On 30 January 1937, a letter addressed to the British weekly New Statesman and Nation announced that Darwin, Marx and Freud had found a follower – or rather, followers. “Mass-Observation is developing on the basis of anthropology, psychology and the sciences devoted to the study of man,” the letter said, “but its goal is to work with the masses of observers.” Fifty volunteers had already joined the movement, and it was planned to increase this cohort to five thousand activists who would be ready to study such aspects of their contemporaries' lives as:
– human behaviour at war memorials,
– the shouts and gestures of motorists,
– the cult of growing the 'home blessing' [fern],
– football pools,
– bathroom behaviour,
– beards, armpits and eyebrows,
– anti-Semitism,
– the spread, propagation and significance of dirty jokes,
– funerals and undertakers,
– women's dietary taboos,
– as well as the personal lives of midwives.
The Mass-Observers did not, in principle, distinguish themselves from the people they were studying. Their only intention was to make the facts known in “simple formulations” to “all observers, so that their environment would become intelligible and thus constantly transformed.”
The letter was only the first of several movement manifestos, yet none of those that followed made it easier to categorise Mass-Observation. In a February publication in New Verse magazine, the group announced that it would introduce a new standard of literary realism and free poetry from the iron grip of professionals: “By taking on the role of an observer, every person becomes equal to Courbet at his easel, Cuvier at the dissecting table and Humboldt on the shores of a continent.”
The inventors of this new science were Charles Madge, a poet, journalist and Communist Party member; Humphrey Jennings, a surrealist painter and documentary filmmaker; and Tom Harrisson, a dropout anthropologist who felt more comfortable among cannibals than among academics. There had been many disagreements among the triumvirate from the very beginning – they had not even been able to agree on whether the group's name should be understood to mean that the masses were being observed, or that the masses themselves were the observers. Either way, between 1937 and 1945, hundreds of people sent them regular reports about their daily lives. The volunteers came from diverse social backgrounds, but young, unmarried clerks and teachers were particularly well represented. No detail was deemed too trivial. Mass-Observers studied, for example, which end of a cigarette people tap against the table before lighting up (fifty-two per cent do so with the end they subsequently put in their mouth), the most common female revenge fantasies during the war (about slicing Hitler into pieces for a stew, or sawing off his ankles, sharpening the shanks into pointed stakes and using a large mallet to drive him into the ground like a pile), and the average number of outdoor copulation incidents on a normal evening in the working-class resort town of Blackpool (four, including one in which the observer themselves participated). The group released a series of eccentric books, and during the Second World War, the reports published by the observers influenced the British government’s perception of the mood of the nation’s civilians and even its tax policy. The Mass-Observers were attempting to understand a phenomenon that anthropology and sociology largely took for granted – the daily lives of ordinary people.
The first to start dreaming of an “anthropology that would study ourselves” was Madge, a young man with a long face, slender fingers, wonderful manners and an iron will. At Cambridge, he had studied philology under I. A. Richards, who was best known for giving his students poems to read without the author’s name, so as to hear a response uninfluenced by prejudice. During his university years, he joined the Communist Party. After Madge finished his studies, Yeats chose two of his poems for the Oxford University Press poetry anthology, while Eliot found the young man a reporter’s job at the Daily Mirror. On the night of 30 November 1936, London's Crystal Palace, the home of the 1851 World’s Fair built of glass and metal – the pride of Victorian-era capitalism – burned down. Madge, then twenty-four years old, had become involved with English surrealists who, influenced by Freud, looked for patterns in every coincidence, and he began to wonder if there wasn't a deeper meaning to the destruction of such an iconic structure. Perhaps by documenting events that had shaken the collective consciousness, it was possible to make society aware of its previously unexamined myths and fantasies, thereby granting it the freedom to change them? The French surrealist André Breton had already explained that to achieve such liberation, it was necessary for “poetry to be made by all.” And so, Madge had slowly begun planning a new movement which he called “popular poetry”; its distribution throughout Great Britain would be undertaken by “Clubs of Coincidence.” The fire offered a perfect opportunity, especially because news spread soon after that Edward VIII was being forced to choose between the throne and his lover, Wallis Simpson, whose marriage had not even been annulled yet. Coincidence? Now, a double omen was casting its shadow over the British kingdom. The press had delayed reports on the monarchy crisis until the very last moment; the surrealists wanted to put an end to precisely this kind of national-level suppression of impulses.
