Mass-Observation
Based on Wikipedia: Mass-Observation
In 1937, three young men from Cambridge set out to do something audacious: they wanted to study the British people the way anthropologists study remote tribes. Not from above, with surveys and statistics, but from within—recording the texture of everyday life as it actually happened. What they created was Mass-Observation, one of the strangest and most revealing social experiments of the twentieth century.
The project began with a royal scandal.
When King Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée, the newspapers assured their readers that the British public supported the new King George VI wholeheartedly. But the founders of Mass-Observation suspected this was propaganda, not reporting. They wanted to know what ordinary people actually thought and said when they weren't being quoted for publication.
So they did something radical. On May 12, 1937—the day of George VI's coronation—they deployed over two hundred volunteer observers across Britain. These untrained participants recorded overheard conversations in pubs, noted what their neighbors said at street parties, collected anecdotes from workplaces, and documented the small ceremonies and grumbles of a nation supposedly united in celebration. The resulting book, May the Twelfth, painted a far more complicated picture than the government's image-makers had crafted. Here was patriotism, yes, but also cynicism, indifference, and drunkenness. Here was Britain as it actually was.
The Unlikely Founders
The three men behind this enterprise were an odd combination. Tom Harrisson was an anthropologist who had studied cannibals in the New Hebrides—and who had left Cambridge before bothering to graduate. Charles Madge was a poet and journalist. Humphrey Jennings was a documentary filmmaker who would later create some of the most celebrated British films of World War II.
What united them was frustration. They believed that the people who claimed to speak for Britain—politicians, newspaper editors, advertisers—had no real understanding of how ordinary Britons lived, thought, or felt. The gap between official pronouncements and lived reality seemed vast. Mass-Observation would bridge it.
Harrisson established himself in Bolton, an industrial town in northern England that the project called "Worktown" in its publications. He moved into a working-class street and began systematically recording everything: conversations in pubs, behavior at football matches, rituals at church services, the rhythms of factory work. Meanwhile, Madge coordinated a network of volunteer observers from his home in London, recruiting poets, painters, and filmmakers to the cause.
The collaborators who joined them read like a roll call of British cultural life in the late 1930s. William Empson, one of the most influential literary critics of the century, contributed. So did photographers Humphrey Spender and Michael Wickham, painter William Coldstream, and novelist G.B. Edwards, whose posthumously published The Book of Ebenezer Le Page would later become a cult classic.
The Art of Observation
The methods were deliberately unscientific—at least by the standards of formal sociology. Mass-Observation used two main approaches.
The first involved paid investigators who would go into public spaces and record what they saw and heard. These observers would note down conversations verbatim, describe gestures and expressions, document who was present and what they were doing. The goal was anthropological thick description: capturing life in sufficient detail that patterns might emerge.
The second approach was even more unusual. The project recruited a panel of around five hundred volunteer correspondents from across Britain. These unpaid participants either kept regular diaries or responded to open-ended questionnaires called "directives." The directives asked about everything from dreams to death, from attitudes toward foreigners to feelings about furniture. The diarists wrote about their daily lives in whatever way seemed natural to them, with no special instructions about format or content.
The result was an unprecedented archive of subjective experience. Here was not what people told pollsters they thought, but what they actually wrote when given space to reflect. Here was not the Britain of newspaper columns and parliamentary speeches, but the Britain of back gardens and kitchen tables.
Wartime and Influence
When World War II began in September 1939, Mass-Observation expanded dramatically. The project invited members of the public to keep day-to-day diaries of their lives during the war. Four hundred and eighty people responded, and their diaries now form one of the richest firsthand accounts of British civilian life during the conflict.
The war also brought something the shoestring operation had rarely enjoyed: official influence. In 1939, Mass-Observation publicly criticized the Ministry of Information's propaganda posters as tone-deaf and ineffective. The government listened, and the posters were replaced. More substantially, the project's research on saving habits caught the attention of John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the most influential economist of the twentieth century. Keynes used Mass-Observation's findings to argue for changes in tax policy—and won.
The Ministry of Information itself began commissioning research from Mass-Observation, recognizing that the project understood public opinion in ways that official channels could not. Here was a curious inversion: a project founded to subvert official narratives about the public mood was now helping shape those narratives.
Some of the wartime publications became classics of social documentation. The Pub and the People, published in 1943, remains one of the most detailed studies ever conducted of British drinking culture. War Factory, from the same year, documented the experience of industrial workers during wartime production.
Decline and Transformation
After the war, Mass-Observation lost its founding energy. Harrisson, Madge, and Jennings all departed to pursue other interests. The remaining organization drifted away from its original mission of cultural anthropology toward something more commercially viable: market research.
In 1949, the project was formally incorporated as a private company, Mass Observation (UK) Limited. Under new management, it began conducting consumer surveys for businesses rather than documenting working-class life in Bolton. Eventually the firm merged with J. Walter Thompson's research agency to form MRB International, and by the early 1990s, the original Mass-Observation had been fully absorbed into the advertising industry.
