OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi SEVEN LIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi SEVEN LIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION BRITAIN IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY JAMES HINTON 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © James Hinton 2016 Material from Mass Observation archive reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive. The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. 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Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi Preface What was it like to live in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century? Historical memory is always in a state of fux, never more so than when dealing with the recent past. Younger readers of this book will have impressions formed by their elders, by media rep- resentations, by the histories now being written. Older readers, like its author, will combine such infuences with answers drawn from their own experience: in my own case that of a septuagenarian left-wing academic and one-time political activist from a secure middle-class background. But very few people can speak with the authority of the hundreds of volunteer writers whose contemporary testimony is pre- served in the Mass Observation archive at the University of Sussex. Throughout the fnal two decades of the century, Mass Observation’s correspondents regularly responded to open-ended questionnaires touching on every aspect of their everyday lives, thoughts, and feelings, both as they experienced them at the time and as they remembered them from earlier decades. This book uses the contributions of seven of these people as a basis for biographical essays designed to explore the social and cultural history of late-twentieth-century Britain. Around 2600 individuals have at one time or another sent in responses to Mass Observation’s thrice-yearly directives since 1981. Half of them quickly dropped out, but around 1100 people remained for between two and ten years, 250 for up to twenty years, and a similar number for more than twenty years, a select few writing for the whole period from 1981 to the present.1 I began by sampling a handful of responses from a hundred or so of the most prolifc correspondents, gradually narrowing down my selection according to the vividness and 1. These rough totals are derived from calculations based on information in the online catalogue (<http://www.thekeep.info/collections/mass-observation-archive/>). Nearly 3500 are listed there, but 900 of them failed to respond to any directives after registering with MO. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi vi preface intimacy of the writing, the respondents’ engagement with activities beyond the worlds of paid employment and domesticity, and the need to select individuals, both women and men, from as widely as possible across the social spectrum. Historians usually write about dead people, and about periods of time in which they were not themselves active players. In sampling the Mass Observation writing, I was looking for lives diferent from my own, lives from which I could get a sense of how my times looked and felt to people with a very diferent experience of them. The seven people I eventually selected were all—for reasons to be explained later—born before the Second World War: Caroline (b. 1922). Wife of a small businessman. West London Janet (b. 1933). Schoolteacher. South London Stella (b. 1931). Social worker. Surrey and Yorkshire Helen (b. 1921). Wife of an RAF pilot. Hertfordshire and South Wales Len (b. 1930). Mechanic and manager. North London and Sussex Bob (b. 1934). Lorry driver. North London and Essex Sam (b. 1933). Banker. South-east England Clearly this is not a representative sample, and no selection from the rather special people who volunteered to write for Mass Observation possibly could be. Nevertheless, despite echoing the disproportionately southern and middle-class composition of the MO respondents as a whole, these seven people cover a wide range of occupations and social situations. And, although all seven were white, people of colour played a signifcant role in the lives of several of them. By following their life stories there is much to be learned about the history of Britain in the late twentieth century. Biography has traditionally been reserved for the great men (and occasional women) who are of interest because they had the power, it was believed, to ‘make history’. But, as social historians have long argued, this power has never been reserved for emperors, generals, or intellectuals. Where the sources allow us to recover the biographies of ‘ordinary’, conventionally ‘powerless’ people, we get to glimpse the processes by which history is made from below by a multitude of i ndividual, personal decisions: to leave school or stay on, to live together, marry or divorce, to have children or not, to rent or buy a place to live, to save or to spend. The choices made by individuals about such things, and about work, lifestyle, political loyalties, or reli- gious beliefs, are always constrained by existing economic, social, and OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi preface vii cultural structures, but they are never entirely determined by them. Individuals pick and choose from the resources available to them, and the structures themselves shift under the impact of the choices each of us make about how to live our lives. Politicians think they change the world, and we are all too ready to buy into their delusions of grandeur because they provide a useful shorthand for understanding the times we live through. If anyone changed Britain in the last seventy-fve years— so popular historical memory would have us believe—it was Mrs Thatcher. In reality, however, the sources and processes of social change move at a slower and deeper pace than anything determined by the frenzies of political life or the rise and fall of career politicians. The mass observers, carefully compiling records of their own lives and choices, provide us with one way of observing these deeper processes at work. Mass observers are guaranteed anonymity, and this has been respected—except in the case of Bob, the lorry driver, who declared that he had never done anything he would mind appearing on the front page of the Daily Mirror. Circumstantial detail will, unavoidably, make these individuals identifable to those who know them person- ally, and I have interviewed those who are still alive (or in the case of the banker, his widow) and taken account of their responses to draft versions of the essays. The identity of Caroline, the small businessman’s wife, who stopped writing for the archive twenty years ago and died ten years ago, has been more thoroughly disguised. In order to preserve anonymity I have not revealed the codes by which these people are identifed in the archive. Bone fde researchers, however, can apply to the archivist for these codes. My greatest debt is to the mass observers themselves. They wrote because they wanted to contribute to the way that the history of their times would be written, and I hope that they will see this book as some small justifcation for their commitment to Mass Observation. I am particularly grateful to the widow of Sam, the banker, for allowing me access to his diaries, and for the generosity of her response to my draft chapter on her husband. Without Dorothy Sheridan’s dedication and skill over many years the Mass Observation Project itself would probably not have survived. She has been closely involved throughout the research and writing of this book, and she accompanied me with a watching brief on behalf of the MO Trustees when I interviewed the contributors. I am grateful to Fiona Courage and Jessica Scantlebury, current guardians of the archive, for their help and support; and I thank OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi viii preface the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive for permission to quote material of which they hold the copyright. Dorothy Sheridan, Penny Summerfeld, and OUP’s two readers have given me invaluable advice on the text. And I have learned a great deal in discussing the project with colleagues, friends, and, above all, my closest friend and partner, Yvette Rocheron. James Hinton Les Trémoulèdes December 2015 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/07/16, SPi Contents 1. Mass Observation 1 2. Histories 9 3. Housewife 25 4. Teacher 41 5. Social Worker 59 6. RAF Wife 81 7. Mechanic 93 8. Lorry Driver 109 9. Banker 133 1 0. Conclusion 161 Notes 167 Bibliography 193 Index 203