Mass Observation Online

Mass Observation Online

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2010

Update II (2011):

The latest update to Mass Observation Online will see a further 200,000 pages added to the resource, bringing the total to around half a million pages of unique material for the study of Britain, 1937-1955. All material for this section has been digitised in colour.

The update will feature the following range of materials which are all being digitised in full colour:

Diaries: Men & Women, 1943-1945

This addition to the diaries already available via Mass Observation Online completes the war years. About 500 men and women kept personal diaries which they sent to Mass-Observation in monthly instalments. No special instructions were given to diarists, and consequently the diaries vary considerably in style and content. They are a fabulous resource for social historians.

Directives: Men & Women, 1943-1945

This addition to the directives completes the war years. Specific topics given to respondents between 1943 and 1945 include demobilisation, post-war hopes and expectations; the atomic bomb and attitudes towards public figures such as Aneurin Bevan and Clement Atlee. There are also directives on general subjects such as children, housing, money and religion.

The Worktown Collection

Between 1937 and 1940, Mass Observation conducted a major study of the towns of Bolton (Worktown) – chosen because of what it shares in common with other principal working-class and industrial work places throughout Britain” – and Blackpool (Holidaytown). People's conversations and behaviour were recorded in a variety of settings - in the street, in the pub, at dance halls and cinemas, in churches and chapels, at meetings and public events, at work in the cotton mills and on holiday in Blackpool. The aim was to document the broadest possible sweep of Bolton's social and political life. The Worktown project collected an astonishing amount of material, but very little was published. The entire study is available as part of this update, and contains excellent source material for all those interested in studying the ordinary people of Britain during a period of great change.  It is a vital research tool for social historians, labour historians, historians of leisure, sociologists, and for those studying the fiction of Bennett, Lawrence and Orwell.

Topic Collections

We include five new topic collections in the update, all of which were previously unavailable in microfilm or digital form:
 
TC 26: “Britain Can Make It”
This exhibition, held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in September 1946, was organised by the Council of Industrial Design, whose aim was to “hold in the summer of next year a national exhibition of design in all the main range of consumer goods – clothing, household furnishings and equipment, office equipment and civil transport…. [It will be] British industry’s first great post-war gesture to the British people and the world.” This topic collection covers an MO investigation into reactions to the exhibition. Material comprises questionnaires, observations and ephemera.
 
TC 42: POSTERS 1939-1947
Data collected during a series of poster surveys, notable as a record of attitudes evoked by wartime public information campaign posters and recording in part MO's liaison with the Ministry of Information. The collection is also concerned with some commercial advertising.

TC 63: SMOKING HABITS 1937-1965
This collection consists primarily of material relating to smoking habits, including the rationing of cigarettes, their effects on health and relevant ephemera. Material relates to the MO surveys of 1941, 1943, 1949 and 1957, into various aspects of cigarette and pipe smoking. Later material investigates brand preference.
 
TC 85: DRINKING HABITS
This collection contains pre-war and wartime material on juvenile drinking, women in pubs, children's essays on drink, also the big 1947-8 survey on drinking habits together with temperance literature, and market research from the 1950s and 1960s conducted for the major breweries Guinness, Courage and Double Diamond.

TC 86: GAMBLING
Material relating to MO surveys of gambling from 1939-51, mostly from a 1947 survey commissioned by the National League for Education Against Gambling. Other material includes reports on greyhound racing in the early years of WWII, and surveys of Football Pools and feelings about a National Lottery in the immediate post-war years.
 

Editorial Board:  

Dorothy Sheridan, Head of Special Collections, University of Sussex
Professor Stephen Brooke, Department of History, York University, Toronto
Dr Ben Highmore, Department of Media and Film Studies, University of Sussex
Professor James Hinton, Department of History, University of Warwick
Ben Lander, PhD student, Department of History, York University, Toronto
Dr Claire Langhamer, Department of History, University of Sussex
Professor Laura Marcus, Department of English, University of Sussex
Professor Bob Malcolmson, History Dept, Queen’s University, Canada
Professor Brian Street, Department of Education & Professional Studies, King’s College London
Jennie Taylor, Department of History, University of Sydney
Dr Leslie Whitworth, Faculty of Arts and Architecture, University of Brighton

Source Library:

Special Collections, University of Sussex

Nature of the Material:

Original manuscript and typescript papers created and collected by the Mass Observation organisation, together with printed publications, photographs and interactive maps. The social research organisation, Mass Observation, was founded in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, film-maker Humphrey Jennings and poet Charles Madge. Their aim was to create an 'anthropology of ourselves', and by recruiting a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers, they studied the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. This resource covers the original Mass Observation project, the bulk of which was carried from 1937 until the mid 1950s.

Scope of the Collection:

Mass Observation Online offers revolutionary access to one of the most important archives for the study of Social History in the modern era. The material covers:

• The end of the ‘Hungry Thirties’ when the impact of the Depression was still being felt;
• The onset of war, the Blitz and war on the home front;
• The post war world, with the rise of consumerism and television.

The archive has always been immensely popular with students because it offers immediate and engaging evidence of major trends such as the increasing role of women in work, the birth of the welfare state, anti-Semitism and anti-communism, the growth of secularism and the increasing importance of radio, television and cinema in people’s lives. Through interviews, overheard conversations, directive responses and diary entries it offers brilliant cameos describing life in the jazz halls, what people thought of the movies they saw, how people survived the random terror of the Blitz, and where they lived and worked.

In addition to offering high quality images of over 300,000 pages of previously unpublished material, this resource also acts as a finding aid for the microfilm series (published by Adam Matthew Publications) and other unpublished material from the archives.

