hartlepool byelection, the Tories were briefing that they expected to establish hegemony for a generation, or at least the next ten years. People who do the kind of analysis that I do are working in think tanks and elsewhere, to construct a new ‘reality’. ‘Freedom day’ has been postponed four weeks from 21 June to 19 July but it’s coming and it promises to be a powerfully seductive ideological moment because we all want to be free of the restrictions and feel safe. I got my second vaccination yesterday (15 June 2021) because I want to have that protection and because I want to be able to travel and do things (although, to be clear, I’m quite happy to do them while wearing a mask and socially distancing; and also happy to wait for other people to have their second vaccinations too). There is a powerful motivation for us all to buy-in to the official narrative of the pandemic, to praise the NHS and the vaccine rollout, and celebrate a British triumph in the face of adversity. At the last of these seminars, there was discussion of the motivation of mass observers to write for future historians. That’s a powerful motivation and one to be supported not least because the very act of thinking about what might be of value to people in the future is itself a valuable way of understanding the present. However, the question to us as researchers is how we write about this now; how we contest the official narrative of the pandemic and construct an alternative narrative that helps people better understand what is going on. And how we invite MO respondents (and other diarists and participants in other writing projects) to share in constructing this narrative; whether we ask people to continue to keep their diaries or whether we issue further supplementary directives. But we do have to find some way of keeping this going. The pandemic cannot just stop with the advent of ‘Freedom day’ according to the narrative being established by the current government.

© Nick Hubble

Works Cited and Further Reading:

Paul Addison. The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975.

Andy Beckett. When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies. London: Faber and Faber, 2010.

Andy Beckett. Promised You a Miracle: Why 1980-82 Made Modern Britain. London: Penguin 2016.

Angus Calder. The People’s War. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969.

Angus Calder. The Myth of the Blitz. London: Jonathan Cape, 1991.

Stuart Hall. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988.

Christopher Hilliard. To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

James Hinton. Nine Wartime Lives: Mass Observation and the Making of the Modern Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

James Hinton. Seven Lives from Mass Observation: Britain in the Late Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Nick Hubble. ‘Documenting Lives: Mass Observation, Women’s Diaries, and Everyday Modernity’. In A History of English Autobiography. Ed. Adam Smyth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016: 345-358.

Nick Hubble. ‘“You’re Not in the Market at Shielding, Joe”: Beyond the Myth of the “Thirties”’. In The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction. Eds, Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor. London: Bloomsbury, 2021: 17-57.

Nick Hubble, Jennie Taylor and Philip Tew, eds. Growing Old with the Welfare State: Eight British Lives. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.

Ross McKibbin. Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Ethel Mannin. Privileged Spectator. London: Jarrolds, 1939.

Naomi Mitchison. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. London: Fontana, 1986 [1979].

Naomi Mitchison, Among You Taking Notes…: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939-1945. Ed. Dorothy Sheridan. London: Gollancz, 1985.

Raphael Samuel. Island Stories: Unravelling Britain. London: Verso, 1998.

Dorothy Sheridan, ed. Wartime Women: A Mass-Observation Anthology 1937-45. London: Heinemann, 1990.

This is the day diary I am submitting to the Mass Observation (MO) 12 May 2020 day-diary project. I’m including this within a wider series of posts that I wrote about MO last year but never got around to finishing for reasons which are summed up below (but I do hope to finish this series off shortly with a final updating post). Here is my day diary:

I am 56 years old, a university academic and live in Aberystwyth with my partner ‘A’ (52), and one of our three children (14).

I got up in the morning and had breakfast alone as our son had gone to school and A was already conducting back-to-back interviews on teams for a job on her research project. Yesterday we had been in Cardiff because our son had a consultation following-up on his surgery in Cardiff at the end of January (see below) and the day before that had been my birthday, so I had been reflecting on the past year a lot late into Tuesday night rather than going to sleep. Therefore, I was a bit tired but also pleased because I had made a decision about how I was going to approach teaching next year and so I felt reasonably content too. I had a variety of chores to attend to alongside the usual demands of email. One advantage of working from home is that you can put the laundry on, unblock the bath with a plunger and transfer credit on to your son’s dinner card via the ‘parentpay’ app, in between emails.

