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.

The 1930s was a key decade of social and cultural change, marking the emergence of a mass democratic twentieth-century culture, in which both women and the working class had representation, from the hierarchical claws of the long nineteenth century. It’s a crucial decade for thinking intersectionally about the relationship between self-reflexive writing and class consciousness as a means of ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’. This week sees the publication of The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by myself (Nick Hubble), Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

This is the seventh volume of The Decades Series to be published; you can read about the previous two volumes in this post I wrote on ‘British Fiction of the 1950s and 1960s’ for the Bloomsbury Literary Studies Blog. One of the key ideas behind this collection was 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 21^st century.

Below is 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’. Rather than see the 1930s as an isolated literary decade, this volume positions it as central to understanding British literary culture (and that of its constituent nations); arguing that it is the democratisation and politicisation of 1930s writing (rather than modernism) that is central to the subsequent fiction of the twentieth century.

The literary decade featured in this volume has recently expanded into ‘the long 1930s’ (Mellor and Salton-Cox 2015a, 2015b; Kohlmann and Taunton 2019b). This is a reaction to the dominant literary-critical reception of the decade established in the 1970s and 1980s (Hynes 1976; Bergonzi 1978; Cunningham 1988), which, by focusing on the specificities of the period, has functioned in effect to tie its unashamedly political writing to a particular set of not-to-be repeated circumstances which were superseded by the wartime defeat of fascism, the foundation of the welfare state, and the onset of postwar political consensus leading to prosperity from the mid-1950s onwards. This negative perception had already become well-established in the postwar decades: as discussed in the 1950s volume in this series, the overt political commitment of 1930s writing was unpopular and even embarrassing from the viewpoint of an apparently meritocratic society enjoying a decade of full employment (see Bentley et al 2019: 6–7; Hubble 2019: 19–20). While the return of mass unemployment and the rise of political conflict across the 1970s and 1980s made such commitment relevant again, it was within a tightly constrained critical and historical framework already in place. As Mellor and Salton-Cox note, the initial 1930s canon comprised of works of the male, public-school-educated ‘Auden Generation’ was not revised but added to while ‘leaving fairly intact the governing assumptions surrounding the period’s literary historiography – in particular the classic bookending of the period [between the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War] according to a neat decade’ (2015b: 3). Thus, despite Lawrence & Wishart reprinting key works of proletarian literature, such as Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy (1937/1978a) and We Live (1939/1978b), Harold Heslop’s Last Cage Down (1935/1984) and John Sommerfield’s May Day (1936/1984), Virago reprinting novels by women, such as Naomi Mitchison’s The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931/1983) and Storm Jameson’s Company Parade (1934/1982), and the publication of revisionist critical studies (Croft 1990; Caesar 1991; Montefiore 1996), the constricting parameters of the decade have remained in place until very recently.

This reception history depends on the 1930s being seen simultaneously, on the one hand, as just as a literary decade like any other decade covered in this series, and, on the other hand, as exceptional because of its political and historical circumstances. As a consequence of what Mellor and Salton-Cox describe as this reification of the decade into ‘the thirties’ – a contained, knowable topic, suitable for an undergraduate module and the occasional edited collection of essays – it becomes harder to argue for its pivotal role in twentieth-century British cultural history: ‘the 1930s saw a thoroughgoing renegotiation of the relationship between literary texts, writers, forms, audiences, and publics that transformed literary production in Britain’ (Mellor and Salton-Cox 2015b: 1). These developments, including especially the unprecedented quantity of working-class writing published and the emergence of a generation of ‘professional women writers’ (see Ewins), amount to what Christopher Hilliard describes as a broad process of cultural democratization that drove the immense social and political change that occurred across twentieth-century Britain. Hilliard’s central argument is that democratic cultural life is not best defined by ‘a widely shared corpus of texts and ideas [as] [f]ew actual societies would satisfy this test’ but rather by ‘a shared sense of entitlement to participate in cultural activities’ (Hilliard 2006: 5–6). From this perspective, the novelty, topicality and publicity surrounding ‘proletarian writing’ (147) in the depression years of the mid-1930s contested the common conception that writing was an elitist pursuit and paved the way to active mass participation in the ‘wide-ranging examination and revaluation of the everyday in literature and the arts’ that characterized postwar Britain (287). Explicitly acknowledging the centrality of 1930s concerns to cultural democratization would help undermine the normative assumptions that underpin much British history by highlighting the importance of ‘the long-term development of working-class, queer, anti-racist, and feminist political movements’ (Mellor and Salton-Cox 2015b: 3). Therefore, this chapter will take a different approach to many previous accounts of the decade by discussing 1930s contexts and concerns largely in relation to two lesser-known writers who personify aspects of this cultural democratization, Ethel Mannin and Harold Heslop, and by orientating these contexts and concerns towards the demands of an intersectional politics of the twenty-first century.

Both Mellor and Salton-Cox and Kohlmann and Taunton criticize the expansion of modernism, which has intensified over the last twenty-five years of the New Modernist Studies, into certainly the dominant period descriptor for the 1910s to the 1950s and, by implication, for pretty much the whole of the twentieth century; with the latter pair hoping that their A History of 1930s British Literature (2019) ‘demonstrates that subsuming the 1930s under an increasingly expansive (and increasingly) meaningless “modernism” label fails to capture central aspects of the decade’s literary and cultural field’ (2019b: 8). However, while it is undeniable that a focus on modernist signifiers, such as stream of consciousness or experimental form, excludes or marginalizes certain types of 1930s writing, the term is not so easy to dispense with because of the way it stands – in the work of writers from Katherine Mansfield to Virginia Woolf – for the attempt to break free from the traditional hierarchies and patriarchal order of the nineteenth century. Thus attempts to reconfigure modernism, such as Kristin Bluemel’s concept of ‘Intermodernism’, do not indirectly perpetuate conventional canonical hierarchy but seek to break down the binary oppositions around which that hierarchy is structured. As she points out, one way to circumvent the underpinning logic of modernist studies ‘that whatever is not modernism will function as modernism’s other’ (Bluemel 2009: 2) is to focus on the many writers who were operating in the space between that opposition by, for example, simultaneously pursuing aesthetic and political aims. Rather than accepting the binary logic of modernist studies, an intermodern approach would therefore lead to ‘reshaping the ways we think about relations between elite and common, experimental and popular, urban and rural, masculine and feminine, abstract and realistic’ (2009: 3). It was with this aim that I sought to rethink the seemingly antithetical opposition between the categories of proletarian literature and modernism in The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017). Despite the playful socialist triumphalism of the title, the book examines case studies that show not just points of overlap but a shared project of intersubjective and intersectional – particularly in terms of class and gender – self-liberation; while writers such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon and John Sommerfield wrote modernist novels to convey socialist politics, a text such as Woolf’s introductory letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies’s edited collection of the autobiographical experiences of members of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, Life as We have Known It (1931), ‘can itself be seen as a work of proletarian literature designed to hold open the possibility of readers developing a fuller consciousness’ (Hubble 2017: 167). I argue that the defining feature of these texts, whether ostensibly proletarian or modernist, is a ‘desire for a liberated future’ (Hubble 2017: 53). From this perspective, the expansion of modernism as a category of study simultaneously acknowledges and conceals the transformational impulse running through twentieth-century writing. The reason the radical popular and political components of this impulse remain obscured is because the democratization and politicization of self-reflexive and self-liberating writing that occurred from the end of the 1920s onwards is bracketed off within the hermetically sealed ‘thirties’ and considered as the exception to the norm. The argument of this chapter and volume is that rather than modernism, it is the democratization and politicization that characterized the 1930s, and subsequent decades, that is central to twentieth-century British fiction.

Mellor and Salton-Cox’s argument that the long 1930s run, if not until the Oil Crisis of 1973, at least from ‘a penumbra about 1926 to in, or around, 1950’ (2019b: 7) coincides with the position outlined in David Edgerton’s revisionist history, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (2019):

In the early 1950s there was little new rolling stock; there were barely more private cars and buses than in the late 1930s; the most modern public buildings from pubs to council buildings dated from the 1930s. In 1950 there were still about the same number of private telephones as there were business telephones. The number of TV owners was at 1930s levels, the newest cinemas were the great palaces of the 1930s. The schools, hospitals and employment exchanges of the 1950s were those of the 1930s. To cap it all the British diet was the 1930s diet set in aspic by a decade and a half of food control and rationing. (Edgerton 2019: 282–283)

However, not only was the British infrastructure of the early 1950s in fact built in the 1930s, but also the welfare provision of the time was a reworked version of the ‘elaborate system of welfare for the working class (that is, around 80 per cent of the population)’ created by the Conservative Party in the 1930s: ‘The United Kingdom went to war in September 1939 with a welfare state already in place’ (Edgerton 2019: 236–237). As Edgerton points out, the reality of this situation undermines the ‘whole historiography developed’ from the 1960s onwards, in works such as A.J.P. Taylor’s English History (1965) and Angus Calder’s The People’s War (1969), ‘claiming a wartime consensus around the need to create a welfare state, brought into being after 1945’ (Edgerton 2019: 236). This dominant trend in historiography, which Calder later partially repudiated in The Myth of the Blitz (1991), implicitly supported the construction of the literary myth of ‘the thirties’ by enabling the political literature of the decade, particularly documentary writing, to be portrayed as preparing the ground for the subsequent postwar consensus and welfare state. A different way to think about the 1930s and 1940s would be to see them jointly sharing political, policy and social differences from the preceding decades. Edgerton (2019) argues that the UK went from being ‘part of an Empire, not something which had an Empire’ to emerging in the late 1940s as ‘one of the new nations which arose from the dissolution of Empire’ (22, 26). The pound coming off the gold standard in 1931, as a result of the financial crisis triggered by the Great Depression, brought down interest rates and tariffs were introduced on most manufactured imports; conditions which supported the home market becoming important for British industry, leading to the expansion of Britain’s manufacturing capacity in time for the war when trade routes were largely cut off. Consequently, the free trade versus protection arguments of the Empire became superseded in the 1930s ‘as class became the central divide in politics, politics which was now national rather than imperial’ (Edgerton 2019: 33). For Edgerton, the defining feature of this emergent British state of the 1930s and 1940s was nationalism and the resultant ‘actual post-Second World War United Kingdom was in some ways better prefigured in the programme of the Tories and the British Union of Fascists (BUF) than that of the Liberals or the Labour Party’ (Edgerton 2019: xxxiv).