Mass Observation Online comprises:

• A complete set of the File Reports, 1937-1972, with full text searchability. Over 2,000 File Reports provide top-level summaries and conclusions of the findings of nearly every Mass-Observation study from 1937 to 1955. The range of topics covered is immense, including popular culture (with reports on cinema-going, radio and music, and the advent of television); consumerism, branding and fashion (including the rise of department stores and the New Look); sex, marriage, and the family, as well as attitudes to war, politics and America, Russia and Europe. We have added nearly 25% more material to the previously published microfiche set, as many of the longer reports that were intended for publication were previously withheld. Most reports run to between 16 and 49 pages and are a perfect introduction to the whole range of topics explored by Mass-Observation.

• Publications by Mass-Observation. Twenty-five books, most now out of print, appeared during Mass-Observation’s first period of activity, 1937-1950, including May 12th; First Year’s Work; and Britain By Mass-Observation. They are all included here, along with pamphlets and workbooks published by the Mass-Observation Archive. All material is full text searchable.

• Thirteen previously unpublished Topic Collections, including:
  
  - Famous Persons (the public’s perceptions of Chamberlain, Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt etc)
  - Household Matters and Household Budgeting, 1939-1950
  - Juvenile Delinquency (featuring a wonderfully insightful diary of borstal life)
  - Korea, 1950
  - Radio Listening, 1939-1948 (on war-time broadcasts and the post-war impact of television)
  - World Outlook, 1945-1950 (on people’s fears of World War III and a nuclear Armageddon)
  - Films 1937-1948 (on British and Hollywood films; newsreels by Pathé, Gaumont-British and others; surveys of audience behaviour; and the effects of air-raids on the cinema trade and the public reception of
    propaganda during WW2)
  - Capital Punishment Survey, 1938-1956 (attitudes to the death penalty)
  - Victory Celebrations, 1945-46 (a record of reactions to the end of war over the periods leading up to and including VE Day and VJ Day)
  - Dreams 1937-1948 (a fascinating collection of reports on their dreams from members of MO's volunteer panel)
  - Religion 1937-50 (including studies on the effects of WW2 on religious attitudes)
  - Reading Habits 1937-47 (the buying and reading of books, and the use of bookshops and libraries)

The Topic Collections represent the raw material behind many of Mass-Observation’s published studies, consisting of both quantitative and qualitative data including questionnaires, interviews, observations and contemporary ephemera. The extensive listings of these collections are fully searchable.

• The Day Surveys, 1937-1938. These were special diaries recording details of a single day, written by members of Mass-Observation’s National Panel, which consisted of over 500 observers. Initially the Panel recorded the 12th day of each month, but by 1938 they were recording special days such as Armistice Day, Christmas, and Bank Holidays.

• Diaries, 1939-1942 - offering roughly 500 separate accounts of what was happening each month, allowing users to compare accounts and trace events as they unfolded. For anyone studying the outbreak of the war, the impact of Dunkirk, the Blitz, evacuation, or a host of other topics, they are indispensable. As Professor Tony Kushner says, “it is a collection of diaries that has few equivalents for this period anywhere in the world.” We offer subject indexing to enable users to search diarist entries for key events and figures in World War II. Readers can also search by date, the gender of the diarist, their location and profession.

• Directives, 1939-1942 - these are specific responses to wide-ranging questions on topics concerning drinking, religion, political beliefs, and much more. Specific subjects included ‘Race’, ‘Class’, ‘Jazz and Dancing’, ‘Shopping’ and ‘the BBC’. There are also many directives relating to World War II, assessing attitudes towards wartime sexual behaviour, propaganda, conscription, air raids and evacuation.

This publication opens up a host of essay and project possibilities on topics such as abortion, old age, crime, eating habits, shopping, fashion, dance, popular music, coal mining, adult education, sex, reading, ethnic minorities, and the decline of Empire. It is a resource that will be welcomed by historians, literary scholars, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists.

There are nine contextual essays and a host of other supporting materials, which will guide the reader through the origins of Mass Observation, its working methods and its value as a source for history, literature, sociology, anthropology and gender studies. There are also essays on research strategies that can be adopted using the archive and on the use of Mass Observation Online as a teaching resource, including two essays by graduate students giving their experiences of working with the material.

Additional features include interactive maps, a bibliography, a chronology, and a collection of photographs by Humphrey Spender.

Supporting Comments:

“The publication of Mass Observation Online will afford undergraduate students, postgraduate researchers and professional historians access to one of the great treasure troves of twentieth-century British history.  This is an absolutely critical resource.”

Professor Stephen Brooke, Department of History, York University, Toronto

From a recent article in the New Yorker by Caleb Crain (Sept 2006):

“On January 30, 1937, a letter to the New Statesman and Nation announced that Darwin, Marx, and Freud had a successor—or, more accurately, successors. “Mass-Observation develops out of anthropology, psychology, and the sciences which study man,” the letter read, “but it plans to work with a mass of observers.” The movement already had fifty volunteers, and it aspired to have five thousand, ready to study such aspects of contemporary life as:

Behaviour of people at war memorials.
Shouts and gestures of motorists.
The aspidistra cult.
Anthropology of football pools.
Bathroom behaviour.
Beards, armpits, eyebrows.
Anti-Semitism.
Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke.
Funerals and undertakers.
Female taboos about eating.
The private lives of midwives.

The data collected would enable the organizers to plot “weather-maps of public feeling.” As a matter of principle, Mass-Observers did not distinguish themselves from the people they studied. They intended merely to expose facts “in simple terms to all observers, so that their environment may be understood, and thus constantly transformed.”

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