On August 29 1938, in the build-up to the second world war, a now-defunct London newspaper asserted that Europe was tensely watching the crisis over Czechoslovakia unfold. But how could a newspaper know what a population was feeling? What if some people, even lots of people, were tensely watching “the racing news and daily horoscope”? This is the question posed by Mass-Observation at the start of the 1939 book, Britain.
Mass-Observation was established as a social movement in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, an ornithologist and self-taught ethnographer, surrealist poet and Daily Mirror journalist Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, a filmmaker and painter. Jennings didn’t last long. Three large male egos were probably at least one too many.
The trio were inspired by surrealism’s interest in coincidence and the unconscious, as well as by the Everyday Life in Middletown sociological studies being carried out in the US. And their output was an odd mix of science and poetry. It was also a democratic riposte to a newspaper and radio culture where the few communicated to the many: what would happen, they wondered, if the balance shifted the other way?
