Why I Chose to Use the Mass Observation Project for My Research on ‘Ageing’

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.