However, if the long 1930s, running into the 1950s, was the period in which a British nationalism developed, there was a shift within this period in the way that this Britishness became represented or embodied in the working class. In Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (1998), Ross McKibbin situates this shift as occurring principally in England during the period of the Second World War: ‘In the 1930s the ruling definition of democracy was individualist and its proponents chiefly a modernized middle class; in the 1940s the ruling definition was social-democratic and its proponents chiefly the organized working class’ (533). McKibbin argues that working-class fortunes during the interwar period were mixed, with huge differences eventually developing between skilled workers in the South or the Midlands and the long-term unemployed in the North. Furthermore, there was a split in political allegiance: ‘Throughout the interwar years about half the working class voted Conservative, about half Labour’ (530). However, the War, with its restoration of the ‘old staple industries’, evened out disparities between North and South and ‘universalised a working-class political culture’ in support of the Labour Party (531). Considering the historical accounts of McKibbin and Edgerton side by side makes visible the ambiguity of the long 1930s and the nationalist British welfare state that emerged within it. On the one hand, the postwar welfare state was, as Edgerton argues, a continuation of the structures developed by the Tory governments of the 1930s. On the other hand, the wartime universalization of working-class political culture, as described by McKibbin, changed the signification of those welfare structures so that their popular meaning shifted from a 1930s fear of means-testing to a post-1945 pride in the idea of support from the cradle to the grave. This latter meaning held throughout the period of postwar prosperity and full employment, but once economic conditions changed following the 1973 oil crisis (Mellor and Salton-Cox’s implied end date for the longest ‘long 1930s’), the universalized working-class political culture fragmented and welfare state systems gradually resumed a more punitive dimension culminating in the despised Universal Credit scheme in operation since 2013. The point is not that Britain has returned to a modern-day equivalent of the 1930s means test, but that it has never moved beyond that system structurally, even if for many years that system signified what appeared to be a different set of values.

The idea of Britishness being represented or embodied in the working class is also ambiguous. As William Empson noted in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), anticipating Roland Barthes’s (1957) concept of myth, the idea of the heroic ‘Worker’ was a myth, which could be used in different contexts to signify radically different meanings. Communist and Labour Party celebrations of the worker were no hindrance to the Conservative-dominated National Government also presenting images of the worker in posters as the ‘stringy but tough, vital but not over-strong, cockney type’ (Empson 1995: 20) that they presented themselves as the champion of. While the working-class vote did consolidate around Labour in 1945, the division of the interwar years returned from the 1970s onwards with large sections of the English (as opposed to the Scottish and Welsh) working class going on to vote for the Thatcher governments of the 1980s. As Raphael Samuel notes, Thatcherism was attractive to those whose sense of identity had been unsettled by progressive social change in Britain from the 1960s onwards because of the way it was able to articulate a reactionary version of history from below ‘which gave pride of place to those whom [Thatcher] called “ordinary people”’ (Samuel 1998: 346). A similar implied division between ‘ordinary people’ and ‘metropolitan elites’ went on to become one of a number of complex factors impacting the 2016 referendum on Britain’s EU membership, and has underlain attempts by Brexit-supporting politicians of both the political left and right to appeal to working-class voters. This convergence suggests that the constituent myths of the emergent British state of the 1930s and 1940s have merged with the passing of time.

In the 1930s, Empson argued that there was little point people complaining that the ‘Worker group of sentiments is misleading’ whether deployed by the National Government or as proletarian propaganda by the Communist Party; ‘what they ought to do is produce a rival myth’ (1995: 20). He suggested that a more sophisticated ‘Proletarian Literature’ was possible than one that simply expressed a supposedly working-class viewpoint. Such a literature would function similarly to pastoral by ‘putting the complex into the simple’ (25). For example, ‘in the manner in which Shakespeare brings lords and ladies together with simple men who unexpectedly turn out to have more sense than their betters’ (Hubble 2017: 6). In other words, one alternative to a literature rooted in the supposedly authentic experience of the worker would be a literature focusing on intersubjective relations between classes and – given the changes that occurred in the industrial workforce during the 1930s – genders. As I have argued in The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question, such a proletarian literature did exist during the long 1930s in novels such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932–34), Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933), Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned (1935), Walter Brierley’s Means-Test Man (1935), and John Sommerfield’s May Day (1936). The work of some of these writers, and others such as Jack Common and James Hanley, led George Orwell to state ‘I believe we are passing into a classless period, and what we call proletarian literature is one of the signs of change’ (Orwell 2000a: 297). Such writing overlaid class consciousness with a self-reflexivity that revealed the limitations of the subject position of the writer, whether bourgeois or proletarian. The net result was a move away from the rigidities of Victorian class and gender roles, including from the ‘common proletarian way of life’ that had existed since the 1880s (Hobsbawm 1978: 281), into what Orwell later called ‘the naked democracy of the swimming-pools’ (Orwell 2000b: 297). Orwell’s idea in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) that the germs of a new England were forming in the indeterminate social strata at the margins of longer established communities suggests that this fluidity offered a route from the cultural democratization of the 1930s to a liberated future beyond the seemingly intractable binary oppositions of the British State.

The rest of the chapter continues after this point by setting out an alternate literary history of the 1930s: first focusing on two key writers of the period who remain undeservingly neglected, Ethel Mannin (see the posts on this blog: ‘A Book for 1939 or 2019? Ethel Mannin’s Women and the Revolution’ and ‘Ethel Mannin’s Confessions and Impressions (1930/1937)’ and Harold Heslop (see ‘Text of My Working Class Studies Association Conference Paper on Heslop’); and then moving on to consider the challenge posed to the newly formed British State by the national turn of Welsh and Scottish writers.

Works Cited:

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Hammersmith: Paladin, 1973 [1957].

Bentley, Nick, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble. ‘Introduction: The 1950s: A Decade of Change’. In Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble, eds. The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction. London: Bloomsbury, 2019: 1-18.

Bergonzi, Bernard. Reading the Thirties: Texts and Contexts. London: Macmillan, 1978.

Bluemel, Kristin, ed. Intermodernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Bluemel, Kristin, ‘Exemplary Intermodernists: Stevie Smith, Inez Holden, Betty Miller, and Naomi Mitchison’. In Maroula Joannou (ed.), The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920-1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015: 40-56.

Caesar, Adrian. Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class and Ideology in the 1930s. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991.

Croft, Andy. Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.

Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Edgerton, David. The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History. London: Penguin, 2019.

Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995 [1935].

Ewins, Kristin. ‘Professional Women Writers’. In A History of 1930s British Literature. Eds Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019: 58-71.

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

Hobsbawm, Eric. ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ Marxism Today, September 1978: 279-286.

Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Hubble, Nick. ‘“The Choices of Master Samwise”: Rethinking 1950s Fiction’. In Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble, eds. The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction. London: Bloomsbury, 2019: 19-51.

Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982 [1976].

Kohlmann, Benjamin and Matthew Taunton, eds. A History of 1930s British Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019a.

Kohlmann, Benjamin and Matthew Taunton, ‘Introduction: The Long 1930s’. In A History of 1930s British Literature. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, Eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019b: 1-14.

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

Mellor, Leo and Glyn Salton-Cox, eds. ‘The Long 1930s’. Special issue, Critical Quarterly. 57 (3), 2015a.

Mellor, Leo and Glyn Salton-Cox. ‘Introduction’. In Leo Mellor and Glyn Salton-Cox, eds. ‘The Long 1930s’. Special issue, Critical Quarterly. 57 (3), 2015b: 1-9.

Montefiore, Janet. Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History. London: Routledge, 1996.

Orwell, George. ‘The Proletarian Writer’. In A Patriot After All 1940-1941, Collected Works XII. Ed. Peter Davison. London: Secker & Warburg, 2000a [1940]: 294-299.

Orwell, George. The Lion and the Unicorn. In A Patriot After All 1940-1941, Collected Works XII. Ed. Peter Davison, London: Secker & Warburg, 2000b [1941]: 391-434.

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

This is the fourth instalment in a short series on aging following on directly from the third, ‘Growing Old with the Welfare State’ (the first two posts are here and here). Having discussed both the ‘Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (FCMAP) described in my brief introduction to this series, and the follow-on project to produce Growing Old with the Welfare State, eds Hubble, Taylor & Tew (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), I want to reflect on what I learnt from that process before finishing with a fifth and final post thinking about ageing in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In my previous post in the series, I discussed the response of two mass-observers (‘Dick’ and ‘Beryl’) to the postwar decades and suggested it is the apparent contradictions thrown up by studying individual lives in detail that reveals deficiencies of the received historical cultural frameworks that we assume to be operating. Not only do we need to rethink how we understand contemporary history but we also need to consider that the dissatisfaction which is sometimes felt with contemporary Britain by some older people (in this case, to use media labels, one that might be termed more ‘socially conservative’ and one that might be termed more ‘liberal’) is not simply nostalgia for bygone ages but a disappointment that the world of their youth has not changed into the transformed future that they sought to achieve during their life.

It seems to me that anyone arguing Dick does not want to change the world of his youth but return to it is failing to grasp the complexity of these mass-observer lives by categorising them as though they can be assigned easily as binary-gendered responses. In Seven Lives from Mass Observation (which also discusses ‘Dick’ and ‘Beryl’ but he calls them ‘Len’ and ‘Stella’), James Hinton accounts for this apparent division by arguing that while ‘for most men of this [interwar] generation, gender was an unproblematic given’, women were dependent on ‘more complicated processes [to construct] their sense of themselves’ (165). The differences in responses to the past are not therefore essentialist but a result of women being more likely to have to undertake a particular process of self-discovery than men because they wanted more from their lives than the subordinate roles they were offered in the 1940s and 1950s. There was nothing preventing men from following a similar path other than the fact that they already appeared to have clearly-defined active high-status social roles – as breadwinner, husband and father – openly available to them. In fact, we might see those men who did participate in MO as on some level seeking such a path of self-discovery as followed by many women. As Hinton argues, by describing himself as an ‘old reactionary’, Dick ‘could be seen as a man who had internalised a narrow and life-denying subaltern consciousness’ but, on the other hand, as ‘an MO correspondent’ he found a way to nonetheless explore much wider horizons (108).