Madge’s main co-author was Jennings, a close friend from his Cambridge days. Jennings had a nervous habit of eating paper and a penchant for daintily chewing on sugar cubes. Peggy Guggenheim, one of his lovers, claimed that Jennings looked “like Donald Duck” (she left Jennings and began a relationship with Samuel Beckett), but in the photo by Lee Miller published in Vogue magazine, he looks quite charming and confident. Whatever quirks Jennings may have had, he managed to find success in almost everything he undertook. During his studies and later, he worked as a theatre costume designer and set designer, and in 1931, at the age of twenty-four, he set off for work in Paris. “My testicles are as calm and full as a Poussin landscape from his exile,” he wrote longingly home to his young wife. This figurative comparison quite rightly leads to the thought that Jennings’ first and greatest love was painting. He continued to paint until his last savings and his wife’s patience ran out. In 1934, Jennings finally turned to permanent work – cinema. His achievements include editing half-hour films dedicated to the history of the British post (commissioned by the UK General Post Office) and a Shell Oil commercial in which a robot thoroughly lubricated with machine oil wakes up to a new life. In 1936, Jennings helped organise the International Surrealist Exhibition in London; his ties to this movement quite naturally led to his collaboration with Madge on his new project.
In a letter published in the New Statesman on 2 January 1937, Madge announced that he and his friends were committed to finding a solution to “the symbolic situation of the Crystal Palace and the King’s abdication,” and asked for help in gathering testimonies. “Only mass observation can create a mass science,” he wrote, and published his address.
In Bolton, an industrial town in Northern England so hopelessly grim that even the bottom of the river is covered with cobbles, Madge’s letter caught the attention of twenty-five-year-old Tom Harrisson. The young man was reading the magazine in the local library because he could not afford to buy it. Harrisson only noticed the article because his own poem, “Coconut Moon”, written about three years earlier in the New Hebrides (an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, now known as Vanuatu), where he had gone on a zoological expedition, was published on the same page. The trip ended with him getting stuck on the islands for two years, devoting himself to studying the lives of the natives and perfecting himself as a “first-class master of drunkenness,” consuming large doses of the local drink, kava. Harrisson let a tribal chief’s wife decorate his chest with scars and later, in England, often made hints that he had participated in cannibal feasts. Judith Heimann, in her captivating and meticulously researched biography “The Most Offending Soul Alive”, writes that this claim is false, but she believes he did indeed eat a rotten grub offered to him by a leper.
Upon returning to Great Britain, Harrisson gave several lectures about his experiences and wrote a book dedicated to his adventures. After that, he could not find a new occupation. Alienated from his peers and at odds with his father, who threatened to disinherit his son, Harrisson decided to cut all ties and become an “embedded observer” in his own country, then gripped by the Great Depression. Just as George Orwell once headed to Wigan and James Agee [1. James Agee (1909–1955), American writer and screenwriter] to Alabama, Harrisson chose Bolton. There, he earned a living as a factory worker, lorry driver, shop assistant and ice-cream vendor.
Soon after reading the letter printed in the New Statesman, Harrisson boarded a train and set off for a meeting with Madge and Jennings. A witness to this conversation recalls “Humphrey with his elbow resting on one end of the mantelpiece, and Harrisson with his elbow placed on the other end – both very loudly and simultaneously addressing everyone present in general and paying not the slightest attention to what the other was saying.” Madge, without a doubt, listened alternately to one and then the other.
