by Rebecca Goldsmith @relgoldsmith
The field of modern British history has experienced a new ‘turn’ in recent years. Historians like Jon Lawrence, David Cowan and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite have pioneered the re-use of archived interview field-notes from post-war social science.[1] By and large, this trend has been motivated by an interest in the subjects of social science, rather than the social scientists themselves. By reading ‘against the grain’ in this material, historians have sought to reconstruct ‘popular understandings of the social world in subjects’ own words’, generally using the term ‘vernacular’ to refer to this study of how people in the past talked about and made sense of their experiences.[2]
The methodology I use in my doctoral project resembles this trend. Using archived material from Mass-Observation, I seek to reconstruct the classed politics of everyday life in mid-twentieth century Britain. This blog post sketches out how such an approach works in practice, seeking to answer how appropriate it is to use the term ‘vernacular’ when dealing with the kinds of testimony found in the Mass-Observation archive.
Mass-Observation’s co-founders claimed to be able to provide an account of ‘the ordinary man, his way of living and thinking’. Such a claim rested on the organisation’s use of experimental research methods. Compared to the detached elitism of contemporary social-science, Mass-Observation pioneered a ‘human approach… taking into their confidence, as it were, the man in the street… They come from no heights of learning to mix with ordinary people and things’.[3] The pursuit of these experimental methods can be seen in the organisation’s work in the Lancashire mill-town of Bolton in the late 1930s. As part of this investigation, Mass-Observation sought to disavow the conventional distinction between researcher and researched.
The surviving field-notes from the investigation reveal the mixed results of this effort in practice. Despite some instances of rapport between Mass-Observers and local pubgoers, the investigators’ lack of familiarity with working-class culture in Bolton generally resulted in their feeling out of place.[4] Relatedly, in some of the published material based on this investigation Mass-Observation relapsed into speaking for the masses, bringing to mind Raymond William’s suggestion that ‘there are in fact no masses… only ways of seeing people as masses’.[5]
In other parts of the Bolton investigation, however, Mass-Observation came closer to fulfilling its stated ambition of letting the masses ‘speak for themselves’. This can be seen in the organisation’s practice of recruiting local individuals to work on the research project, commissioning them to write reports on their lives and everyday experiences. These individuals tended to be unemployed men, possessing the time and interest to contribute, and thus cannot be regarded as representative. Nevertheless, their accounts provide illuminating insights into the classed politics of everyday life and social relations in 1930s Bolton.
While these first-hand accounts closely resemble what we might think of as ‘vernacular’ testimony, the Bolton investigation proves exceptional in this regard. Much of the rest of the popular testimony contained in the Mass-Observation archive comes second-hand, in the form of recorded survey responses. At times, the Mass-Observers’ commitment to providing rich, qualitative material, subsequently recording interviewee responses as faithfully and close to verbatim as possible, has resulted in the survival of material which gives a sense of interviewees’ personalities, their understanding of the social world, albeit framed around the questions posed by the Mass-Observers.
Ultimately, the richness of this testimony varied depending on how far the individual Mass-Observer recording the interview saw this as important to their work. Studying the Mass-Observers, their motivation in working for the organisation, thus takes on a newfound importance.[6] In turn, this richness could vary depending not just on the investigator in question, but on the nature of the investigation; how far this was designed to elicit anything more than short, quick statements. Even where this recorded testimony resembled opinion polling, however, this material can still be productively mined for useful insights. As I’ve written elsewhere, by reading ‘against the grain’ in this material we can pick up on those instances where interviewees upended the expectations framing the interview encounter to speak on their own terms.[7] This analysis gets us closer to the spirit of so-called ‘vernacular’ testimony (the supposed opposition between official and popular perspectives), if not the letter.
While it is hard to see much of the popular testimony contained in the Mass-Observation archive as ‘vernacular’, in this short piece I have sought to demonstrate how this material remains useful in spite of, and at times because of, its limitations. More broadly, this blog post has nodded towards the sheer range of different kinds of testimony contained within the Mass-Observation archive, which a catch-all term like ‘vernacular’ fails to capture. While the questions we can ask of this material vary depending on the context in which it was produced, this piece has made clear the opportunities as well as the challenges the archive poses for researchers interested in recovering popular attitudes and perspectives.
[1] See J Lawrence, Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); F Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, Politics and the Decline of Deference, 1968-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); D Cowan, Politics of the Past: Inter-war Memories and the Making of British Popular Politics, 1939-2009 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)
[2] J Lawrence, ‘Historians’ Re-Use of Social-Science Archives’, Twentieth Century British History 33:3 (2022), p.439.
[3] Mass-Observation in Bolton: A Social Experiment’, pp.1-2, found in Mass-Observation Archive [hereafter MOA], Worktown Collection [hereafter WC] Box 1: Organisation of the Project, File C: Draft articles about Worktown project, 64-5; ‘Spending and Saving in Worktown’, p.1, found in MOA, WC Box 1: Organisation of the Project, File C: Draft articles about Worktown project, 71.
[4] MOA, WC Box 3: Public Houses, File A: Pubs and pub activities, 8, 20-21.
[5] R Williams, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in Resources of Hope (London: Verso Books, 1989), p.11.
[6] In light of this, I have recently been undertaking my own research into some of the Mass-Observers themselves, including those James Hinton was unable to trace, consulting (with kind permission) family archives and personal papers.
[7] R Goldsmith, ‘Mass-Observation and Vernacular Politics at the 1945 General Election’, Twentieth Century British History 34:4 (2023), pp.703-725.
Doing History in Public 