The Meanings of Happiness in Mass Observation’s Bolton

On 28 April 1938 a small advertisement appeared on the front page of the Lancashire penny newspaper, the Bolton Evening News. ‘What is Happiness?’ it asked, explaining:

Once more ‘Competitions’ are wanting to find out what Bolton thinks, as it has done already about Beer and Pools. You are asked to write simply what you personally think is HAPPINESS for you and yours. Don’t bother about style or grammar. Just write it down.¹

The address for entries was 85 Davenport Street, Bolton. Prizes of two guineas, one guinea and half a guinea were promised. The judge was to be Bolton-born social scientist and broadcaster Professor John Hilton.² The advertisement reappeared over the next few days in slightly amended forms: ‘Do you want a million pounds? A cottage in the country? Everyone wants happiness – but what is happiness?’ and ‘Are you happy? Do you want to be happy? What do you think happiness is?’³ Each time entrants were encouraged to write regardless of literary skill. Potential entrants were assured that ‘it’s your ideas that we want’. An additional incentive was to be the publication of the winners’ names in the evening newspaper, received by ninety-six per cent of Bolton homes.⁴ A fortnight later the winners were announced.⁵ Accompanying the results was a statement from the judge:

It has been a great pleasure to me to read these papers. In every one of them is some turn of phrase that takes me right back to the fireside of my childhood days. The plain good sense and the kindliness in one and all of them tells me of Bolton folk. My one trouble has been that I have hated to put any one of them out of the running for a prize. But it had to be done. I could give reasons for my choice, but to set them out adequately would take a column of the ‘Bolton Evening News’, so I will be content to say ‘There’s my pick for the prizes; but to all who are not on the list – my regrets and respects’.⁶

Fig. 1.

Happiness competition leaflet, Bolton, 1938. Mass Observation Archive, Topic Collection 7, Happiness 1c.

85 Davenport Street was in fact home to the British social investigative organization Mass Observation during its ‘Worktown’ survey.⁷ The competition was one of many methods the investigators used to research everyday life in Bolton across the years 1937–1940. Letters of varying length outlining the nature of happiness were received from 226 individuals. A follow-up questionnaire was completed by most entrants, providing details of their occupation and age and a self-assessment of how often they were ‘really happy’.⁸ This questionnaire also asked individuals to rank order ten factors making for happiness; to judge whether it was easier to be happy in Bolton or Blackpool; to assess the happiest time of the week and to consider the role played in happiness by luck. Although every entrant was sent a copy of the questionnaire each was led to believe they were actually on a shortlist: ‘In order to assist us in selecting the best from a number of good ones, we [sic] asking you to answer the following simple questions ... The prizes are for sincerity, not for style.’⁹ Mass Observation in fact did little with the responses. Here we examine this hitherto ignored material.

Mass Observation’s happiness survey was carried out at a critical point in British twentieth-century history: just prior to the Second World War and towards the end of a period of prolonged economic depression.¹⁰ Fear of war was growing after Nazi Germany’s reoccupation of the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936 and the ‘Anschluss’ with Austria in March 1938. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War had brought Basque refugee children to Bolton by the middle of 1937.¹¹ In 1938, unemployment in Britain remained stubbornly high at around 2.1 million workers, though it had fallen substantially from its interwar peak...