The Mass Observation archive is a well-used source. Those who write for a wide public (even military historians such as Max Hastings) value the way in it seems to conjure up the lives of “ordinary people,” while those aiming at a more academic audience delve into it as a source for the history of emotions. One is struck, however, by the fact that most modern uses of this archive do not have much to do with either “mass,” because they use small numbers of case studies, or “observation,” because interest is increasingly focused on the way that subjects describe their interior lives rather than how they see other people.
James Hinton takes seven case studies: four women and three men, five born in the early 1930s and two in the early 1920s; all were white. Each story is told in a separate chapter. These accounts are based on what subjects wrote in response to various “directives” that enjoined them to talk about some aspect of their lives. This is the “second generation” of Mass Observation in the sense that the project, after an interruption, was revived in 1981, meaning that evidence about subjects’ earlier lives is largely based on retrospective recollections—though Hinton also draws on diaries that some of them kept even before they became involved with Mass Observation; on interviews with the subjects; and, in one case, an interview with the widow of a subject. The accounts throw up striking details. One woman recalls her first orgasm as being “rather like a glorified sneeze” (32). A successful banker (ruthless in his business and complacently adulterous in his private life) survived an investigation by the Inland Revenue into the chauffeur-driven company Daimler that he used, among other things, for collecting his son from boarding school. After this ordeal, he wrote in his diary, “my religion helps a lot in these awful situations” (154).
The emphasis on individual lives makes for an enjoyable read and provides much material that other historians will mine for their own purposes. I wonder, however, whether Hinton might have provided more overall background. To take an obvious example, he says nothing about the proportion of men born in the early 1930s who were called up for compulsory military service, which makes his own sample (two of his three men joined the army as short-service regulars and one failed the medical) unusual. More cultural context might also have been useful. Do the stories recounted here tell us about things that really happened? Is it, for example, likely that one woman was almost poisoned by her own father and that she subsequently had a passionate but chaste relationship with a bomber pilot who was killed in 1943? Is it possible that these details might tell us about how films and popular fiction came to be woven into how people “remembered” their own lives?
Given that Hinton now lives in France, I was surprised that he says little about how the lives of his subjects might, or might not, have been governed by things that were specific to Britain. Looking at France (where historians have taken a particular interest in notions of generation) might have made Hinton ask more about the difference between those of his subjects born in the 1920s (who were adults during the second world war) and those born a decade later. Most of all, the question of generation brings us to Hinton himself. We keep glimpsing the author's shadow on the page. Sometimes he intervenes directly—particularly to draw attention to the evils of “neo-liberalism.” More generally, though, it seems to me that the most interesting feature of the whole book lies in the ways that the lives of its subjects differed from that of Hinton, who was, I assume, born in the 1940s. Having taken his degrees in 1964 and 1969, he belongs to the cohort that benefitted from the increased opportunities for an academic schooling that went with the Butler Education Act of 1944 and the university expansion that came from the Robbins Report of 1963. His subjects, by contrast, grew up at a time when a withdrawn scholarship could blight a whole life. Education is, in fact, a recurring theme in these accounts. People lament their own lack of opportunities, but they are also often hostile to what they see as “progressive” education. Hinton also belongs to a generation that was, at least so far as many academics were concerned, often marked by the radicalisms of the 1960s and (later) by hostility to the government of Margaret Thatcher. His subjects, some of whom would have been contemporaries of Thatcher, are less easy to label as right or left. Some of them mix egalitarianism with a vigorous nationalism. Hinton writes that he considered entitling the book “My Times: Their Lives” before deciding that he was not ready “for the degree of exposure involved in writing autobiographically” (166). I would have liked Hinton to have been more explicit about his own life, or at least his social background and political views, and more systematic in his approach to the “times” in which his subjects lived.