This trajectory was perhaps inevitable. The methods that made Mass-Observation valuable for understanding British society made it equally valuable for understanding British consumers. The skills that helped Keynes reshape tax policy could just as easily help corporations reshape their marketing. The distinction between social research and market research is often more ideological than methodological.
Revival and Legacy
But the archive remained.
By 1981, scholars had begun to recognize that the materials Mass-Observation had collected—the diaries, the observation reports, the directive responses—constituted an irreplaceable historical resource. The project was relaunched at the University of Sussex, not as a commercial enterprise but as an ongoing research archive.
Today, Mass-Observation continues to collect material. A panel of volunteer writers responds to regular directives, just as their predecessors did in the 1930s. Every May 12—the anniversary of that first coordinated observation of George VI's coronation—the project invites anyone to submit a diary of their day. The archive, now housed at The Keep in Brighton, contains millions of documents spanning nearly nine decades of British life.
The published diaries have become a genre of their own. Nella Last's War, drawn from the archive, tells the story of a middle-aged housewife in the northern town of Barrow-in-Furness during the conflict. It inspired a television film, Housewife, 49, starring Victoria Wood. Simon Garfield has edited several collections—Our Hidden Lives, We Are At War, Private Battles—that bring the voices of ordinary diarists to contemporary readers.
The Problem of Observation
Mass-Observation raises uncomfortable questions about the relationship between watching and being watched, between documentation and surveillance.
The project's methods would strike many contemporary observers as ethically troubling. Paid investigators recorded private conversations without consent. Observers in workplaces documented their colleagues' behavior without their knowledge. The line between social research and spying was deliberately blurred.
Yet the project also democratized whose experiences counted as worthy of study. Before Mass-Observation, British social research largely focused on the poor as a problem to be solved—surveys of poverty, studies of slum conditions. Mass-Observation treated working-class life as intrinsically interesting, as worthy of the same detailed attention that anthropologists lavished on Polynesian islanders or African tribes.
There is something both condescending and liberating in this approach. Condescending, because it treats one's own countrymen as exotic specimens. Liberating, because it takes their daily lives seriously enough to document in exhaustive detail.
The Texture of the Ordinary
What makes the Mass-Observation archive so valuable is precisely what made it so difficult to create: it captures the texture of ordinary life that usually leaves no historical trace.
We know a great deal about what Churchill thought during the Blitz. We know relatively little about what the woman working in a munitions factory thought, or the old man in the pub, or the child evacuated to the countryside. Official records preserve official views. Personal letters and diaries, if they survive at all, tend to come from the literate and the comfortable. Mass-Observation deliberately sought out voices that would otherwise be lost.
The directive responses are particularly revealing. When asked about their attitudes toward death, or their memories of childhood, or their feelings about the royal family, ordinary Britons produced reflections of astonishing depth and variety. Here are the kind of thoughts that people rarely articulate even to themselves, drawn out by the simple act of being asked.
Some wrote with literary flair; others with awkward sincerity. Some were earnest; others were funny. The archive contains bigotry and generosity, banality and insight, all jumbled together as they are in actual human minds.
Anthropology at Home
Tom Harrisson once wrote that Mass-Observation aimed to create "an anthropology of ourselves." This phrase captures both the project's ambition and its strangeness.
Anthropology, in the 1930s, meant the study of other cultures—preferably distant ones. The discipline had developed its methods in places like the Trobriand Islands and the American Southwest, among peoples whose ways of life seemed fundamentally different from those of the researchers. The idea of applying these same methods to industrial England was either brilliant or absurd.
What Harrisson and his collaborators understood was that the familiar can be just as opaque as the exotic. A British observer watching Bolton steelworkers might assume he already knew what their lives were like. Mass-Observation's great insight was that he probably didn't—and that patient, systematic observation might reveal patterns invisible to casual understanding.
This insight has proven durable. Social scientists today routinely study their own societies using ethnographic methods. The boundary between "anthropology" and "sociology" has blurred considerably. Mass-Observation helped make this possible by demonstrating that the methods of fieldwork could illuminate not just Polynesian kinship systems but also English pub culture.
What Remains
Nearly ninety years after its founding, Mass-Observation continues to generate new material and new scholarship. Researchers use the archive to study everything from attitudes toward AIDS to the emotional politics of the atomic bomb. The project has become what its founders only dimly imagined: a living record of British life across generations.
The methods seem less radical now than they did in 1937. Oral history, ethnography, qualitative research—these are established fields with professional standards and ethical guidelines. What Mass-Observation pioneered has become mainstream.
But the archive itself remains unique. No other project has collected subjective testimony from ordinary Britons so systematically and for so long. No other source allows researchers to compare how people felt about rationing in 1943 with how they felt about the Falklands War in 1982 with how they feel about artificial intelligence today.
The volunteers who responded to directives in the late 1930s could not have imagined that their reflections on dreams and furniture would still be read nearly a century later. The diarists who chronicled their wartime experiences wrote for themselves and perhaps for the project, not for posterity. Yet posterity is what received them.
In this sense, Mass-Observation achieved something its founders may not have intended. They wanted to document Britain as it was. They ended up creating a record of how Britain felt about itself changing—a mirror that shows not just a moment but a movement through time.