Shortly after 12, I drove to Tesco to buy some bread, orange juice and printer cartridges. I was thinking while driving there that traffic through town is pretty much back to its pre-pandemic state now. The car park at the supermarket was pretty full but the shop wasn’t particularly packed. As I was walking out, I was thinking how much like a pre-pandemic brief trip to the supermarket this was. Apart from the fact that we were all wearing masks, this felt psychologically like ‘normal’ and not like those trips during the peak periods of the pandemic when everyone was scurrying around furtively as though from foxhole to foxhole in no man’s land. Part of this change is due to the vaccination rollout. That works down through the age ranges – I had my first AZ jab on Easter Saturday – but it is moving quickly in Wales; my 28 year-old daughter has the date for her first jab in early June.

I had lunch with A during a gap in her schedule and then had a supervision meeting with one of my PhD students at 2pm. I think the possibility of having these meetings on zoom, or whatever platform, is one of the good things to come out of the pandemic. Like many others, I have had weeks when I’ve spent too much time for comfort at my screen and in online meetings. But, also like many others, I’m hoping we can keep some of these meetings online after the pandemic is over. It’s much easier to get people together and cuts out a lot of wasted travel time, not to mention environmental costs. I realise there are many who are desperate for face-to-face contact and I’m also looking forward to that but there are so may advantages to having supervision and other types of meeting online. I vote for the hybrid future.

Later in the afternoon, I went for a walk along the seafront. The sun was out and it was a warm and pleasant walk in shirt and shorts. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that busy. I was out a bit before 5 and so maybe beat the rush. However, I have the feeling that less people are now going out for lockdown walks, which have been much more popular in the early months of this year than in the first weeks of the first lockdown in 2020 when the streets often felt deserted. I think people have moved on to other pursuits, such as shopping. I thought it was good that people were out walking earlier in the year because I don’t think it was healthy for those who didn’t go out at all in the first lockdown. On the other hand, there has been far more traffic throughout the lockdown this year than last year. In March and April 2020, people took to cycling along the middle of roads because there was no traffic and you saw birds (not just seagulls) hopping around in the road. None of this happened this year because the traffic continued throughout.

Back at home, we ate ready meals out of sync because A had already moved on from her interviews into a non-work meeting of a local group she is involved with. I put our rabbit and two guinea pigs into their respective pens in the garden and cleaned out their hutches. Then I sat on a bench in the sun and idly tried to reconstruct the article, ‘Without total change labour will die’, that Tony Blair has written for the New Statesman from what people were saying about it on twitter. This turned out to be depressing both because of the number of white forty-something men (‘centrist dads’ in leftwing twitter speak) who had approvingly retweeted it as though it was some major intellectual intervention and because the place where most of it was quoted turned out to be a Daily Mail article by Piers Morgan. Morgan described this as a ‘brilliant piece about the dangers of cancel culture’ in which Blair urges ‘liberal leaders to stand up to it and stop “being backed into electorally off-putting positions” on cultural issues like transgenderism’. Obviously, this is Morgan’s gloss rather than Blair’s marginally more coded message but it does do a wonderful job of expressing the subtext. Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times expressed this slightly differently as ‘Labour in England is a party of the big cities and college-educated middle-classes with an unhelpful set of progressive prejudices’. I think this is meant to be funny, but it is equally prejudiced and reactionary. I support all those ‘progressive prejudices’ and I’m especially proud that my own university has strong policy in support of trans rights for both students and staff. I’m going to buy a hard copy of the New Statesman so that I can analyse the article more thoroughly but my general position on this is that Blair is utterly wrong. He was never a convincing social liberal and I wish he’d keep out of contemporary politics. In fact, having seen a graphic of how different age cohorts have voted in UK General Elections, I’m coming round to the position that pretty much everybody over the age of 40 should keep out of contemporary politics.

Later in the evening, after 9 but before it was completely dark, our humane mousetrap clicked and caught another small rodent, which I carried some way off up the road before releasing. That’s the seventh or eighth we have caught since easter. It seems an odd time of year for an infestation and there also don’t seem to be quite enough mice to amount to an infestation either. Anyway, I shall continue to trap them and move them on until there are no more left.

I didn’t do much else of note during the rest of the evening. It was a quiet day on the whole.

