1946 If the Mass Observation archive is a famous resource for British social history, its value as a repository of vernacular literature is less celebrated than it ought to be. From 1937 Mass Observation surveyed ordinary people’s feelings about what was going on around them. Its founders were not sociologists, but an eclectic mix of the poet Charles Madge, the documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings, and the polymath Tom Harrisson, newly returned from studying cannibals in the New Hebrides, who decided it was time for ‘an anthropology of ourselves’. Others involved included the literary critic William Empson, poet and critic Kathleen Raine, and the Picture Post photographer Humphrey Spender, brother of the poet.
The survey’s managers started out a bit like the American Federal Writers’ Project (see 27 July), paying journalists, civil servants and the like to note down conversations overheard in pubs and workplaces. Later they realised they could get a broader response for less money by recruiting volunteers to answer questionnaires or just keep diaries to note down their feelings and opinions about day-by-day occurrences.
The returns were especially illuminating for the immediate postwar period, which was supposed to bring peace and prosperity, instead of austerity, the fear of nuclear war, a balance of payments crisis, the continuation of domestic rationing, and a shortage of coal during the coldest winter on record, 1946–47. Where were those sunny uplands promised by Winston Churchill? Who won the bloody war, anyway? The vernacular voices of Mass Observation offered a sobering counter-balance to the official optimism about a great technological future in a new Elizabethan age.
Maggie Joy Blunt was a freelance writer and publicity officer in a metal factory living near Slough. On this day she noticed:
… a woman [going] from shop to shop in the village today. She was buying cooking salt. One block from the greengrocer which she concealed in her basket and then another from the grocer. Expect she is salting beans.
Not that salt was rationed. The woman wasn’t on the fiddle; she was just hoarding. But with shortages still a public issue, Maggie couldn’t help noticing – and yet a kind of communal feeling for a fellow victim prevented her judging:
I wonder how many of us do this sort of scrounging for a quantity of something, with and without feelings of guilt? I do it for cigarettes and do have a twinge of conscience.1
1 Simon Garfield, ed., Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain, London: Ebury Press, 2005, p. 275.