Mass Observation Redux

In September 1941 the New Statesman published an 'East End working girl's' testimony about the conditions in a Stepney air-raid shelter, as told to the anthropologist and ethnographer Tom Harrisson. Winston Churchill read Harrisson's essay and his outrage at its revelations led to the dismissal of the borough's Air Raid Protection Officer. Critic Nick Hubble's new study of Harrisson and his collaborators' Mass Observation (MO) project cites Churchill's quick response to the testimony as evidence of the efficacy of MO's method as deployed in the war emergency. At least in this instance, the retelling of his informant's visceral story resonated in the halls of power. Strangely, given the complexity of Hubble's excellent appreciation of Harrisson and his fellow MO co-founders, he does not comment upon the racial perceptions so starkly evident in the young woman's testimony. Along with a plaintive description of the physical conditions of the decrepit shelter, she averred

Everyone there was working class. The shelter is near the dock area, and near the coloured quarters. Mostly Cockneys, but also many Jews and Indians. On the whole, the Jews lay on the right-hand side, the Cockneys in the middle, and the Indians on the left. Race feeling was very marked – not so much between Cockneys and Jews, as between White and Black. In fact, the presence of considerable coloured elements was responsible for drawing Cockney and Jew together, in unity against the Indian. There were a lot of cases of mixed marriages – in fact, it was more usual to see a mixed one, than to see husband and wife coloured. Some of the coloured people were Indian, some Negro, a few Chinese. Some of the Indians, those not occupied with girls, played cards.¹

What disturbed Churchill most – 'the smell of humanity and dirt'? The coughing that 'spread and lasted throughout the evening'? Or the crossing of racial barriers even as the crowd sought to maintain them? Harrisson's selection of this testimony for publication, as well as Churchill's outrage, signal the multiple legacies and uses of the vast MO inheritance. Now at MO's seventieth birthday, as young scholars and researchers new to its lore contemplate its relevance to understanding mid twentieth-century life, they will find themselves looking afresh at collections that have already engendered significant debate and even dismissal. What can we savour from this project in the new century, and what place does it now occupy in the documentary and investigative traditions that led into oral history's boom era in the 1970s and '80s, encompassing the History Workshop movement and much else?

Mass Observation was the brainchild of Harrisson, the poet Charles Madge, and the documentary film-maker and painter Humphrey Jennings, but the Madge-Harrisson partnership was its vortex; Jennings left MO in the year of its founding. Amongst their associates were the documentary photographer Humphrey Spender, brother of the poet, and a band of researchers and co-workers who comprised their teams, many headquartered with Madge in Bolton, Lancashire. Springing from an admixture of documentary realism in film and art, strongly influenced by the Soviet example and by European surrealism, MO was a resolutely English hybrid – one of the most original aesthetic expressions of practical imagination known to British modernism. Its purpose was, as the New Yorker's Caleb Crain explains, to create 'weather-maps of public feeling', to plot the everyday psychology of parts of interwar England.² MO published twenty-five books between 1937 and 1960, including the fruits of the Bolton Worktown project like those more recently collected in Humphrey Spender's Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England...