Therefore, if we reject gender as the prime determinant of self-discovery in the name of a wider social transformation, how else might we broadly classify this lifelong process of self-reflexively considering our own experience in the world even as the social context constantly changes? One term that covers this process in the context of this research is ‘growing old’. Arguably, the acceptance of various mass observers that they are old (as discussed in the second and third instalments in this series of blogposts) is both an unavoidable product of their self-reflexive practice and an acknowledgment that ‘life has meaning because it ends but its end is not its meaning’ and thus an acceptance and statement of their recognition that they are the authors of their own lives (Hubble and Tew 2013: 205). As Lynne Segal observes in Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (2013): ‘To the extent that we can manage it, awareness of mortality can enhance our sense of our bonds with others and our embrace of the moment’ (170). Anne Karpf (2014) makes a similar point about the need to ‘incorporate [our mortality] into our daily lives’ (109) but also insists that ‘we never need to lose our earlier selves only add to them’ (55). This understanding was central to the research undertaken for Growing Old with the Welfare State and arguably it is the reflexive awareness of their past earlier selves that enables these MO diaries to expose the complex, multi-layered composition of the contemporary present we inhabit. On such a reading, ‘growing old’ isn’t just something that happens to us but a process which requires complex self-reflexion. In Ageing, Narrative and Identity, we provided histories and analyses of MO and the University of the Third Age (U3A) which suggested why these two organisations are particularly good in encouraging this process to take place, but the simplest explanation is that both embrace ageing as a lifelong process. As Karpf argues, this attitude will not stop us eventually declining and dying but it will help us in the more difficult task of actually living.

This research into ageing began more than ten years ago while I was still in my mid 40s. I explained why I chose to use MO in the first post of this series but one of the reasons why I quickly warmed to MO and the U3A was the insistence of their members that they weren’t necessarily old when they were in their 60s and 70s but only, as discussed in the second post, at a point when they came to define themselves in this manner: a process which should be seen as a function of self-reflexion rather than bodily decline. At that time, I didn’t particularly think of myself as middle-aged which I would now if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t think it is a particularly useful term. Looking back, I still don’t think I was middle-aged then because if the term means anything at all then it must mark some sort of stage between being young and old and I certainly didn’t consider myself as poised between youth and age at that time (with a youngest child age 3). More to the point, I was hostile to the suggestions I remember reading that people should start preparing for retirement from the age of 50 and perhaps have an afternoon a week to take classes and start preparing (I can’t now remember where this was but I will look it up and add a reference at some point if possible). This idea seemed entirely inconsistent with the ongoing process to extend retirement ages and, furthermore, I was anticipating at least another 20 years of what I thought was turning into a successful career. I saw this ‘classes from 50’ idea as part of an ‘active’ or ‘successful’ ageing agenda in which we all remain super fit until into our 80s and then quickly die at no cost to the state; an approach I found repugnant. I’m not just an academic, I’ve read books and written about them ever since I can remember (I did this at home for fun while I was still at primary school age): therefore I was drawn to defining my life in terms of reading, writing, and self-reflexion. So in terms of my motivation to do it, the research was partly driven by how I see myself and the things I’m drawn to.

A decade later and I can see the point about thinking about retirement in your 50s (in fact, I try hard not to think wishfully about it all the time!) This is because as my own subjectivity has caught up with my research, I have come to fully understand what I wrote about retirement not being about a pipe and slippers but actually moving into a new phase of life working on new projects and ways of living. In my mid 40s I couldn’t see what I would do when I retired other than carry on doing academic stuff (but without the more boring admin load and the need to keep regular hours), preferably with some sort of eminent emeritus status (when indulging in idle fantasy moments) but not dependent on that (when thinking in more pragmatic mode). But now I can see all sorts of things that I would like to be doing which involve reading, writing research and self-reflexion but which my full-time career is actually constraining the opportunities for. I have come to understand, as the founders of the University of the Third Age did, that ‘retirement’ is not a stage of ageing but more of an ideological rejection of the model of professional career for life and the embrace of a more fulfilling way of living. However, I also understand that the financial model and the whole basis of the Welfare State which supported this ideological shift several decades ago no longer exists in the same way that it did. My response to this shift is not to think that we should pour all our resources into desperately rebuilding or shoring up the welfare state and pensions and the whole structure (although we do clearly need to adopt sustainable models for these functions), but that we need to focus more energy on self-reflexion, different ways of living and getting away from the model of professional career for life (e.g. people shouldn’t have to need to do this for 20, 30, 40 years before realising there should be more to life).

So what has happened here other than I have got a bit older? I think this project has (along with other stuff in my life and work) changed my attitude to academia. When I wrote that we considered our MO and U3A volunteers to be co-researchers this was sincerely meant but a statement of the obvious that I didn’t necessarily think through the full implications of (or at least I thought them through intellectually but not fully in terms of my own practice). I don’t like the hierarchical model of academic life but rather than seek to overthrow it, I’ve done my best to climb high enough up so that I don’t have to worry about it. But there is only so far you can go without running into the limitations, internalisations and structural distortions of these kind of hierarchical structures (which not only inherently privilege bourgeois white male subjectivity but to some extent generate it). These consequences of the system affect everything including research. This is not to say that good work is impossible but just to acknowledge that the system itself is another constraint alongside time, budget, resources etc. In order to try and break out of these systemic constraints, I have slowly inched towards a more reflexive stance in various ways such as using the first person more in academic writing, setting up this blog, and writing for MO (see here). These are all ways of easing both the binary divisions between academics and non-academics and the hierarchical divisions within academia (although it is of course possible for academics to write like angels while behaving dictatorially as managers). What I’m trying to say is that this process of undoing binaries and hierachies is like that of ‘growing old’ (understood as a lifelong process) in that it entails giving up status, which is always defined through binaries or hierarchies, in order to better manage the task of actually living. In the final post in this series I will consider some of the things that are happening to our understanding of ‘ageing’ as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and then situate the pandemic in relation to social change within the twenty-first century in order to argue why we all need to grow up by growing older.

References

Hinton, James (2016). Seven Lives from Mass Observation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hubble, Nick and Philip Tew (2013). Ageing, Narrative and Identity: New Qualitative Social Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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

Karpf, Anne (2014). How to Age. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Segal, Lynne (2013). Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. London: Verso.

 

This is the day diary I am submitting to the Mass Observation (MO) 12 May 2020 day-diary project. This is part of a wider series of posts I am writing about MO during this period. Here is my day diary, which is mostly reflective because I wasn’t feeling well and therefore didn’t do much:

I am 55 years old, a university academic and live in Aberystwyth with my partner ‘A’ (51),  and two of our three children, ‘S’ (27) and ‘a’ (13).

I didn’t feel good this morning at all: I didn’t sleep well and I just felt out of sorts, depressed and with a migraine-y headache (which I suppressed with painkillers). ‘A’, in contrast, was feeling positively bouncy in comparison with yesterday, when she was feeling down. It does often appear as though we are on opposed points of cycles that just keep swirling around with us occasionally meeting at the high points. I ended up taking the day off from work. I rested, I had a late breakfast and we did German (‘A’ is giving myself and ‘a’ a German lesson every day from a GCSE coursework book with the idea that we will sit the GCSE next year or the year after). Then I posted my #12May2010 MO diary – the day diary I sent to MO in 2010 when they first ran the annual call for submissions on 12 May – on my blog with an introduction and some afterthoughts. Thinking about it was quite emotional because although I only submitted 750 words (I think we were asked to keep submissions to that length), they touched on a number of very significant points of my life. For a start, that day was two days after my 45^th birthday (and today is two days after my 55^th) and 5’s and 0’s tend to be the ones that make you feel a bit more reflective (in my family, many of them also fall on years ending with 5 and 0: already this year my mum has turned 80 and my dad turned 85, my niece has turned 20 and my sister will turn 50 – this does help with remembering how old everyone is). 12 May 2010 was also 6 days after the General Election which, although we were happy in Brighton Pavilion with the election of Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, had been extremely depressing and eventually resulted in David Cameron’s Tories forming a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats (who the Guardian had unforgivably endorsed in a leader on polling day). While there have been everyday changes since 12 May 2010 – I, like many others, no longer buy a print copy of a newspaper every day; the release statement for MO in 2010 required no reference to the Data Protection Act – the profound changes across the intervening decade (the degradation of the welfare state and public life, Brexit, and the acceleration in the break-up of the UK) largely stem from that coalition and the decade of austerity it unleashed.

Aside from the recent birthday, that day diary from 2010 also touches other personal turning points. As I noted in introducing it on my blog, that turned out to be our last spring in Brighton because later in the summer ‘A’ was offered a job at Aberystwyth University and so we moved at six weeks’ notice. This changed our lives hugely (and generally for the better). It removed us from the blinkered perspective of the South East (although obviously Brighton is hardly typical of political outlook in the wider region) and led to us becoming voters for and, subsequently, members of Plaid Cymru. It meant that I was able to vote Ie/Yes with the winning majority in the Welsh Referendum in March 2011 on greater powers for the Welsh Assembly (now Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament), which has resulted in increasing material differences in the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and means that the conditions we will be experiencing under lockdown from now on will not be the same as those in England (which have attracted condemnation and dismay from around the World). Professionally, it was a great move for ‘A’ because it got her away from the aggressive and damaging neoliberal management style (then and now) of the University of Sussex and allowed her career to thrive. The professional downside was that my commute to the university in west London where I work, which was difficult enough from Brighton, became a nightmarishly long traversal of two different countries and required me to stay away from home (in a variety of B&B and hotel rooms) when working. The current lockdown does mean that I am relieved of this exhausting and draining weekly commute (not helped by the flooding that took place during February this year) and, in fact, this period is the longest I have ever spent without leaving Aberystwyth and the immediate region during the decade I have lived here.

12 May 2010 was also significant for me professionally because I did participate that day as a member of the closing plenary panel of a conference organised by Brighton University at the Jubilee Library: ‘Engaging Mass Observation: New Perspectives on Contemporary Material’. The inherent self-reflexivity of writing a day diary for MO on a day in which I was participating as an academic who works on MO at a conference about MO was too much to resist (and, of course, there is another layer of self-reflection in writing another MO day diary looking back at that day). I get that this might seem like naval-gazing to some, but this is my life. As I noted for a recent post on my blog, Why I Chose to Use the Mass Observation Project for My Research on Ageing, the 1937-49 incarnation of Mass Observation (MO) was central to both my MA dissertation, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Mass Observation’ (1996), and my DPhil thesis, ‘George Orwell and Mass-Observation: Mapping the Politics of Everyday Life in England 1937-1941’ (2002). Vastly expanded, this research resulted in my 2006 book, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Palgrave Macmillan), which was republished as an extended paperback edition in 2010 (although I think this was later in the year than May). Central to my interest in MO was their first book, May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 (1937). I have a large colour photocopy of the iconic red, white and pink cover of this book framed on the wall on the room in which I’m currently typing. During 2010, I was involved with colleagues from Brunel University in a huge funded project on Ageing (see the post linked above) and I had major ambitions for my career across the coming decade (the one we have just lived through). By and large, I have been successful in meeting those ambitions but at some cost in a decade in which the working conditions in academia have worsened to a degree unimaginable back in 2010. I am privileged enough to have a senior full-time academic post but Higher Education as a whole is dependent on a model of exorbitant fees for students, mass recruitment of international students paying even higher fees, and thousands of part-time or hourly-paid staff (many on zero hour contracts) working precariously to keep the show on the road. The icing on the cake is the normalisation across the sector of an absolutely vile and toxic brand of neoliberal performance management which increasingly sees teaching and researching processes led by people who aren’t academics. For several years it has been clear that this system is utterly unsustainable and that fact has now come into sharp focus in the current pandemic with the refusal of the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, to bail out the sector. It is easy to get side tracked by the huge expenditure of energy that university staff have made over the last two months in order to set up and maintain a system of teaching online virtually overnight but it is clear that there will be a savage restructuring of the sector in the months to come. At my university we have been told that the focus going forward will have to be on teaching and that research will be ‘streamlined’. In other words, there is an opportunity to force through yet more performance-managed measures in the name of extracting more labour from the workers in the system. One reflection that writing this diary has reinforced for me is that MO is far more important for my sense of identity and self-worth than being an academic is. That is why I am very happy that, after hearing last autumn that MO was open to new participants without demographic restrictions, I decided to join the project and have been writing for it since. Obviously, the value of MO has become apparent to many during the current crisis because I believe the Project has now swollen to over 700 volunteers (and is therefore closed again) and there are also significant numbers of people (including me) writing Covid-19 diaries for MO.