On 12 February 1937, thirty volunteers undertook to write a one-day diary, which the Mass-Observers called “day-surveys.” The event was conceived to “collect a certain body of data without any principle of selection,” and this experiment was repeated every month. In the convincing and sympathetic biography “Humphrey Jennings”, Kevin Jackson quotes Jennings’ 12 April survey: the film director and his wife accidentally put on each other’s dressing gowns, there is sand in the bath because their little daughter had been playing in the sandpit the day before, and Jennings notices that the bathroom mat is “untidy,” but makes no attempt to do anything about it. These facts are completely random and trivial, but at the same time, fascinating. By January 1938, the Mass-Observers had already collected 1,730 day-surveys, a total of 2.3 million words.
By rough agreement, duties were divided as follows: Madge took responsibility for the day-surveys, Harrisson returned to Bolton to continue studying working-class life at close quarters, and it was left to Jennings to compile and publish the results. This manifested as designing the cover of the introductory pamphlet and fulfilling the duties of managing editor for the Mass-Observation movement’s most strange and poetic book, “May the Twelfth – Mass-Observation Day-Surveys by over two hundred observers, 1937”.
12 May 1937 was the coronation day of George VI. In one of their manifestos, Madge and Harrisson explain that in December, when George’s brother Edward renounced the throne, “millions of people who had previously lived like obedient automatons of the system” suddenly found themselves in a situation where they had to decide for themselves what they thought about the collapse of this system. The coronation was conceived as a grand spectacle meant to dispel the people’s fears. But it was a rather delicate moment for such manipulation of the British people, given that at the time, all across Europe, such lavish mass events with nationalist undertones were being used by fascists to achieve their goals – but for that very reason, the situation was perfect for mass observation. The group collected forty-three day-surveys, another seventy-seven people filled out written questionnaires, and a brigade of twelve anonymous observers reported on the coronation ceremony as reporters – or rather, as newsreel cameras. “Using these three different methods, three different focuses were obtained: close-up, shots with details and mass scenes,” explained Jennings and Madge.
Jennings’ “film” appears on screen in the second chapter. It is about midnight on the eve of the coronation. Euston railway station in central London is already overcrowded. There, for example, is “a man drinking beer and eating sandwiches in a phone booth.” In the cafeteria, another person is playing a game of dice at the counter with his fiancée. She “says it is a prejudice that people should always need to sleep at night. He starts singing Night and day you are the one….” An observer writes: “Everyone is talking to everyone, without addressing anyone specifically,” and notes that an atmosphere of abundance and humanity prevails – heartfelt chaos. On the London Underground, grown-ups unscrew electric bulbs from lamps and, as the train enters the tunnel, amuse themselves by making various animal sounds. At 3:15, a prostitute offers an observer her services. “I say: ‘I think you’ve worked enough tonight.’ The answer is: ‘Shut your trap, mate.’” The reader gets the impression that they are eavesdropping on conversations at a huge party that has taken over the whole city. The merriment seems even more fascinating because the average celebrant is simultaneously participating in the game and remaining outside of it, playing along with the artificial mass cheer but simultaneously not giving up their own pragmatic, ironic “self.” Thus, for example, during the church service, while no one is looking, a Westminster Abbey usher sneaks a smoke in the royal carriage.
In the book “Mass-Observation and Everyday Life”, the style of which unfortunately limits its readership to academic historian circles, Nick Hubble expresses the thought that by focusing on how the coronation celebrations are perceived by the crowd, the Mass-Observers considerably limited the ceremony’s nationalist focus. One of the spectators of the festivities thinks the Queen’s hair is dishevelled, as if she had just climbed out of bed, while the King looks “emaciated, frozen with nervousness” and is blankly staring into space. Someone else mistook the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Craig, for the Dutch Princess Juliana. In Nottingham, a hairdresser’s mother, settled beside the radio set, breaks into tears and sobs: “Oh Lord, it should have been Edward instead of her… it… it… it should have been Edward!”