In MO’s call for day diaries this year it says that ‘Diaries can record 12th May and reflect back over the past year and look forward to the future and life beyond this year.’ Looking at last year’s day diary for #12May20, I didn’t feel good when I woke up and generally was in the midst of a period of sleeping badly, feeling not quite right, and finding it difficult to concentrate on some tasks. I thought I was suffering from anxiety at the situation. No doubt this was part of the problem but subsequently, months later in October, I was diagnosed as suffering from post-viral syndrome, involving fatigue and extended bouts of post-exertional malaise. At that point, things were so bad that I was off work for three months before making a phased return in January this year. Since then I have negotiated a flexible working agreement and a reduction of my hours, so that I can still cope with my job despite this condition. To be clear, the condition is improving – I’m a lot better than I was in January, let alone last October, but I still have to pace myself carefully to manage fatigue. There are also secondary effects in that this condition has affected my mental state and confidence. On the whole, I have tried to maintain a positive front but there were times, especially last autumn, when I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to return to anything like ‘normal’.

Furthermore, in January our youngest son developed an infection in his ankle, which required hospitalisation in Bronglais Hospital in Aberystwyth and then an emergency operation in Cardiff before returning again to the hospital in Aberystwyth. All in all, he was in hospital for 18 days during the peak of the Covid wave, which also meant that due to pandemic restrictions only one of us could be with him at any one time and that we were only allowed to swap over periodically. I was concerned that I would struggle with my post-viral fatigue but in fact I managed to cope with the tension and anxiety and sleeping consecutive nights in a chair. We also managed to deal with the culture shock of going from socially-distanced low-covid-rate Aberystwyth to the huge hospital in Cardiff, which was seemingly full of people throughout the entire site. After we finally got him back home – an hour before his online parents’ evening and the final chance to seek advice on which GCSE options to choose – the pandemic seemed different. I’d finally exhausted all my emotional energy on the topic. Whereas, until that point, I had been diligently following developments in the pandemic on a daily rate, I gave up on that as I seemed to have run out of emotional energy. I also stopped feeling angry all the time. I know there are many people who have had a much worse time than me because they’ve been hospitalised with Covid or bereaved. In fact, I don’t even know for sure that I have had Covid as at the time I was unwell in March 2020 I didn’t have all the symptoms; I wasn’t even that ill and it was impossible to get tested at that time. Nevertheless, by mid-February this year I had reached my limit and just fell back into a routine of getting by on a daily basis. I felt I’d had enough, and I just wanted it to end, so that we could all move on.

I suspect a lot of people feel like this by now and this is one reason why the UK Government will get away with their plan to ensure that the public inquiry into Covid doesn’t report until after the next General Election. However, I’m talking about conscious weariness with the pandemic as a result of its traumatic impact; I do think there is also an unconscious response to the pandemic and that will boil over at some point in the coming years. No doubt the UK Government will try and deflect that suppressed rage at migrants or remainers or ‘woke’ culture or one of the other groups they are working relentlessly to demonise as ‘others’, but I’m not sure they will succeed. The Queen’s Speech this week has set out a list of legislative targets that display a clear intent to fight a ‘culture war’ but I don’t think the ideas behind it are part of a coherent world view; it looks much more like a ragtag assortment of half-baked ideas from think tanks and opinion columnists. I don’t think, as Conservatives were briefing at the weekend, that Johnson is in a position to change the political identity of Britain (at least, not in the way he wants to) and rule for more than a decade, but a lot of damage will be done to marginalised and vulnerable people in the name of achieving those goals. I expect that the exact shape of the future is going to remain unclear for some years as we work through the legacy of the pandemic.

While it is by no means assured that the pandemic is now under control – there may be a resurgence of a new variant – I am reasonably confident that the vaccines will continue to protect us. However, there may be different pandemics and other consequences of climate change will surely have an impact over the next decade. The next few years are also going to be socially volatile and I’m still working out how I am going to approach life during this time. In the meantime, I just think it is going to be – as the cliché goes – one step at a time at a personal level. I’m returning to my campus next week for the first time in 14 months. Then, in June, we’re all going to see my parents. We did see them in their garden for a couple of hours last July but this will be the first proper visit since Christmas 2019. So, there’s things to look forward to…

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.