28 Holiday specials The Economist December 18th 2021
The project could hardly have been described as
professional. From time to time Pocock wrote to Ob
servers warning them of another funding crisis; before
a “freepost” system was belatedly established, his as
sistants made periodic attempts to tot up postage costs
and reimburse Observers. Even the subjects of direc
tives, when not suggested by academics eager for in
put to their own research, were—and still are—picked
almost at random. Pocock—and then Ms Sheridan,
who succeeded him in 1990—were free to ask (pretty
much) whatever they fancied. The title of one directive
from 2013 makes plain the project’s eclecticism: “Serial
killers; the countryside; what makes you happy?”
Yet, letter by letter, Pocock’s archive took shape.
Polls detailing what Britons as a whole thought about
almost any issue in the past four decades are abun
dant. What Mass Observation offers is direct commu
nion with a handful of them. Observers’ individual
voices are preserved, as is their intensity of feeling, or
apathy, on an issue. Spend any time in the archive and
the most prolific Observers, identified only by an al
phanumeric tag and a few words of biography (“78,
male, retired hospital administrator”), come vividly to
life. Even the mode of their replies can be telling: one
Observer always answers on lined paper, with her tag
in block caps at the top of each page, underlined in red,
like an examination answer; another scrawled one re
ply on the back of a carservicing receipt.
Long before it became commonplace to talk of
“lived experiences”, Mass Observation was encourag
ing people to record them. Pocock was an anthropolo
gist but he liked to think of his everexpanding cor
respondence as the raw material of “real history”. Pe
rusing the archive in the future, he said, would be
“rather like discovering a box of your grandmother’s
letters written when she was a teenager”. “It will anson, a career burglar with a knack for relieving country
houses of their silver, wrote from prison in Manches
ter, first on the topic of vegetarianism. Pocock was im
pressed. “I don’t say this to all the girls,” he wrote a lit
tle later in their correspondence, “but you can write.”
And so began one of the most eccentric, yet endur
ing, attempts at preserving for posterity the lives and
views of everyday folk: the Mass Observation Project.
Announcing the plan in a letter to New Society, then a
British periodical, in June 1981, Pocock explained that
he was seeking correspondents from any walk of life:
the more humdrum, the better. “All that is required is a
willingness to write to us both about personal experi
ence and things seen and heard in daily life,” he ex
plained. “The more ‘ordinary’ people think they are,
the more interesting their experience to us.”getting to know all about you
It was not the first such attempt. Pocock borrowed the
idea and the name from a study that began in 1936
whose founders grandly claimed to be pioneering “the
science of ourselves”. Those original “Observers”, as
they referred to themselves, cast a quantitative eye ov
er every aspect of life, sometimes in rather eccentric
detail (on average, one Observer noted, it took a drink
er seven minutes and three seconds to finish his pint
in a pub in Brighton; pints were downed fastest on Fri
days but nursed on Tuesday evenings). Of greater use
to historians were the diaries Observers kept of life on
the home front during the second world war.
That project petered out in peacetime, but its ar
chives eventually wound up at Sussex with Pocock. For
his new Mass Observation he decided to survey his
panel quarterly, tracking in microcosm the effects of
political, social and economic change. “Assume noth
ing is too obvious,” he wrote in a covering letter to his
inaugural “directive”, as he called each appeal for con
tributions. “Think of yourself as describing something
of which the reader has no experience. Concentrate as
if birdwatching. Learn to look.”
Even Pocock’s rather dry choice of initial subject—a
threeyear study of the effects of inflation—did noth
ing to dampen public enthusiasm for the project. Ev
ery corner of the office in the library that Pocock kept
with his longsuffering secretary, Dorothy Sheridan,
and her two assistants was quickly covered in applica
tions to be one of Pocock’s new Observers. It was not
long until their replies to his first directive began to ar
rive. “Peas & beans scarce & their season shortlived!!”
reported one correspondent. Another sent in pages de
tailing the closures of local businesses, including
handdrawn maps of her village. Now, as Ms Sheridan
puts it, the professor had his “pen pals”.
Some of Pocock’s colleagues were less keen. Ms
Sheridan remembers those early years as a battle to be
taken seriously. The panel of Observers (at any one
time, in the low hundreds to low thousands) was never
a representative sample of society; in the early days,
says Ms Sheridan, all who applied were accepted. Nor
were their answers usefully tabulated for researchers
seeking quantitative information. Quite the opposite,
since Pocock encouraged his correspondents to send
in freeform replies that could stretch to dozens of
pages, rather than treat his directives as question
naires. “Nobody should ever apologise for ‘rambling’
or ‘going on’,” he wrote. “For our historian of tomorrow
nothing could be more valuable.”One of the most
eccentric, yet
enduring,
attempts at
preserving for
posterity the
lives and views
of everyday folk