However, the devastating impact of “May the Twelfth” could not have been too great. The book was bought little, perhaps because it was not quite as cheap as the Mass-Observers had vowed it would be. To buy “May the Twelfth”, an average coal miner would have had to pay more than a quarter of their weekly wage. The reviews were mostly favourable, yet a few quite sharp ones occurred. “Facts multiply just like worms in cheese,” complained one critic. But it was a pure joy to write about the Mass-Observers, even if the review author could not stand the movement. So, a “Mass-Observer” soon became a widely known public figure. The New Statesman imagined them moving at a brisk pace, flapping large elephant ears and occasionally pressing themselves against keyholes. Graham Greene involved one Mass-Observer in his 1939 adventure novel “The Confidential Agent”:
“– That’s just Mr Mukherjee, an Indian gentleman, (..) very respectable. (..) He is quite inquisitive. That is the only drawback. He asks such questions!
– What kind of questions?
– About everything. Do I believe in horoscopes? Do I believe in newspapers? What do I think of Mr Eden? And he writes down the answers, too. I really don’t know why.”
Harrisson spent that famous 12 May at home, writing a letter to a friend: “It was pure madness to entrust the editing to a whole pack of intellectual poetasters.” Jennings decided that Harrisson was a philistine and left the society. He did not, however, abandon the ideas of Mass-Observation and began to collect writings in prose and poetry that described various mechanisms and their impact on people’s lives throughout history. Jennings called the descriptions “images” and gradually arrived at the belief that they could be read as “a continuous message or film about the industrial revolution,” just as he had intended “May the Twelfth” to be a film about the coronation festivities. Jennings carried the newspaper clippings, which eventually filled twelve notebooks, in a worn-out travel bag. When a friend from the surrealists asked him what was inside, Jennings replied: “Pandemonium”. Having named his anthology in honour of the city built by Lucifer and his fallen angels in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, Jennings wrote: “The building of Pandemonium is the true history of Great Britain for the last three hundred years.”
In contrast to the artistic pretensions of the London branch of the Mass-Observers, the Bolton circle led by Harrisson operated quite chaotically. Harrisson lived in a working-class house that witnesses later described as “poor,” “grim,” “terrible,” “bug-ridden” and “just like any other house in Bolton.” Usually, two or three other observers lived with him, having been enslaved by Harrisson’s personal charm and readiness to work sixteen hours a day. Every morning, after reading the newspapers, he gave the others leading instructions. The photographer Humphrey Spender, the younger brother of poet Stephen Spender, remembers being instructed to find out “how people hold their hands, (..) how many sugar cubes people tend to just pop into their mouths, (..) how often people pilfer such things as restaurant teaspoons, matches, bits of paper.” The observers were supposed to count hat pins, write down the hymns sung in churches and “at the same time try to pinch a copy of the sermon.” “That’s exactly what Tom said: go into public lavatories and photograph how people pee,” Spender told an interviewer many years later. Bolton’s ascetic life frightened Spender, and his empathetic abilities, which made him step into other people's shoes, sometimes brought him to tears, but in his photos of that time, which were published only forty years later, he is equal to Walker Evans in his truthfulness, and to Helen Levitt in his aestheticism [2. Walker Evans (1903–1975), Helen Levitt (1913), American photographers].
Harrisson used to treat his staff – often in the late hours of the night – to fish and chips, and the house was permeated with the smell of oil. The surrealist painter Julian Trevelyan arrived from London and was commissioned to create a collage of the Bolton scene. The artist later recalled drinking beer in various pubs late at night and then watching a wrestling match in a foundry that strongly resembled a prison from Piranesi’s engravings, “with chains, ladders and bits of rusted mechanism.” A coal haulier named Bill Naughton, who hoped that working for the Mass-Observers would help him hone his literary style, signed up as a volunteer observer; a few decades later, his screenplay for the film “Alfie”, starring Michael Caine, earned international recognition.