Returning to today’s activities, I can report that I didn’t do too much else apart from posting my 12 May 2010 diary other than rectify a problem with the hoover and then run it around upstairs. In the late afternoon I went for a walk along the seafront. Rather like this day ten years ago (only then in Brighton) it was sunny but unseasonably cold. It was noticeably busier than earlier in the lockdown on the south beach promenade. So possibly Johnson’s message that people (in England) can drive where they like has got through. Having said that, it was still possible to physical distance (although any more people and it will be difficult) and it might be just a coincidence that several groups came out at once. The fact it was the south beach (with more parking available) suggests people have driven but they might just have driven from the other side of town rather than further afield. I also suspect that some local people have not really been going out at all and it might just be people thinking it is now safer to do this. Difficult to say exactly but this might become clearer over the next few weeks. When I got home, I let the guinea pigs and rabbit out into their pen on the grass and then we had dinner. Afterwards, I took my cup of tea out to a bench in the garden, where it was actually quite warm because the sun had heated up the wall behind it.

The two big UK news items today – neither of which accord with the fake optimism of Johnson’s message on Sunday – are that Rishi Sunak extended the furlough job retention scheme until the end of October (so the Tories have obviously abandoned the attempt to ‘wean’ workers off it) and the latest ONS weekly updates have impacted the official death toll again, which is now just over 40,000 (although the Financial Times now estimate the actual number to be closer to 60,000). This is far in excess of anticipation at the beginning of the lockdown and far worse than elsewhere in Europe; the result of a catalogue of out-of-date pandemic plans, allowing supplies of ventilators and PPE to dwindle and become obsolescent, prioritising leaving the EU over preparing for the pandemic, flirting with ‘herd immunity’, sending 15,000 people home from UK hospitals in mid-March without testing (many to care homes causing outbreaks and mass fatalities), and fatally procrastinating for eleven days in March before reluctantly imposing a lockdown. An article in the Guardian that went online today describes the UK as ‘taking a pasting from world’s press over coronavirus crisis’. Die Zeit sums up the position well: ‘In Great Britain, the infection has spread unchecked longer than it should have. The wave of infections also spread from the hospitals to the old people’s homes, which could also have been avoided. The government is now trying to pretend to the public that it has the situation under control’. The public however are starting to see through this act. Earlier in the week I read that the Corriere della Serra described the situation in the UK as ‘like a nightmare from which you cannot awake, but in which you landed because of your own fault or stupidity’, adding that Britain seemed ‘a prisoner of itself’. I think this the most apt description I have seen for a situation that can only be described as demonstrating the complete moral bankruptcy of a nation and a ruling class. In this context the celebration of VE Day was obscene. As ‘A’ pointed out when we discussed it later over very weak gin-and-tonics in the living room at the end of the day, Britain is now once again ‘the sick man of Europe’, as they used to say in the 1970s. In the current circumstances, to go through with the final stages of Brexit according to the planned timetable, which would mean in effect a no-deal Brexit, would be an act of criminal insanity.

Looking forward to the next ten years, it is difficult to imagine anything less than extreme political and social change. There is every chance of the Covid-19 infection rate increasing in England as a result of Boris Johnson’s typically inept and incoherent statement on Sunday, with the genuine prospect of a ‘second wave’ and further spike in the mortality rate. I think the US can already be characterised as ‘a failed state’ in terms of the way in which the Trump administration have systematically failed to deal with the pandemic and instead are letting the infection spread while using it as a pretext to roll out an ‘America First’ programme. The UK may yet follow; there has been no evidence so far of any attempt to set up the kind of ‘test, trace and isolate’ programme that has been used in the countries which have successfully controlled the pandemic. Certainly, I don’t expect the UK to exist in 2030. Even if the pandemic is managed and an effective vaccine appears this year (the best case scenario), the social and economic consequences will still be immense and paradigm shifting. At the moment we are all concerned with more immediate issues of how to deal with the lockdown restrictions without succumbing to anxiety and depression and wondering when it will be safe to see friends and families, such as my parents. But we all know deep down that things are never going to be the same again and this is part of the peculiar stress and strain of the situation. On what basis can one even make plans for the future? Unlike 2010, I no longer have ambitions for the coming decade beyond very general ones for the continued well-being of family and self. I have some ideas of what I want to do over the immediate next few months, which mainly involve reading and writing, but beyond that I don’t know for sure what I’ll be doing. The only cast iron prediction that I will venture for 2030 is that I won’t be working in the UK HE sector. We’ll see when I submit my day diary for 12 May 2030.

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.

This was the day diary I submitted to Mass Observation (MO) in 2010 when they started day diaries on 12 May. I wrote a longer piece than this which I can’t find (but is on a memory stick somewhere probably). This version was edited to 750 words for submission, which was presumably what was asked for. I’ve slightly expanded in places for context and made a minor alteration for publication. This was just after the General Election in which I’d voted Green for the first time (although I had previously in council elections) and helped elect Caroline Lucas. Until 2005 we’d been in the Kemp Town constituency and I’d always voted there for Labour and Des Turner, who was on the left. But the constituency boundary changed and we found ourselves in Brighton Pavilion. Unknown to me when I wrote this, this would be our last spring in Brighton because ‘A’ got a job in Aberystwyth later in the year. She had an interview on 9 July and we moved at 6 weeks’ notice to arrive in Aber on the August Bank Holiday weekend. Further thoughts at the end. Here is the diary (the ellipses are where it was originally cut at the time of submission from the longer draft):

I am 45 years old, a university lecturer and live in Brighton with my partner, ‘A’, and youngest two children, ‘M’ and ‘a’.

‘a’ (3yr old son) came in at quarter-past seven but it was ‘A’’s turn to get up and so I managed to doze on to about 8 and got up just after ‘M’ (13) had left for school … As went down stairs, remembered that Cameron was now Prime Minister … hmmmm … Had breakfast … and then helped ‘A’ and ‘a’ to get off in car … Went to Newsagents and bought Guardian … Went back to bed …

After paper, read some more of the recently-published James Hinton’s Nine Wartime Lives: Mass Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (2010) … My colleague P rang about 11am … went upstairs to my attic office … My father in law rang up at quarter to twelve to wish me happy birthday for 2 days before and to talk about our daughter, ‘S’, who isn’t currently living at home. I told him that she had come out to a pub meal with us the previous night to celebrate my birthday. Then I had a vicious fight with the printer/photocopier … [presumably to print notes for speaking later in the day]

By now running late, so got dressed and out of the house … Lovely sunny day (despite the unseasonal cold – probably another reason beside Tories and post-birthday blues why I felt depressed) and I walked quickly, cutting down through Hanover and then across the Steine … and got to the Jubilee Library by half past twelve for a conference organised by Brighton University: ‘Engaging Mass Observation: New Perspectives on Contemporary Material’.

Picked up badge and conference pack … Spoke to a few people and then listened to Ben Highmore’s keynote speech, which I enjoyed very much and found interesting for what he said about ‘singularity’ and the ‘future anterior’. ‘A’ had come in late after finishing her teaching and I managed to kiss her in passing as I filed out of the room at the end. Then moved on to the Life Writing workshop, where Margaretta Jolly… made me work with her dad looking at an extract from Zita Crossman’s diary on the Labour Party conference 11 May 1940 …. So I was able to tell him background about Zita having been Harrisson’s lover etc. By now I was beginning to enjoy the day and Margaretta’s main point that you have to read MO writing as literature chimed in well with my thoughts from reading Hinton …

Then we had a coffee break and it was time for my participation in the closing plenary panel …

Afterwards we had wine and I talked with M and R from UWE about Video Nation before joining ‘A’ and K and talking about taking children out of primary school, the merits of Dorothy Stringer High School (a local comprehensive) and different parenting arrangements. I drank several glasses of white wine, people dispersed, ‘A’ went off to pick up ‘a’ from a friend’s house and I went with the organisers and other speakers to Carluccio’s for some dinner. This was enjoyable … Drank several glasses of red wine and ate the sea bass, which was good … We began to disperse just after eight. M was off to the Lord Nelson to watch Fulham in the Europa Cup final and R and I joined him and assorted friends and acquaintances  there … watching Fulham lose … and talking about various things such as Brighton University, Sussex University (including how crassly it is managed), Xbox games (several fathers of teenage boys there – particularly we were talking about how the boys ‘take the piss’ out of the games: playing hide and seek in ‘Call of Duty’ and as my son did once, stealing a policeman’s bike in GTA and riding the wrong way up a one way street), Stringer (again) … R, meanwhile, had discovered that T was an enthusiast and expert on magic lanterns, which obviously dovetailed well with her own interest in mantelpieces. I’m not sure that after several pints … my contributions to this conversation were particular useful. And then it was nearly eleven and time to depart. I walked with R back as far as Wagamama, from where she could find her hotel back by the Jubilee library, and said the final goodbye of the evening.

When I got home I said hello to ‘A’, who was watching television … The next thing I remember is waking up lying face down on the pillow… but by this time I’m pretty sure it was after midnight.

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 to it being reproduced in full or in part on the MOA website, on other websites and in publications as approved by the Mass Observation Archive Trustees.

