Fifty years ago three young Englishmen set out to snoop on their neighbors on a scale seldom equaled outside national secret services. Their vast eavesdropping exercise still continues in a modified form.
It was called ”Mass-Observation.” The London Times said recently it is
”one of those rather scatty English organizations which seem to last forever.” A suburban London arts center has just held an exhibition to mark its 50th birthday.
In its heyday, Mass-Observation had 5,000 volunteers spying on their neighbors. They repeated overheard remarks. They spied surreptitiously on
”people`s behavior and appearance . . . in public places.” They struck up conversations to discover attitudes to particular topics.
Most extraordinary of all were ”Follows”–”The practice of following an unsuspecting subject, mainly . . . to record how people spent their days.” This peculiar snooping came into its own during World War II, when Mass-Observation applied its techniques to a wide range of war-related subjects.
Its legacy today is the Tom Harrisson Mass-Observation Archive at Sussex University–hundreds of cardboard boxes packed with millions upon millions of raw, undigested facts. Scholars, writers, sociologists and researchers for movies and television plunder it regularly.
Harrisson, for whom the archive is named, was an anthropologist who came back from the South Seas determined to study his fellow Englishmen precisely as he had studied the natives of the New Hebrides.
Home-front anthropology
”What Harrisson wanted,” said a booklet of the Waterman`s Arts Center show, ”was to do to Britain what anthropologists had been doing to the rest of the world–to look at the familiar, find the magic, superstitions and strange rituals of our own culture, to identify taboos.”
He recruited two partners with ties to the Surrealist art movement. They aimed at nothing less than a new science–”the anthropology of ourselves”– by collecting every conceivable fact, the important and the trivial, about their fellow men.
The range of their snooping is shown in the archive`s boxes–subject headings like ”art,” ”money matters,” ”anti-Semitism,” ”dreams,”
”happiness,” ”sexual behavior.” No wonder scholars have produced a half-dozen recent books–including a standard reference work on World War II
–from this mass of data.
World War II brought Mass-Observation`s finest hour. For the Ministry of Information it surveyed public reaction to aerial bombing, then a new phenomenon. It assessed public morale, reactions to rationing, attitudes to gas masks, everything down to the popularity of jazz lyrics.
Before and after the war, Mass-Observation poured out books and articles. Three of its books are being republished in this anniversary year, one coinciding with an autumn television series.
Some of its early ideas seemed odd. To produce ”the collective portrait of the life of a single day” it asked people to keep minutely detailed diaries on May 12, 1937, King George VI`s coronation day.
People did–1,730 of them. Their diaries totaled more than 2 million words. A 400-page book of extracts was termed by a contemporary critic ”about as valuable as a chimpanzee`s tea party at the zoo.”
Raw data
The problem was that Mass-Observation`s very principles made its work indigestible. Harrisson and his partners refused to interpret. They simply collected and preserved facts.
Today the university archive has recruited 1,000 volunteers to continue gathering facts by responding to regular questionnaires.
Mass-Observation itself still exists, separate from the archive, as a market research and opinion polling company. Its methods now are strictly orthodox.
”Trying to assess the evolution and impact of an organization like Mass- Observation is a risky business,” said the show booklet.
But Mass-Observation initially succeeded, the booklet said, because ”it gave thousands of ordinary people the chance to participate and have their views taken seriously” and–most of all–because of ”the fact that it was fun.” —
