The daily round, the common task

Opinion polls, it could be said, are the descendants of Mass Observation. This was a non-academic social survey started in 1936 by three people. Tom Harrisson was an anthropologist who had turned his attention from the tribes of the South Pacific to the habits of the people at home. He employed investigators to observe the citizens of Bolton as they went about their daily business. Charles Madge, a radical poet, and Humphrey Jennings, the film-maker, at about the same time and unknown to Harrisson were planning a scientific survey of ordinary people’s lives. This was to be conducted by means of sending out detailed questionnaires to a host of volunteers about their habits and possessions, their attitudes and opinions. Recognising a similarity of purpose, the three joined forces and named the enterprise Mass Observation.

When war broke out the volunteers were asked to keep monthly diaries with details of such things as gas masks and bomb shelters and to note down their reactions to events, ‘keeping political discussion to a minimum’. Many did so and the millions of words so produced are now well-archived at Sussex University and provide valuable material for researchers of the second world war. Most of the diaries stopped after the war.

A few carried on. Simon Garfield has collected the writings of five of the indefatigable recorders, covering the period from 1945 to 1948, from VE Day to the dawn of the welfare state. The book consists of fullish, unannotated extracts from the diaries of a South African-born wife of a timber merchant in Sheffield, an accountant also from Sheffield, a retired electrical engineer from south London, a gay English antique dealer living in Edinburgh and a well-educated lonely woman in Burnham Beeches.