Afterthoughts: despite the academic component: different person, different life! It’s been a long time since I bought the print copy of a newspaper on a daily basis. My father-in-law has since sadly passed away. There are a few things I’d forgotten about that time that I didn’t particularly want to be reminded of and have been now. Much as I love Brighton, I was glad to get out. But that was a good day and evening. I’ve no idea what I said in the panel but some of it drew on a review I wrote of Hinton’s book for the Journal of British Studies and I think the ideas then fed into this review of Mass Observation Online. But it seems an awfully long time ago: ‘a’ had just moved out of the toddler stage and is now a teenager; ‘M’ is in his twenties and lives in Bristol; ‘S’ does now live at home once more; I was ‘young’ then and I feel a lot older now. The move to Aber did mark a huge nodal point in our lives. But also the full impact of the 2008 crash and the years of Tory austerity was yet to be felt – I think I had earlier that spring been on the first couple of demos/protests that I had been on since the 2003 anti-war march in London. In many ways, this period was still the long hangover of the 1990s. Everything has changed since then.

This is the third instalment in a short series on aging (the first two are here and here). Following the completion of the ‘Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (FCMAP) described in my brief introduction to this series, my colleague Philip Tew and I received follow-on funding to produce an anthology of older people’s accounts of ageing in Britain which was published (with Jennie Taylor, who was the postdoc on the project) as Growing Old with the Welfare State (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

We found the self-reflexive writing of both our Mass Observation (MO) and University of Third Age (U3A) co-researchers capable of taking us as close as we could hope to get to observing ‘a new type of fourth-age selfhood’ under construction. By ‘new type of fourth-age selfhood’ we were signalling a rejection of the conventional definition of the fourth age as ‘dependence, decrepitude and death’ (Laslett 1996: 3; see also Hubble and Tew 2013: 59-61, 80) and replacing it with a self-defined period of old age, characterised by reflection rather than physical condition. Reading the narratives of our project participants, we see the wave of social change enabled by post-war stability and prosperity and the overwhelming sense of liberation felt at the moment of retirement under these circumstances as new horizons opened on what for many turned out to be the happiest and most fulfilling times of their lives; but equally, after 15, 20, 25 years of liberated life, we saw that the eventual recognition ‘and now I am old’ (discussed in the preceding ‘Ageing is Not  a Social Problem’ post), was not generally a harbinger of doom but an opportunity to move on to something different, from sailing to WEA classes perhaps, and to take pride in the ability to look back and learn from one’s life. The point is that ageing is a continual process that cannot be reduced to the essence of one particular phase of post-retirement lifestyle considered in contrast against a supposed final phase of decline and death. In fact, the experience of ageing changes as continually in later years as it does in earlier or middle years: ageing is a lifelong process! As Anne Karpf argues in How to Age (2014), ageing across the entire lifespan is about enrichment and growth and the later years in particular ‘can be actively enriching, a time of immense growth. Perhaps that’s why it’s called “growing old”’ (3). It is precisely in this spirit and understanding that we gave the title Growing Old with the Welfare State to our edited collection of older people’s accounts of ageing in Britain.

Turning to the other component of that book’s title, the ‘Welfare State’, it is worth noting that although the term is now embedded in everyday language, both the history of its usage and the extent of what it defines are varied and often-context dependent. In his The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State (1995), Nicholas Timmins notes that the term extends from the narrow American definition of welfare as payments to the poor to ‘virtually the whole of the economic and social history of Britain from 1945’ and notes that his own coverage is restricted to ‘the mainstream services of health, education, social security, housing, social services, and, in lesser detail, employment policy’ (7). In our usage of the term we followed Timmins’ own practice. Although it is perfectly valid to think of a more-encompassing sense of the Welfare State – including social-democratic and collective values as manifested through nationalised industries and corporate approaches to business – as typifying the political and social culture of post-war Britain from 1945 to 1975, the advantage of Timmins’s approach is that it allowed us to focus on those welfare mechanisms which have persisted beyond the Thatcherite rejection of the collective and corporate aspects of the post-war British State and continued to support the lives of retired generations – including the writers in our collection – into the twenty-first century.

Less controversial than the definition of the Welfare State perhaps is the widespread perception that the pattern of the human life course in Britain changed irrevocably over the second half of the last century as a direct result of the introduction of universal health, education and social security provisions, as well as a steadily-increasing possibility of entering higher education. The combined effect of the Welfare State and medical advances meant that more people lived longer, happier, and healthier lives than ever before in recorded human history. As a consequence of these changes, the experience of ageing was completely transformed. While forty years ago retirement was envisioned as pottering about in the garden and taking to an armchair, it became during the late 20C and early 21C just another different active phase of life. People in their 60s, 70s and 80s embarked on new careers, new pastimes and new relationships, and yet our existing cultural and social perceptions of ageing remained governed by increasingly dated images and narratives from a bygone era.

While the eight diarists anthologised in Growing Old with the Welfare State are not a representative sample in a statistical sense, they do cover between them a wide range of social experience which is indicative of the general British experience of growing old in the Welfare State. Their narratives collectively present an interesting multi-layered account of a general social shift away from values rooted in the deference and social niceties of the pre-war period (some of which date back to the nineteenth century) to new, more informal, ways of living that began to appear broadly from the 1960s onwards. Similar stories can be found in the work of historians who have drawn on life writing from the Mass Observation Archive. James Hinton’s Seven Lives from Mass Observation (2016) focuses on seven mass observers born between the early 1920s and the early 1930s: ‘Because the people dealt with here engaged with the defining transformations of the late twentieth century as adults, their sensibilities and expectations shaped by an earlier era, their experiences are particularly valuable in helping us to view those transformations in historical context’ (4). Two of the mass observers included in Growing Old with the Welfare State (‘Dick Turpin’ and ‘Beryl Saunders’) are also featured (under different names) by Hinton in Seven Lives (and two more of Hinton’s subjects make up the list of eight mass observers selected by Hubble in 2010 as potential FCMAP case studies from which the six included in Growing Old with the Welfare State were selected). There is something especially engaging about reading the thoughtful and detailed reflections of those who have lived through the significant social changes since the early 1930s which draws researchers to them. However, it is also fascinating to consider how that generation’s attitudes were shaped by their relationship with the following generation born in the 1940s, who also lived through interesting times but with a different set of perspectives. As Claire Langhamer notes in The English in Love (2013), her history of love, marriage, and the emotional revolution in the twentieth century, the Second World War can be seen as an ‘emotional watershed’: ‘a period of rapid discontinuity out of which emerged a subtly different set of intimate relations embedded in, and expressive of, changed gender and social relations’ (9). The pre-war boundaries between public and private crumbled and the younger generation developed very different expectations of emotional intimacy than those whose values had already been formed in the earlier period. According to Langhamer, this ‘revolution’ unfolded over several post-war decades culminating in the 1960s, which she views as not so much the age of sexual permissiveness but as a ‘golden age of romance’ (11) that included expectations of emotional and sexual intimacy within a desired ideal of companionate marriage. However, while the evolution of attitudes to sex and relationships was more gradual and nuanced than the stereotypical idea of the ‘swinging sixties’ allows, people’s understanding – especially those of the older generation whose attitudes were formed before the War – was often shaped by exactly such popular stereotypes.

In discussing the mass observer he calls ‘Len’ (but we called ‘Dick Turpin’) in his Seven Lives from Mass Observation, James Hinton describes his accounts 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 what he understood as the sexual and feminist revolutions of the 1960s and the Thatcherite era of privatisation, financial deregulation and destruction of the unions and manufacturing industry. ‘Dick’, as an example of a wider body of skilled manual labour (in his case a mechanic who moved into public sector transport supervision and management), manifests a nostalgia for pre-1955 Britain. Whereas the older way of life he values was once supported by the welfare state, it is the welfare state 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 counterintuitive 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 ‘Dick’ 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. What this suggests is that the apparent clash between the collectivism of the Left and the individualism of the Thatcherite Right which characterised the divisive politics of the 1980s has since switched polarity. In the post-Brexit-vote society we now inhabit (and as confirmed by the result of the 2019 General Election), it is the Left which now seems aligned with individualism, in the apparent form of ‘identity politics’ and the Right which seems to be seeking the return to a more traditional collectivism (albeit without strong trade unions).

On the other hand, in discussing the mass observer he calls ‘Stella’ (but we called ‘Beryl Saunders’), Hinton points out an apparent paradox of ‘a thoroughly engaged citizen for whom politics was largely a matter of indifference’ (76). While Beryl’s embrace of the emotional and sexual revolution, anti-psychiatry and ‘New Age’ alternative therapies suggests a rejection of traditional, collective values, Hinton suggests that the consequences were ‘neither individualistic or normalizing’:

The alternative therapies with which she experimented were geared not to adjusting the individual to predetermined social roles, but to freeing them from the tyranny of norms so that ‘any problem can be looked at honestly out in the open’. Freedom from norms was not, however, a recipe for anti-social individualism. [. . .] The ethos was co-operative, not individualistic, and Stella [Beryl] saw herself as participating in a human growth movement, in its own way a politics of social transformation […]. (76-7)

The deeper message here is that, in the logic that consciously informs Hinton’s approach, by studying individual lives in detail we gain an insight into the complex, interwoven historical strands that make up our present. Arguably, it is the apparent contradictions within lives that reveals the deficiencies of the received historical cultural frameworks which we assume to be operating. Dick’s deep unhappiness with the liberalising changes of the 1960s did not draw him to the politics of Thatcher, even though she campaigned for a return to traditional values, because he identified her project of privatisation as equally part of the assault on collective social values in the name of individualism. Beryl’s marked preference for alternative psychology, group therapy and sexual and emotional liberation over politics might suggest an extreme form of individualism but actually seems to have been more in line with a form of collective social transformation. What links the stories of these two mass observers of almost identical age and other members of the interwar generation is that their stories suggest we need to rethink, or at least elaborate, the paradigms and interpretive frameworks by which we try and understand contemporary history. From this perspective, the defining characteristic of this generation is not so much a rejection of contemporary mores in Britain in favour of the attitudinal values of their youth, as a sense that contemporary Britain has either failed or not yet succeeded in changing the world of their youth into the transformed future that they sought to achieve throughout their lives by the activities they engaged in.

References

Hinton, James (2016). Seven Lives from Mass Observation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hubble, Nick and Philip Tew (2013). Ageing, Narrative and Identity: New Qualitative Social Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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

Laslett, Peter (1996) [1989]. A Fresh Map of Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Langhamer, Claire (2013). The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Karpf, Anne (2014). How to Age. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Timmins, Nicholas (1996). The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State. Hammersmith: Fontana.

