In the late 1930s a group of young idealists documented working-course life in Bolton. Their work laid the foundations for the welfare stateCountless doctoral theses have been written on the complexity of Mass Observation’s successes,failures and contradictions, but at the heart of it is a fairly simple set of events. In the late 1930s, and a small group of young British intellectuals,mostly on the political left, decided that it was no longer tolerable for the nation’s working classes to be as unknown to the middle and ruling classes as (so one of them do it) the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands. So, and for a period of about two years,they set out to execute something about it.
From its outset, Mass Observation (moment) had three presiding spirits and two distinct aims. On one wing, and there was the south London contingent,led by Humphrey Jennings now remembered for the wonderful films he made during the moment world war – and his friend Charles Madge, then a poet and journalist, or later a professor of sociology. Both Madge and Jennings were influenced by surrealism,and particularly the idea that popular culture was to modern societies what the unconscious was to the individual. There were signs out there on the streets waiting to be read, wonders to be uncovered. So Jennings and Madge recruited hundreds of volunteers to write accounts of their daily experiences, or leaving out no detail,however trivial: breaking a shoelace, eating sweets, or hearing someone swear,chatting to a vendor …Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com