The result of all this Mass-Observation activity was a single book, “The Pub and the People”, released in 1943, four years after it was written. It explains that in Bolton, “the pub has more buildings allocated to it, it has room for more people and it takes more time and money from them than the church, the cinema, the dance hall and political organisations combined.” The statistics are exhaustive. In the course of one Thursday evening, one pub-goer drinks an average of 3.16 pints of beer; on Saturday, the average volume increases to 3.45 pints. Demand for fish and chips reaches its peak on Friday, the local payday, but beer consumption peaks on Saturday: “That is what is left in our culture of the old orgies, of the periodic release of suppressed urges.” During the final hours of the pub’s opening time, more beer is sold than in any other time span. People in groups drink faster than alone, and they feel the rhythm of drinking so deeply that they almost always empty their simultaneously ordered mugs at the same time – even if the drinkers are blind.
The book’s main author was John Sommerfield. He masterfully knew how to blend into any company and never officially questioned anyone; he just drank beer, watched and listened. He describes an activity called “swilling” – swirling a nearly empty glass with circular motions, which makes the beer left in it spin into a vortex. Sommerfield also notices that the traditional cry “Time, Gentlemen, please!” before the pub closes is always repeated in the same intonation. (In the previous decade, Eliot had noticed this too and put his discovery to use in “The Waste Land,” achieving an unsettling effect.) He explains why a drunk person sounds drunk when speaking (illustrating abundantly with quotes), reports that there are fewer spittoons in finer pubs and that playing darts became popular in 1937 when the King and Queen played a round. Sommerfield’s observations at pigeon races, a favourite sporting event in working-class circles, reveal how best to motivate a cock pigeon for a competition (make a cake out of sugar, sherry and seeds, and before the race, show how his mate is feasting on this treat). The book celebrates the pub as an active and social form of recreation, a lifestyle that is in danger of being “gradually replaced by the passive, drug-like pleasures of the cinema and radio,” as Orwell wrote in his review of this work. Orwell once described himself as belonging to the “lower-upper-middle class,” and Hubble has placed Madge, Jennings and Harrisson on this same shelf: all three had grown up expecting a gentleman’s lifestyle, but had been forced to realise that the inheritance left to them was either meagre or non-existent, and that they would have to work very hard to earn a living. However, no one would have mistaken them for proletarians. In 1961, reminiscing, Harrisson admitted that “in those old days, almost anyone who had not himself been born into a working-class family regarded them as belonging to almost another race.” Attempts to bridge this social distance were received with unpleasant surprise. “Let’s go and see how Humphrey is coddling the common people,” sneered Jennings’ boss, who was irritated by the democratic atmosphere on his film set. Over the last few decades, nasty suspicions have arisen among more than a few critics, too. Did the Mass-Observation leaders only show interest in the workers to express dissatisfaction with their own socio-economic niche? To put it more bluntly – were they not going to the common people just to indulge themselves?
Hubble quite reasonably assumes that Madge, Jennings and Harrisson may indeed have had selfish motives, but they were able to overcome them. In any case, in the 1930s of the 20th century, you did not need any personal reasons to be interested in workers. The Depression had made the difficult living conditions of workers unbearable, and, furthermore, for the first time in human history, a country – the Soviet Union – was being governed in the name of the workers. With fascism spreading ever more widely, it seemed crucially important to understand what the workers wanted and what their views were. However, it cannot be said that only workers were the focus of the Mass-Observers' attention. Tom Jeffery, who wrote the group’s history in 1978, values more highly its focus on the lower-middle class, clerks, shop assistants and teachers, who were the authors of the largest part of the day-surveys. The left from the high-bourgeois circles usually dismissed these people as “instinctive fascists and the bearers of all the greatest evils of consumer culture,” writes Jeffery. The Mass-Observers also gave them the opportunity to describe their own world.
In the autumn of 1938, Harrisson moved to London and stayed with Madge; together, they collected material for a new book, “Britain”. They tried to trace public opinion on Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who flew to Germany three times in September and, by giving Hitler part of Czechoslovakia, delayed the start of the war. “Britain” was rushed into print by Penguin; one hundred thousand copies were sold within ten days.