This is the second instalment of a short series on ageing (the first is here). As I noted when introducing this series, this research was carried out in collaboration with colleagues at Brunel, Demos, Mass Observation (MO) and the University of the Third Age (U3A) as part of the New Dynamics of Ageing programme. Our project was called ‘Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing’, but I mainly worked on responses to the MO directives on ‘Growing Older’ (Winter 1992), ‘Age’ (Autumn 2006) and ‘Books and You’ (Winter 2009). Overall findings were published in a 200-word report with Demos, Coming of Age (2011), which is available for free download here. An article by myself and Philip Tew, ‘“There is no doubt that I’m OLD”: Everyday Narratives of Ageing’, gives a useful overview of some of the main themes of the research. Data from the reading groups conducted in collaboration with the U3A is archived online and available for secondary analysis. The particular analysis below, which focuses on MO responses, was discussed in more detail in our book Ageing, Narrative and Identity: New Qualitative Social Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

While, as Pat Thane (2000) notes, in writing about the responses to the 1992 MO directive on ‘Growing Older’, ‘Mass Observers [are] not representative of the British population in any strict sense’ (464); it is also the case, as she goes on to add, that:

They can be said come from backgrounds comparable with those of a very high proportion of the British population at the end of the twentieth century. Mass Observation provides an unusual opportunity to read the opinions, expressed at length, in their own words, of people whose views are rarely made public. (464)

So, therefore, while these views are not those of a statistical sample, they do represent the in-depth opinion, not otherwise available, of ordinary people, who are simultaneously extraordinary in the sense, discussed in the previous post, that they are at all times reflecting on their ordinariness as well as simply reporting on their doings and attitudes. The 1992 directive asked these respondents to explain the categories of ‘young’, ‘middle-aged’, ‘elderly’ and ‘old’. The age ranges given fell broadly into this pattern:

Young: 18-35/40

Middle-Aged: 40/45/55 – 50/55/60/65

Elderly: 60/65-75

Old: 75+.

[some people left gaps on either side of middle-aged hence the variations; and a few people had ‘old’ and ‘elderly’ reversed so that the latter category represented the oldest].

Clearly, what most people (who answered this part of the directive) did was divide up life into the categories provided by the question. Interesting questions thrown up by this exercise included: (a) which people did not answer this part of the directive; (b) how people described themselves in relation to these categories; and (c) how people actually described the characteristics of the categories.

While, over half of the men confidently provided age ranges in the above manner; less than a quarter of the women were prepared to do so. Some explicitly refused; but the more common reason supplied took the form of variations on the response: ‘it is what you feel like inside that counts.’ Comments from women who did not classify what they understood by the different categories included:

B1261: I am now 76 years of age and would class my body as elderly but my mind as young middle aged

B1429: I am 67 years old and I don’t feel old.

B1521: I don’t care to be an old person. People in newspaper reports are stated to be elderly at 60. At 63 myself, I don’t consider myself elderly.

However, both women and men who did classify the categories were prone to then situate themselves outside the parameters of their own classification, as did these women:

B2258, 55, (Y<40; MA<65; E<75; O>75): I would on that general perspective, see myself as middle-aged now – but I don’t feel that way.

B2645, 78, (Y<40; MA 45-65: E <75; O>75): But although I am aged 78 I do not think of myself as old but elderly.

And these men:

B1989, 65, (Y<30; MA 40-59; O<70; E>75): I would place myself in the category of old though I do not feel particularly old.

D1419, 69, (Y<25; MA 40s; E 60s; O>70): At one time I would have considered this old (perhaps very old) but now that I have reached this age. I am inclined to think that people attain old age in their late seventies or early eighties. I am even reluctant to describe myself as elderly.

There are many other examples making similar points. Clearly, as in the last example quoted, perspectives change as individuals change with age but it is also the case that perspectives change with the social values of the age. It is notable that the men and women who categorised age ranges are frequently those with specific career paths (training, appointment, consolidation, promotions, sometimes redundancy, and retirement) and sometimes, in the cases of men, the application of an age-range category carries a value judgment, for example: ‘Many men in my experience are ‘middle-aged’ from 30, lacking confidence and initiative’ (B1442, 69).

It is possible to consider that these age-range categories represent a particular perspective of ageing rooted in the social values of the post-war era of full employment and the Welfare State. Before the War, these categories did not exist for the mass of people: they were young and then grown up – maturity set in at 40 and life remained much the same from then on until perhaps 70 if one was lucky (several mass-observers remember their grandparents living on the pre-war ‘ten bob’ pension and not being treated especially differently to anyone else). A 1939 MO directive investigating the relationship of social attitudes to age, simply investigates the differences between those under and over the age of 40. However, the 1945 political settlement changed the social perception of ageing to produce the categories assumed by the 1992 directive but which in fact, as the responses show, are beginning to crumble at that point. Indeed, this transition in social attitudes is an integral part of the process of which Professor Linda Partridge, the head of the working group behind the Academy of Medical Science’s 2009 report Rejuvenating Ageing Research report, was quoted in the edition of the Observer published on 27 September 2009 as saying that ‘today’s 60 year-olds have the lifestyles that 40 year-olds had a century ago’.

It is noticeable that when these questions on age categories were repeated in the 2006 directive, the term ‘elderly’ was dropped. As noted above, there was some confusion as to where ‘elderly’ fits into the spectrum of ageing and, significantly, it was clearly the most unpopular term despite being ostensibly not the oldest category. One point that was (negatively) commented on by several respondents, including a journalist, was the tendency of the media to label anyone over 50 as elderly. The more fundamental problems of the term were analysed by this man:

When I was very much younger [ … ] the word elderly, which my dictionary defines as “somewhat old: bordering on old age” was hardly used or thought of but it was politely used of people who were assumed to be old. For example to refer to an ‘elderly aunt’ was rather more correct than ‘old aunt’

   Now that I am 68 myself the markers seem to have shifted a bit [ … ] The term ‘elderly’ is now very current everywhere, particularly in describing social conditions or making special provisions, and I would define it as old and disabled, partially disabled or with capacities in obvious decline though not to the degree of senility. I do not mind being referred to as being old, but I do not consider myself elderly. (W2117, 68)

What is primarily being objected to here is external categorisation itself. It is notable that the respondent refers to the use of the term ‘elderly’ in conjunction with descriptions of social conditions and special provisions: rather as with the usage of terms like juveniles or, even, youth, there is a silent ‘problem’ implied. People do not mind being old in the same way they do not mind being young: what they do mind is being labelled. A similar point was made by Bill Bytheway (2005) in his research on age-identities, which drew on a different set of MO directives concerning the celebration of birthdays. Discussing the third age idea that dates of birth and ages should simply not be recorded for official purposes to prevent ageism, he reached a different conclusion from his study of material in the MO Archive: ‘people do not find chronological age problematic – whenever it appears appropriate, they are willing to reveal it – but many consider the implied age-identity inappropriate and unwelcome’ (475-6).

By 2006, it was also strikingly clear that the numbers prepared to categorise the age ranges were less than in 1992. The trends already discernible in 1992 had accelerated so that virtually no one, for example, considered being in the 60s as old (or elderly or any other such term):

I would class 60-75 yrs as being middle-aged! (B1215, female, 53)

   Of course, I’m ‘middle-aged’ now and I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said so, but I wonder when I’d have objected to being called this? From where I am (at 60) ‘old’ starts around 80 years of age. (B3886, male, 60)

   A long time ago I think I would probably have thought of middle aged as 50-60ish, but now I’m 60 – I even felt a bit funny writing it at the top of the page – middle age will probably be me going on to 70. (A1706, female, 60)

   At 70 I still like to think that I am on the end of the category of Middle-Aged (B1771, female, 70)

   I am 71 now, feel fine, and can do everything I could do at 30 – but sometimes a bit slower! In many young peoples’ minds, I will be well and truly over the hill, ancient, but when one gets to this age in pretty good health, it really does not feel old. (B3323, male, 71).

   I feel middle-aged (B89, female, 75)

Another related change from 1992, is that whereas people then caught themselves using the dominant categorisations, which they eschewed for themselves, for others; in 2006, the old categorisations were simply in the process of being abandoned as, for example, in the case of A1706 (who is also quoted above):

I think I sometimes describe people not by age-bands. I might call someone ‘a bit Mick Jaggerish’ meaning he’s a hip young-minded middle aged person or ‘she’s a bit Shelley Winters’ meaning the weighty gin drinking friendly sort of middle aged person.

Of course, there were also people in their 70s who did talk about themselves as being old, but here it seemed to be functioning as a self description (something along the lines of ‘I’ve earned the right to call myself old now’) and not as an external categorisation of their limitations:

   I am well and truly ‘old’ […] I suppose that from the age of 72, I was beginning to feel old, but I am happy to say that I am still active! I cycle nearly every day and go for walking holidays – preferably in the mountains and last year was able to do a ten hour day in the hills. Perhaps, therefore, one is as old as one feels. (B1509, male, 77)

 Much of the debate around usage of MO material – for a summary see Pollen (2013) – misses the point that it is typically used to provide case studies rather than for representative quantitative research on public opinion. That is to say that MO material particularly supports types of inference based on analytical induction:

This is the inference that the theoretical relationship among conceptually defined elements in the sample will also apply to the parent population. The basis of an inference of this sort is the cogency of the theoretical argument linking the elements in an intelligible way rather than the statistical representativeness of the sample. (Mitchell 1984: 239-40)

The following analysis demonstrates how responses to the 1992 and 2006 directives can be used for longitudinal case studies (five of which are provided in Ageing, Narrative and Identity) as a basis for thinking about the process of ageing, related identity formation and the relationship between the third and fourth ages. As the above example from B1509 suggests, MO allows the process of accepting one’s oldness to be traced out for a number of individuals. This is particularly the case where observers were already retired at the time of the 1992 directive, as it becomes possible to see how their attitudes have changed 14 years later. Here, the male observer B1654, responds to the 1992 directive and  reflects on the difficulty of describing his exact age status; admitting that he would be emotionally hurt to be called old:

I am now closer to 62 than 61 and find myself fallen between two stools. I am still quite active and cannot possibly regard myself as being elderly, but on the other hand how can I be middle-aged when I have no expectations of living until I am 124! Perhaps it is appropriate to heed the saying ‘You are only as old as you feel’ rather than go around wearing mental labels admitting defeat to the advance of the years.

   My friend Herbert adopts this attitude of mind. He is 78 and is soon to go into hospital for the first of two hip replacements. He is presently almost housebound, although unfailingly cheerful, and he told me recently that he hated old people. ‘They’re always moaning and groaning about something,’ he said.

   [ … ]

   No one has yet called me ‘elderly’ or ‘old’, but should this happen I believe I would feel a little sad. No one wants to be reminded that the passing of time is beginning to show …. that there are fewer years left to live than those already lived.

