Seven lives from mass observation : mass observing post-1960s Britain

190 Pages·2016·0.88 MB·English

by  James, Hinton

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi
SEVEN LIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi
SEVEN LIVES
FROM MASS
OBSERVATION
BRITAIN IN THE LATE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
JAMES HINTON
1
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3
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© James Hinton 2016
Material from Mass Observation
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First Edition published in 2016
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi
Preface
What was it like to live in Britain during the second half of the
twentieth century? Historical memory is always in a state of fux, never
more so than when dealing with the recent past. Younger readers of
this book will have impressions formed by their elders, by media rep-
resentations, by the histories now being written. Older readers, like its
author, will combine such infuences with answers drawn from their
own experience: in my own case that of a septuagenarian left-wing
academic and one-time political activist from a secure middle-class
background. But very few people can speak with the authority of the
hundreds of volunteer writers whose contemporary testimony is pre-
served in the Mass Observation archive at the University of Sussex.
Throughout the fnal two decades of the century, Mass Observation’s
correspondents regularly responded to open-ended questionnaires
touching on every aspect of their everyday lives, thoughts, and feelings,
both as they experienced them at the time and as they remembered
them from earlier decades. This book uses the contributions of seven
of these people as a basis for biographical essays designed to explore
the social and cultural history of late-twentieth-century Britain.
Around 2600 individuals have at one time or another sent in
responses to Mass Observation’s thrice-yearly directives since 1981.
Half of them quickly dropped out, but around 1100 people remained
for between two and ten years, 250 for up to twenty years, and a similar
number for more than twenty years, a select few writing for the whole
period from 1981 to the present.1 I began by sampling a handful of
responses from a hundred or so of the most prolifc correspondents,
gradually narrowing down my selection according to the vividness and
1. These rough totals are derived from calculations based on information in the online
catalogue (<http://www.thekeep.info/collections/mass-observation-archive/>). Nearly
3500 are listed there, but 900 of them failed to respond to any directives after registering
with MO.
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vi preface
intimacy of the writing, the respondents’ engagement with activities
beyond the worlds of paid employment and domesticity, and the need
to select individuals, both women and men, from as widely as possible
across the social spectrum.
Historians usually write about dead people, and about periods of
time in which they were not themselves active players. In sampling the
Mass Observation writing, I was looking for lives diferent from my
own, lives from which I could get a sense of how my times looked and
felt to people with a very diferent experience of them. The seven
people I eventually selected were all—for reasons to be explained
later—born before the Second World War:
Caroline (b. 1922). Wife of a small businessman. West London
Janet (b. 1933). Schoolteacher. South London
Stella (b. 1931). Social worker. Surrey and Yorkshire
Helen (b. 1921). Wife of an RAF pilot. Hertfordshire and South Wales
Len (b. 1930). Mechanic and manager. North London and Sussex
Bob (b. 1934). Lorry driver. North London and Essex
Sam (b. 1933). Banker. South-east England
Clearly this is not a representative sample, and no selection from the
rather special people who volunteered to write for Mass Observation
possibly could be. Nevertheless, despite echoing the disproportionately
southern and middle-class composition of the MO respondents as a
whole, these seven people cover a wide range of occupations and social
situations. And, although all seven were white, people of colour played
a signifcant role in the lives of several of them. By following their life
stories there is much to be learned about the history of Britain in the
late twentieth century.
Biography has traditionally been reserved for the great men (and
occasional women) who are of interest because they had the power, it
was believed, to ‘make history’. But, as social historians have long
argued, this power has never been reserved for emperors, generals, or
intellectuals. Where the sources allow us to recover the biographies of
‘ordinary’, conventionally ‘powerless’ people, we get to glimpse the
processes by which history is made from below by a multitude of
i ndividual, personal decisions: to leave school or stay on, to live
together, marry or divorce, to have children or not, to rent or buy a
place to live, to save or to spend. The choices made by individuals
about such things, and about work, lifestyle, political loyalties, or reli-
gious beliefs, are always constrained by existing economic, social, and
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preface vii
cultural structures, but they are never entirely determined by them.
Individuals pick and choose from the resources available to them, and
the structures themselves shift under the impact of the choices each of
us make about how to live our lives. Politicians think they change the
world, and we are all too ready to buy into their delusions of grandeur
because they provide a useful shorthand for understanding the times we
live through. If anyone changed Britain in the last seventy-fve years—
so popular historical memory would have us believe—it was Mrs
Thatcher. In reality, however, the sources and processes of social change
move at a slower and deeper pace than anything determined by the
frenzies of political life or the rise and fall of career politicians. The mass
observers, carefully compiling records of their own lives and choices,
provide us with one way of observing these deeper processes at work.
Mass observers are guaranteed anonymity, and this has been
respected—except in the case of Bob, the lorry driver, who declared
that he had never done anything he would mind appearing on the
front page of the Daily Mirror. Circumstantial detail will, unavoidably,
make these individuals identifable to those who know them person-
ally, and I have interviewed those who are still alive (or in the case of
the banker, his widow) and taken account of their responses to draft
versions of the essays. The identity of Caroline, the small businessman’s
wife, who stopped writing for the archive twenty years ago and died
ten years ago, has been more thoroughly disguised. In order to preserve
anonymity I have not revealed the codes by which these people are
identifed in the archive. Bone fde researchers, however, can apply to
the archivist for these codes.
My greatest debt is to the mass observers themselves. They wrote
because they wanted to contribute to the way that the history of their
times would be written, and I hope that they will see this book as
some small justifcation for their commitment to Mass Observation. I
am particularly grateful to the widow of Sam, the banker, for allowing
me access to his diaries, and for the generosity of her response to my
draft chapter on her husband. Without Dorothy Sheridan’s dedication
and skill over many years the Mass Observation Project itself would
probably not have survived. She has been closely involved throughout
the research and writing of this book, and she accompanied me with a
watching brief on behalf of the MO Trustees when I interviewed the
contributors. I am grateful to Fiona Courage and Jessica Scantlebury,
current guardians of the archive, for their help and support; and I thank
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viii preface
the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive for permission to quote
material of which they hold the copyright. Dorothy Sheridan, Penny
Summerfeld, and OUP’s two readers have given me invaluable advice
on the text. And I have learned a great deal in discussing the project
with colleagues, friends, and, above all, my closest friend and partner,
Yvette Rocheron.
James Hinton
Les Trémoulèdes
December 2015
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Contents
1. Mass Observation 1
2. Histories 9
3. Housewife 25
4. Teacher 41
5. Social Worker 59
6. RAF Wife 81
7. Mechanic 93
8. Lorry Driver 109
9. Banker 133
1 0. Conclusion 161
Notes 167
Bibliography 193
Index 203