Sixty-nine-year-old Chamberlain had never travelled by plane before, and Madge and Harrisson viewed the widespread popular adoration of the Prime Minister through the prism of an anthropologically tinted mockery: “Old age combined with movement through the skies turned him into a fatherly deity. But the self-sacrificing humility of going to Hitler made him like a son of God who descends from heaven to the sinners to save them.” In typical Mass-Observer fashion, the human eye noticed various eloquent details. Before Chamberlain announced to the people from the window of Downing Street that he had brought back “peace for our time” from Munich, he stretched out his hand to silence the cheering people standing below. One observer notes: “In the crowd, several people apparently took it for a fascist salute and responded with the same gesture.”
The book also devoted attention to other aspects of British life. The authors seem to have been delighted by a “light case of totemism” that they had stumbled upon in a small mining town. There, the locals held a peculiar ritual every year, sawing off and greedily eating a cow’s head inserted into a gate. In Lambeth Walk, in turn, the observers perceived a source of natural anti-fascism, because the general craze for this dance of Cockney origin turned the usual flow of culture (from the higher circles to the lower strata) in the opposite direction and gave working-class people an opportunity to assert themselves. “It’s great to be an ordinary person and let yourself go,” explained one enthusiastic fan of the Lambeth Walk.
The end of 1938 arrived. Madge was in love with Stephen Spender’s wife, Inez, and wanted to get out of the city as soon as possible. As soon as he and Harrisson had finished with “Britain”, the two swapped houses. Harrisson was supposed to take over the management of the national team of correspondent-observers in London, but he found this duty boring. Soon, Harrisson’s attention was drawn by a wealthy married woman with a propensity for alcoholism. Meanwhile, Madge’s observer career in Bolton flourished; he embarked on a study of workers’ saving and spending habits, which was highly appreciated by the famous economist John Maynard Keynes. Although the Mass-Observation movement existed for another ten years, its founding circle gradually scattered to the four winds.
In a January 1939 lecture, which was still published in the Sociological Review, Raymond Firth, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, criticised the group for its weakest point: statistics. The groups of people surveyed in “Britain” were small, atypical and unsystematically selected, he claimed. Firth noted that George Gallup’s organisation had laid the foundations for scientific public opinion research in Great Britain. Thus began a long dispute in which the Mass-Observers were destined to remain the losers from the very start.
But then, expelled from science, the Mass-Observation movement was reborn in art. In March, commissioned by the New York World’s Fair, Humphrey Jennings began shooting the documentary film “Spare Time” about workers’ leisure. The film was conceived in three parts – about those working in the steel and cotton industries, and coal miners. While working on the part dedicated to the cotton industry, Jennings returned to Bolton, where he had once photographed with his “Leica”. He also stopped by to visit the local Mass-Observation brigade, which was now led by Madge.
This time, Jennings is creating not a “film” that consists of textual images, but a series of visual scenes whose individual segments he masterfully connects with the help of sound. For example, while watching men playing darts, the viewer hears a brass band warming up; the musicians appear in the next scene. The band is already gone, but the music continues to play, and we watch a boy reading a comic book, his mother taking a minced meat and potato pie out of the oven, and a man having taken three racing dogs out for a run behind the factory building. In scenes that seem to have come alive from the pages of Mass-Observation reports, old men play billiards in a pub, a crowd of fans watches a wrestling tournament and a man releases a flock of pigeons into the air. But even more than these details, it is the mood of the film that leads to thoughts about the Mass-Observers. For a dance hall scene, Jennings chooses shots in which a woman bends down and adjusts her shoe strap. In a choir rehearsal, a woman removes her scarf with her right hand while playing the piano with her left, and then continues to play while one of the choristers helps her get out of her coat. Then everyone starts singing Handel. Improvisation is part of life, and beauty is naturally born from the mundane.