This man clearly wants to continue to live his life in the active manner to which he is accustomed and expresses a certain level of anxiety about being able to do so. This desire corresponds to the ideas behind the contemporary notion of ‘active’ or ‘successful ageing’. For example, Professor Ray Tallis, another member of the working group responsible for Rejuvenating Ageing Research was also quoted in the Observer of 27 September 2009:

We want people to live long healthy lives and then when they go, to slip away quickly. After all, that is how most people want to live and die and, of course, it is also attractive economically. The less time we spend in hospital the happier we are and the less we cost the state.

This might seem unobjectionable at first glance and yet if we return to our 61 year-old man in 2006, we find him still writing about aging but, now at the age of 75, with a different attitude:

I recently read an American author who claimed, rather cynically, I thought, that the best thing about old age was that it didn’t last long! This inferred that once you reached one or the other of the later milestones it would be preferable to die rather than continue to live as a slow and crooked shadow of your former self. I cannot agree – not yet, that is. At 75 years of age I have a disabling lung disease that cannot be cured. I fight for breath after the slightest exertion and there are times when I need the help of doctors and nurses, but I still enjoy my life and every day is precious – books to read, films to see, letters to write, grandchildren to spoil, driving to the shops, a good wife with whom to share so many simple pleasures. Unlike the American writer I would rather see my old age as an extended period of reward in which I am given the time to do all those things that had to be set aside in the rush and race of a younger life. Long may it last. 

[ … ]  

And now I am old. I have lost most of my hair and I have an elderly man’s ‘pot’ that requires me to wear braces rather than a belt to keep my trousers comfortably in place. I like to dress smartly and would never dream of not showering and shaving in the mornings, as I have done all my life. I read a quality newspaper and watch television news to keep me abreast of world events. I do have a habit of dropping off in my chair for forty winks in the afternoon while reading – and then find I can’t sleep much past 4.30 in the mornings! Infuriating. I enjoy my food and enjoy going on shopping expeditions with my wife. I like a tot or two of whisky after 8.30 in the evenings and I am generally in my bedroom reading by 9.30pm. I drive a 1.3 car that is now ten years old and generally speaking I am utterly content with my lot because I have long accepted that fact that I have everything that old age can hope for. Peace, quiet, comfort, to name but three essentials … the best thing about old age is that it brings wisdom – the ability to look back and learn from one’s own life.

 What is particularly interesting about this man’s two statements on ageing, made 14 years apart, is the way that the second one exhibits a dual consciousness that is not present in the first one. At age 75, he is able to accept a separation between, on the one hand, his consciousness of enjoying material pleasures and of having enjoyed his life, and, on the other hand, the pleasures themselves and the life itself. Whereas, at 61, a much more existentialist angst is discernible in him that he remain identifiable primarily as his state of being in the world at that moment. The qualitative difference between these two identities, which are nonetheless both in the retired age range, suggests the possibility of a much more sophisticated way of understanding ageing than that offered in the quote by Tallis above. Eventual frailty – for example, suffering from a lung disease as the man above – is compatible with the capacity for peaceful reflection on the pleasures of life. The lifespan should not be measured as one continuous adult stage and then a quick death because that is a philosophy based on a denial of death. If we really want to understand human life in all its stages then we shouldn’t pathologise age-related infirmities and ‘underlying conditions’. Society would be transformed by refusing to define old age in numerical terms or by reference to employment status. Instead, the term should be self-defined and indicate an awareness of having entered a reflective stage of life which will eventually end in death but might none the less last for years. Only in this manner we will move beyond the implicit designation of ageing as a social problem.

References

Bazalgette, Louise, John Holden, Philip Tew, Nick Hubble and Jago Morrison (2011) Coming of Age. London: Demos.

Bytheway, Bill (2005) ‘Age-identities and the Celebration of Birthdays’, Ageing & Society, 25, 463-477.

Hubble, Nick and Philip Tew (2013). Ageing, Narrative and Identity: New Qualitative Social Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mitchell, J (1984). ‘Typicality and the Case Study’. In R.F. Ellen (ed.). Ethnographic Research: A Guide to Conduct. New York: Academic Press, 238-241.

Pollen, Annebella (2013). ‘Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present: “Scientifically, about as valuable as a chimpanzee’s tea party at the zoo”?’ History Workshop Journal. 75 [advance access] (January 2013): 1-23.

Thane, Pat (2000). Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

As the first instalment of a short series on ageing, this is a revised and updated version of a paper that was presented under the original title of ‘Why I Collaborated with the Mass Observation Project’ on 16 April 2013 to ‘Mass Observing Today: Opportunities for New Research’ at the Charity Centre, Directory of Social Change, London.

I researched aspects of the 1937-49 incarnation of Mass Observation (MO) for both my MA dissertation, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Mass Observation’ (1996), and my DPhil thesis, ‘George Orwell and Mass-Observation: Mapping the Politics of Everyday Life in England 1937-1941’ (2002). This research contributed to my 2006 book, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Palgrave Macmillan), which was republished as an extended paperback edition in 2010. Therefore, when I became interested with some colleagues at Brunel – Philip Tew and Jago Morrison – in researching ageing – leading to ‘Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing’ (FCMAP) – I already knew a lot about MO and in particular its qualitative approach to investigating not just public opinion but also the actual processes of attitude formation.

MO was founded in 1937 by Tom Harrisson , Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge and ran in its first phase until 1949 – for an overview see Caleb Crain’s New Yorker article, ‘Surveillance Society: The Mass-Observation Movement and the Meaning of Everyday Life’ (2006). Their projects included a study of the industrial working class in Bolton (‘Worktown’) and the establishment of a National Panel of volunteers, who answered monthly questionnaires about various aspects of their everyday lives and were, from the outbreak of the War, asked to keep day-to-day personal diaries; the most famous of these was that of Nella Last (1981), memorably portrayed by Victoria Wood in the 2006 TV drama Housewife 49. MO was unique in terms of its participative research techniques, capacity to simultaneously reveal and interrogate narratives of everyday life modes of data collection and pioneering analysis of public opinion (see Hubble 2010). In 1939, Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge wrote in their Penguin Special, Britain by Mass-Observation (1939):

Opinion is made in two ways. It is made by each single person looking at the facts, as far as they are available, and then framing his own judgment on them. It is also made by the reaction of each single person to the opinions of other people. Few are so confident of their own judgment (whatever they may say) as to be uninfluenced by knowing what other people are thinking. It is here that the newspapers play an important role. For the newspapers not only state their version of the facts—they also state their version of the public opinion of the moment (32).

In this context, the personal view may be elusive, as Tom Harrisson details in ‘What is Public Opinion,’ objecting to ‘crude stratification’ (368) and reminding us that genuine public opinion represents huge numbers of people:

each one with a private opinion, with private prides and prejudices, personal antagonisms and loyalties. This is the stuff of Britain, tough, solid, stolid stuff—the rhythm essentially slow. When we talk about public opinion, we should mean the top level in this great conglomeration of private opinions. There is not, anywhere, a separate entity called public opinion. Public opinion only comes from the minds and the tongues of the people. But there is an important distinction between the two areas of existence—the area of the minds and the area of the tongues. In the mind is the private thought; and on the tongue, the public statement. Logically, a person’s ‘real opinion’ is the opinion he holds privately. He will not necessarily voice publicly, as public opinion, certain parts of his private opinion, which is a complex of feelings, often conflicting. (369)

Harrisson adds ‘Public opinion is only a part of private opinion and only that part which, so to speak, dare show itself at any moment’ (373). Diaries of course have the potential (as implicitly suggested by Harrisson) to unlock something of the very privately held opinions that other methods of engagement tend not to access and MO’s central method might be seen as encouraging members of the public to keep a variety of diaries ranging from the day diaries they collected for the twelfth day of each month during 1937 to the vast diaries kept by observers, including Nella Last and the novelist Naomi Mitchison, during the Second World War. In Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (2010), James Hinton notes the unique specificity of these diaries: ‘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). Therefore, he argues that they ‘take us as close as a historian can hope to get to observe selfhood under construction’ (7). And clearly a sufficient number of such diaries taken together can also offer some view of the manner in which social opinions either emerge or are responded to, as well as providing, through analysis, an informal cartography of aspects of collective group identities. Crucially, Hinton refuses to give ground to those critics who question MO on grounds of how representative it is, by stating explicitly that the biographical examples he discusses open a window on to the personal opinion and everyday life of postwar Britain and are definitely ‘not “case studies” narrowly designed to sustain a particular theory or test a particular hypothesis’ (20). This was also how the original mass observers understood their project; their analysis involved sifting and accounting for the influence of imposed cultural views upon personal perspectives thereby allowing them to reveal private opinion at odds with publicly-accepted norms as, for example, in their prediction of the 1945 Labour election victory eighteen months in advance (Harrisson 1944). Moreover, in today’s ‘politically correct’ age, when people may be even more wary of candid public utterances, diaries retain this potential to unlock private views and reveal their interaction with wider social and cultural narratives.

However, my interest in MO was not just related to its historical significance. Since 1981, a contemporary MO Project (MOP) has been run from the MO Archive (MOA) at the University of Sussex. This is one of the longest-running longitudinal life-writing projects anywhere in the world. Three times a year, MO participants receive a seasonal “directive,” which is a set of open questions that invite them to write freely and discursively about their views and experiences. Anne Jamieson and Christina Victor’s edited collection Researching Ageing and Later Life: The Practice of Social Gerontology (2002), includes an article on the MOP by Dorothy Sheridan, which enumerates the particular attributes that make it particular suitable for ageing research. First, the majority of respondents [at that time and still broadly the case in 2013] are not only over 50 but also well-distributed across the older age ranges. Second, the longitudinal nature of the MOP means that, for example, at the turn of the millennium they had 18 respondents in the over-80 age range who had been writing for over 15 years, providing a vast wealth of material. The same holds true across all the age ranges, as Sheridan observes:

The project itself is a record of the ageing process over 20 years, whether someone goes from 32 to 52, or from 62 to 82, and if again is taken to means the process of growing older at any point in one’s life, then we have access here to a huge amount of information about the life span (75).

Third, the particular quality of MO, as opposed to other forms of life writing such as memoirs and autobiographies, is that it does not provide one single monolithic account of a life. Rather, reading across the directive replies of an individual over the years reveals layered life stories made up of description and re-description, which ‘enable us to have access to the contradictions of everyday life, and to the changes of people’s perceptions of themselves and the world they inhabit’ (75). MO material has been used successfully in ageing research ranging from Pat Thane’s Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (2000) to Bill Bytheway’s work on ageing and birthdays (2005, 2009, 2011).

