How Little We Know of Our Neighbors

Possible subjects of inquiry:

This eclectic list of largely physical, quotidian behavior was composed by two young Cambridge dropouts, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, to announce the establishment of Mass-Observation, an unusual social science project from the 1930s, whose hope was to introduce the British population to itself. Madge and Harrison rejected the press’s characterization of public opinion and suggested that the true nature of Britain’s “ultra-repressed” society was to be deciphered in images and objects of everyday life; sublimated meaning was to be discovered and decoded in the street.

The movement formed in the wake of Edward VIII’s decision to abdicate the British throne in 1936 for the love of American divorcée Wallis Simpson. The abdication created an uproar in England that is difficult to appreciate today—a constitutional crisis that called into question England’s identity as a participatory parliamentary democracy. A public exchange of letters regarding the abdication in January 1937 brought a small group together, who declared that the press and the Establishment were out of touch with the public and had no idea what people really thought about the abdication or, for that matter, anything else. They proposed to bridge the gap by conducting what they termed “an anthropology of ourselves.” In describing the Mass-Observation Movement, they wrote:

The movement’s diversity and often contradictory goals were present from the beginning and reflected in its founding members. Madge was a surrealist poet and journalist; Harrisson, an ornithologist and self-styled anthropologist, had recently returned from a three-year stay on the New Hebrides island, Malekula, where he had lived among the headhunters and written the book Savage Civilization. Their mission was to collect data and to refrain from judgment and analysis with the idea that information could be pure. In this mode, Harrisson stated that the ideal instrument for observation was an earplug. He advised, “See what people are doing. Afterwards, ask them what they think they are doing, if you like.”^[3]

Looking back in the 1970s, Harrisson wrote:

Through newspapers all over England, they recruited volunteers to record and report on the true nature of daily life. They conducted polls, distributed questionnaires, and enlisted “official” observers to take detailed notes of people’s behavior in public places. Observers were sent out into the street, the pub, and under the pier. Armed with stopwatches, they entered the cinema and timed the length of the audience’s laughter. They spied on young couples kissing by the sea. They counted the number of pints consumed in an evening at the pub and the amount of time it took to drink them.

Harrisson set up headquarters in Bolton, a Lancashire mill town, where he supervised a three-year survey of daily life called the Worktown Study. The study produced voluminous materials on the leisure and work habits of Boltonians and included a related study in Blackpool, the seaside town where the citizens of Bolton took their holidays. Here the aim was to investigate the difference in people’s behavior during the one week in the year away from their usual routines. Their sexual habits were of particular interest:

Despite claiming that they were not interested in invading private lives, Mass-Observation was periodically criticized by the press. Humphrey Spender, Mass-Observation’s official photographer, said: “There was an uncomfortable element of spying in all this and the press was often hostile. We were called spies, pryers, mass-eavesdroppers, nosey parkers, peeping-toms, lopers, snoopers, envelope-steamers, keyhole artists, sex maniacs, sissies, society playboys.” In one extreme example, an observer proves himself nothing less than a Peeping Tom:

While Harrisson carried on in Bolton and Blackpool, Madge was living in Blackheath, London where he organized the Day Surveys project. These were monthly diaries solicited from the public. Participants, also called Observers, were asked to send in a detailed description of a day’s activities on the 12th of each month. They were also asked to answer a “directive” regarding any number of subjects, from how well people knew their neighbors to what they found embarrassing to what they thought about the rat problem in London. These diaries and directives more closely fulfilled the idea of an “anthropology of ourselves.”

A woman in Kent describes her 12 July 1937:

The outbreak of World War II gave Mass-Observation a focus that it had not previously had. Surveys and questionnaires took up such issues as the public’s reactions to be being bombed, air raids, anti-Semitism, rations, reconstruction, and victory parades.

Many of the diarists faithfully continued to write throughout the war. One diary in particular, written by a woman named Nella Last, is a unique and remarkable memoir. She was a housewife living in Barrow-in-Furness, a shipbuilding town that became a target of German bombing during the Blitz. Last began writing in September of 1939 and continued for nearly 30 years. The diary records her opinions about the events of the war and provides vivid accounts of what life was like in England during the Blitz. She also writes frankly about her feelings about her family and her frustration at the societal limitations she faced as a woman.

Harrisson, who was always looking for sponsorship for Mass-Observation, struck a deal with the Ministry of Information for Mass-Observation to gather and report on data regarding wartime morale and the effectiveness of wartime propaganda. Although the cooperation between Mass-Observation and the government lasted only a short time, the eventual revelation of the arrangement created a sense of betrayal among many of its participants. An undergraduate at Cambridge wrote:

Madge was also unhappy at Harrisson’s willingness to cooperate with the government. Their relationship had never been easy, and in 1940, Madge left Mass-Observation to work for the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. In 1941, Harrisson joined the army and was sent to Borneo. Still, a small dedicated staff kept Mass-Observation running. The end of the war was the undoing of the project. Harrisson returned briefly to Britain in 1946, but soon left to become the director of the Sarawak Museum in northern Borneo. Mass-Observation’s fate in 1949 was to become Mass-Observation Ltd., a market research firm. The irony of this evolution must, however, be qualified. Although Mass-Observation had started as an anti-establishment organization, from early on it had provided information about the public’s consumption habits to private industry.^[10] The concerns of Mass-Observation’s pre-war studies lose some of their silliness when regarded in this light. Surveys of people’s feelings about margarine and how many men are wearing caps in the pub echo contemporary market research.

Although the market research firm continued work for several decades, Mass-Observation as an anthropological research project terminated in the early 1950s, and in 1970 its archive was acquired by the University of Sussex. Since 1981, the Mass-Observation Archive at the university has resumed the diary and directives projects. The internet has been instrumental in recruiting participants. Recent directives ask observers to comment on:

Daily use of numbers
Feelings about higher education
War in Iraq
Opinions about the BBC
Attitudes toward Americans
Sending emails to the wrong person
What counts as a love letter