In the final shots of the film, a woman is cutting bread late at night for her husband’s dinner, while he is reading the newspaper (headline: “She used ‘Bat’s Delight’ perfume”). The viewer gradually realises that this man is not resting after a long day at work; quite the contrary, he is getting ready to go to work in the coal mines. Coal miners with lamps in their hands enter the cage, in which they will be lowered into the depths of the shaft, one after the other. The cage doors slam shut, and a voice-over comments: “Our life is so arranged that spare time is the time when we have the opportunity to occupy ourselves with what we want. It is the opportunity to be as we are.” A short pause follows, then the cage disappears into the shaft.
In the past, Jennings had considered his films simply as work for profit, but his wife remembers that on the day the two of them went to watch “Spare Time”, “he was so excited that he sat on the very edge of his seat in the cinema like a little boy.” Jennings had found his style.
In September 1939, Great Britain entered the war. The Mass-Observers called on their volunteers to describe their own experiences in diaries. Commissioned by the government, the group conducted a study on whether the posters plastered everywhere helped improve public mood. “Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us victory,” proclaimed one of them. The Mass-Observers reported that the dramatic substitution of the pronoun was having catastrophic consequences.
To get some money, Madge and Harrisson wrote a book about this and other wartime observations; its title was “War Begins at Home”. They reported that people were very negative about the city’s blackout – perhaps because the air raids on London had not yet started and its point was not yet obviously clear. The darkness increased people’s fear of attacks and theft, including the theft of animals. “They say they’re putting cat meat in pies now,” explained a Hampstead cleaner.
Behind the scenes, Harrisson tried to arrange another government commission. “I wasn’t sure if it would be right,” Madge later remembered. He did not want the Mass-Observers to degrade into “some kind of rear-guard spying agency.” Hubble writes that in January 1940, the disagreements over the group’s future turned into a bitter squabble. Harrisson accused Madge of aiming too much at literature, while Madge accused Harrisson of attempts to turn the Mass-Observers into a political party. They argued even over whose name should be mentioned first on the title page. In May, Harrisson began sending secret weekly reports on public mood to the government. In July, Madge left the group.
In the autumn, when the bombing of London began, the Mass-Observation founders tried to deal with this trial each on their own. Madge’s study on workers’ savings helped Keynes convince Parliament that workers would not mind if taxes were deducted from their pay immediately, thus easing the war expenses for the state. Keynes’ support helped Madge enter academic circles, and later he became a professor of sociology at the University of Birmingham.
Jennings shot a series of propaganda films permeated with tenderness and resolution, such as “London Can Take It” and “Listen to Britain”, and today he is remembered primarily in connection with this work. In 1950, while looking for potential filming locations in Greece, on the island of Poros, he fell off a cliff and was killed. At the beginning of the war, Harrisson was occupied with sending reports to the government, which in turn tried to tell him that the collected facts should not be supplemented with such long commentaries, and later he was conscripted into the army. In 1945, he landed by parachute in Borneo, where he undertook the leadership of the local tribal partisan movement. The natives enthusiastically resumed headhunting, a tradition that the British had only very recently banned. In the following twenty-odd years, Harrisson, managing to change three wives, spent quite a lot of time in Borneo.
Having lost its founders, the Mass-Observation movement gradually lost its rebellious eccentricity; in 1949, it was transformed into a market research company. The observers’ archives lay unread in a cellar until the late 60s, when two historians stumbled upon them and took them to the University of Sussex. Madge, remembering his Mass-Observation days in 1961, felt grateful that they had managed “to weave something like a net to catch this elusive, occasionally shimmering phenomenon – the spirit of the time.” In 1938, speaking on the radio, Jennings expressed the thought that it was not a coincidence that the search for the meaning of daily life had led to history. “Secrets reside in the most humble everyday things,” he said; they are our heritage. By studying these phenomena, a poet in the past can find “a certain idea of ‘who I am’”. To share his discovery with others, he compares it with present experience, “things that society is familiar with, things that interest it.” As an example, Jennings mentions “The Waste Land”, in which Eliot portrays the past as a church designed by Christopher Wren, but daily life – as a pub on Thames Street. A poet must love both one and the other, Jennings asserted; “anything else is empty arrogance”.
Translated from English by Sabīne Ozola, first published in The New Yorker, 11 September 2006