Mass Observation 75 years on: the extraordinary in the everyday

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/19/mass-observation-75-years



In the runup to the Coronation in 1953, Mass Observation recorded the fevered preparations of the population.' Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images


Historians, along with everyone else, are rather at the mercy of nameless bureaucrats when it comes to the preservation of the documents that can give us insights into the past. Usually government officials will decide what makes it into the public domain, and what gets shredded. Sometimes important documents will be held back or destroyed for political reasons.

The recent release of files relating to Britain's sometimes violent decolonisation is a case in point. Often, however, for more banal reasons the archive is silent when it comes to reconstructing ordinary people's experiences of extraordinary events.

This is what makes the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, such an important and valuable resource. Mass Observation was founded 75 years ago in 1937 by the South African poet, communist and journalist Charles Madge and two English eccentrics: the filmmaker and polymath Humphrey Jennings and the anthropologist and self-publicist Tom Harrisson. Formed in the aftermath of the abdication crisis, Mass Observation sought to bridge the gap between how the media represented public opinion and what ordinary people actually felt and thought.

This was done by taking the then-novel step of asking them. Mass Observation asked people to keep diaries, record their dreams and respond to questions on anything from public love-making and Neville Chamberlain to newspaper horoscopes and the rise of fascism.