For these two reasons, that is its capacity to reveal private opinion and its pedigree in ageing research, FCMAP made MO diary-keeping techniques central to the two major studies it set up, following Chris Phillipson’s (2007: vii) proposals for a critical gerontology, both to give voice directly to older subjects and to include them centrally in the research process: one involving the present-day MO and the other ninety volunteers from the older age ranges organised into reading and discussion groups. For the first of these, an MO directive (‘Books and You’) was commissioned by the FCMAP team, and issued in Winter 2009, concerning participants’ responses to representations of ageing in political and media discourse. The directive was send to the panel of around 600 people and 193 written responses were returned. In conjunction with earlier directives concerning ageing in Winter 1992 (‘Growing Older’), whose responses are featured in Thane (2000), and Autumn 2006 (‘Age’), it was possible to collate high-quality longitudinal qualitative data regarding how ageing is understood in society, how this differs between generations and how social expectations regarding ageing relate to self-understanding.

MO – ‘the most studied, and arguably the most important, social research institution of the mid-twentieth century’ (Savage 2010: 57) – gave us the primary data and the methodology for a reliable mode of investigation capable of capturing something of the multiplicity of intersecting narratives that constitute everyday life. While MO was founded in 1937, its underlying ideas first began to take shape the year before, in a list by Charles Madge written under the perhaps surprising title of ‘Popular Poetry’ (see Hubble 2010: 77). The ideas here, including ‘Coincidence clubs’ and ‘exercises for imagination’, were discussed with Jennings and other members of a group that met at Madge’s home in Blackheath and eventually realised in MO’s idea of the image, which evolved from Ezra Pound’s concept of ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’ (cited in Jones 2001: 39); mass observers were famously asked to record the dominant image of the day.

The importance of this technique cannot be underestimated because it represents an alternative mean of recording knowledge other than straightforward discourse. Importantly it draws upon the material form of poetry, which is woven together from images and so embodies paradox and ambiguity as famously recorded by the critic and poet William Empson, a participant in early MO, in his influential volume, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). The culminating idea of Empson’s book is the un-resolvability of the seventh type of ambiguity, which creates not a contradiction but the possibility of simultaneously satisfying impulses that otherwise appear to conflict at a societal level. For example, he discusses Richard Crashaw’s ‘Hymn to Saint Teresa’ in which the saint is praised for chastity with subtle metaphors alluding to the sexual act (see Hubble 2009: 178-9). As we will see, the metaphoric possibilities of such language are suggestive of multiple and complex narratives and meanings. Therefore, for Empson, poetry becomes a tool for revealing the ‘stereoscopic contradictions that imply a dimension’ (193) thus permitting people to see things in more than one way and opening up the possibility for social change. More recently, Slavoj Žižek has theorised such a mode of apprehension as ‘the parallax view’ (2006). MO, with its central paradox by which everyone is both observer and observed, represents another related form of stereoscopic observation.

Therefore, MO in practice was not just a collection of positivistic data but a collection of social imagery; ‘overheards’, surreptitious observation and intimate reflections as well as reportage. As Highmore (2002) notes, in sharp contradistinction to the fascist homogenising forces at work elsewhere in Europe in the late 1930s and, we might add,  once again in the second decade of the twenty-first century, MO’s imagistic technique was central to ‘the practice of promoting a “totality of fragments”, of a society “united” by a heterogeneous everyday, a commonality of diversity’ (92). By presenting this social imagery through the means of ‘a complex montage’ (Highmore 2002: 93), in books such as May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937, MO was able to produce work that reflected the textured and contradictory, essentially intersubjective, nature of social reality. Appropriately, Madge reflected on this process in his 1939 poem, ‘Drinking in Bolton’:

Not from imagination I am drawing

This landscape, (Lancs), this plate of tripe and                                                                                       onions,

But, like the Nag’s Head barmaid, I am drawing

(Towards imagination) gills of mild

The industrial drink, in which my dreams and theirs

Find common ground. (108)

Here, the poem nicely foregrounds the fact that it, itself, is a product not of imagination but of material description and yet its purpose is to move towards social imagination, which may be understood as the means by which the contradictions of social existence are transformed into a perspective for considering different possible futures. However, as Madge goes on to imply in the poem, social imagery is not in itself sufficient to effect social transformation; intellectual and emotional complexes in an instant of time are, in the final analysis, merely instants, which do not last in and of themselves:

And in this hour are crowded all men’s lives,

For, as they drink, they drown. So final night

Falls, like a pack of cards, each one of which

Is fate, the film star and the penny pool.

You sit there waiting for the spell to break. (ibid)

This differentiation between the ‘mass’ and the mass media, which threatens to obscure the contradictions of everyday mass social existence underneath an homogenising and totalising set of values, is typical of MO’s approach. As Highmore observes:

[ … ] rather than seeing people as passively led by the mass media, Mass-Observation instead sees a huge gulf between mass media representations and the experience and understanding of the world in everyday life. Mass-Observation continually juxtaposes newspaper by-lines on current events with the heteroglossia of everyday life, where responses vary from antagonism to cynicism, from outrage to bewilderment, from refusals to acquiescence. (2002: 107)

Acutely aware that social solutions are never immediate, MO ‘set in motion an archival practice of the present that tried to attend to the conscious and unconscious aspects of everyday life’ (111). As Pollen (2013) notes, ‘Inconsistency, heterogeneity and even incoherence are part of the world we live in. the mixed and disruptive methods of MO provide a unique means of access to that experience and offer a satisfying challenge to established ways of thinking in contemporary history’ (18). Furthermore, although MO’s imagist and surrealist ideas originated in the wider modernist movement, their understanding of everyday life was not, as Highmore notes, limited to notions of the modern and the metropolis. Savage makes this point more specifically in his analysis of responses to a 1939 MO directive asking observers to discuss where they would situate themselves on the class scale, which concludes:

We can read, then, the accounts of the 1939 Mass-Observers as seeking out an intellectual space, one which did not reproduce existing class divisions, but which creatively sought to use Mass-Observation to distance itself from gentlemanly, artistic, highbrow motifs in favour of a more ‘technical’, scientific intellectual vision, once concerned to free itself from fixed spatial location (2010: 64).

While this specific form of cultural distinction did break down during the Second World War and afterwards into an external conflict described by Kynaston (2007) between the needs of  ‘activators – politicians, planners, public intellectuals, opinion-formers’ and ‘ordinary people’ (22), the heterogeneous approach of MO held these possibilities together through an implicit understanding that

‘ordinariness’ is only ever one aspect of the rhetorical claim to be ‘ordinary’ that necessarily also implies a concurrent ‘extraordinariness’: an ability to stand outside the ‘ordinary’ at the same time as standing within it, which is not just the possibility of reflecting on ‘ordinariness’ but the very act by which ‘ordinariness’ is constituted. Indeed, it might be argued that MO – because of [its combination of the roles of observer and observed], the experience of its wartime diarists, its bridging of the divide between postwar ‘activators’ and ‘ordinary people’ and its role in the transition of social identities – has the best possible claim to talk for the apparently ‘ordinary’ people of contemporary British society because it necessarily recognises them as more than ordinary. [ …] Therefore, it seems more appropriate to describe these mass observers as extra/ordinary people: a term which acknowledges a full stereoscopic vision.  (Hubble 2010: 241)

Therefore, alongside its unique capacity to document the intersubjective nature of everyday social experience, it is this further capacity to bridge the gap between policy makers and other such ‘activators’ and ‘ordinary people’ that makes MO so essential to the study of ageing in general and, in particular, to the consideration of the relevance of a narrative understanding of ageing to public policy that was central to the FCMAP project (see Bazalgette et al 2011; Hubble and Tew 2013).

As will be discussed in more detail in the following posts, this narrative understanding of ageing is even more important to public policy during the Covid-19 crisis in which Government attitudes to older people appear to have reverted to an earlier model of treating them as a vulnerable liability and a social problem to be solved.

References

Bazalgette, Louise, John Holden, Philip Tew, Nick Hubble and Jago Morrison (2011) Coming of Age. London: Demos.

Bytheway, Bill (2005) ‘Age-identities and the Celebration of Birthdays’, Ageing & Society, 25, 463-477.

——– (2009) ‘Writing about Age, Birthdays and the Passage of Time’, Ageing & Society, 29, 883-901.

——– (2011) Unmasking Age: The Significance of Age for Social Research. Bristol: Policy Press.

Empson, William (1961) [1930]. Seven Types of Ambiguity. Harmondsworth: Peregrine.

Harrisson, Tom and Charles Madge (1939). Britain by Mass-Observation. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

——–  (1940). ‘What is Public Opinion.’ Political Quarterly. XI (42): 368 – 83.

——– (1944). ‘Who’ll Win?’ Political Quarterly. XV (1): 21-32.

Highmore, Ben (2002). Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Hinton, James (2010). Nine Wartime Diaries: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hubble, Nick (2009). ‘The Intermodern Assumption of the Future: William Empson, Charles Madge and Mass-Observation.’ In Bluemel, Kristin (ed.).  Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 171-188.

——– (2010). Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory. Rev. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

——– and Philip Tew (2013). Ageing, Narrative and Identity: New Qualitative Social Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jamieson, Anne and Christina Victor (eds.) (2002). Researching Ageing and Later Life: The Practice of Social Gerontology. Milton Keynes: Open UP.

Jennings, Humphrey and Charles Madge (eds.) (1937). May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937. London Faber and Faber.

Jones, Peter (ed.) (2001).  Imagist Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Kynaston, David (2007).  Austerity Britain. London: Bloomsbury.

Last, Nella (1983) [1981]. Nella Last’s War: A Mother’s Diary 1939-45. (Eds)  Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming. London: Sphere.

Madge, Charles (1994) [1939]. ‘Drinking in Bolton.’ In Of Love, Time and Places: Selected Poetry. London: Anvil Press, 108.

Phillipson, Chris (2007). ‘Foreword.’ In Miriam Bernard and Thomas Scharf (eds.). Critical Perspectives on Ageing Societies. Bristol: Policy Press, vii-viii.

Pollen, Annebella (2013). ‘Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present: “Scientifically, about as valuable as a chimpanzee’s tea party at the zoo”?’ History Workshop Journal. 75 [advance access] (January 2013): 1-23.

Savage, Mike (2010). Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sheridan, Dorothy (2002). ‘Using the Mass-Observation Archive.’ In Anne Jamieson and Christina R. Victor (eds.). Researching Ageing and Later Life: The Practice of Social Gerontology. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 66-79.

Thane, Pat (2000). Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Žižek, Slavoj (2006). The Parallax View. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press.