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.
