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Women’s Mass-Observation Diaries: Writing, Time & ‘Subjective Cameras’ Andrea Clare Salter This thesis has been composed by me, is my own work and has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. ……….………. PhD in Sociology The University of Edinburgh 2008 --------------------- Women’s M-O Diaries: Writing, Time & ‘Subjective Cameras’ Contents List of Figures and List of Tables 3 Acknowledgements 4 Abstract 5 Guide to Reader 6 Chapter One – Mass-Observation: Ordinary People and Their Lives ……. 7 Such a sane balanced programme: Contextualising the PhD Project 7 Establishing Observation Points 10 ‘Worktown’ and ‘The Economics of Everyday Life’ Project 13 Individual Observers in Their Social Surroundings 18 The Observer as ‘Subjective Camera’ 27 Please Keep a Diary for the Day: Day-Diaries and ‘May The Twelfth’ 35 A Conclusion: M-O, Subjective Cameras and Women’s Wartime Diaries 43 Chapter Two – Mass-Observation’s Wartime Diaries: ‘Speaking for Themselves’?.............................................................................................. 48 The Wartime Diaries: Setting the Scene 48 Using the Wartime Diaries: The 1940s 54 Anthologising the Diaries 68 Publishing Women’s Wartime Diaries 79 A Conclusion: M-O’s Wartime Diaries, Editing, Time and Genre 87 Chapter Three – ‘M-O! Please Note’: Mass-Observation’s Diaries and the Diary-Genre …………………………………………………………. 94 Introduction 94 ‘Mrs Higham - & my diary, are my only confidents at times’: M-O Wartime Diaries as Private Texts 94 ‘Was very pleased to get Diarist letter from M-O – feel kept in touch’: M-O Wartime Diaries as Social Texts 107 Diary Letters? M-O Diaries and Epistolarity 118 A Conclusion: Hybridity, Context and Time 131 1 Women’s M-O Diaries: Writing, Time & ‘Subjective Cameras’ Chapter Four – ‘Shaped by the structures of our time’: Temporality, Women’s Wartime Diaries and ‘Telling the Time’ ……………………………. 137 Introduction 137 What a diary ‘is’ 139 Nella Last’s Diary: ‘a long long time … day after day, week after week …’ 147 Discussion Time: Temporal Issues in Reading the Nella Last Diary 174 Telling the Time: A Conclusion 192 Chapter Five – More About Time: Across the Wartime Diaries, In Time and Over Time ……………………………………………………… 201 Introduction 201 A Day At A Time 203 ‘We bought our poppies from Ena on Thursday’: Social Interaction in Wartime Diary-Entries 208 ‘The picture was so real’: Classifying Time 218 One Day And Another 226 ‘A Day’ and its Problematics 233 (i) The (de)stability of the ‘writing present’ 233 (ii) ‘Were times more gracious?’ M-O diaries and remembering 238 (iii) ‘Till 12 read Sitwell in bed’: accounting for time? 242 (iv) Social times, the news and Mass-Observation 248 A Day at a Time: A Conclusion 258 Conclusion – On Time, Diaries and Mass-Observation ………………………. 269 References ………………………………………………………………………... 283 Additional References 306 List of the Original Material Examined from the M-O Archive 307 Appendices ………………………………………………………………………... 310 Appendix 1: Nella Last’s comments regarding her Aunt Sarah 310-312 Appendix 2: M-O Wartime Diarists, Directive Respondents & Observers Examined by Date/Event 313-314 Appendix 3: Background and Writing Lives of the M-O Wartime Diarists Examined 315-319 2 Women’s M-O Diaries: Writing, Time & ‘Subjective Cameras’ List of Figures Figure 1.1 The Social Area of an Observer 41 Figure 2.1 Number of Wartime Diarists by Sex per Year 50 List of Tables Table 2.1 Yeta Lane’s Two Synopses 57-58 Table 2.2 Celia Fremlin’s Drafted Chapters 61-63 Table 4.1 Sampling Nella Last’s Wartime Diary 150-151 Table 5.1 Wartime Events and Diary-Entries 204 Table 5.2 Classification of Wartime Diary-Entries for 11 November 1939 209-210 Table 5.3 11 November M-O Diary-Entries Over Time 227-228 3 Women’s M-O Diaries: Writing, Time & ‘Subjective Cameras’ Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex, for permission to use quotations from original archive material. The Archive staff, particularly Joy Eldridge, Fiona Courage, Sandra Koa Wing (who very sadly died in 2007), Karen and Simon, and its Director Dorothy Sheridan, helped me considerably with my research and I would like to express special thanks to them. My thanks also go to scholars who have given their advice, in particular Margaretta Jolly, Jaana Loipponen, Jennifer Purcell, Irene Rafanell, Hilary Rose, Kim Seaton and Fiona Smyth. Events organised by the Scottish & Northern Narratives Network, the Centre for Narrative & Auto/Biographical Studies (NABS), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities (IASH) and the Documents of Life Group at Newcastle University all provided wonderful forums for discussion, developing ideas and presenting draft papers, and I would like to thank all involved. My sincere thanks to the University of Edinburgh’s Sociology department, especially Sue Renton for her unfailing consideration, and also to Sociology at Newcastle University where this thesis began. My deepest and heartfelt thanks must go to my supervisor Liz Stanley for her exceptional and inspirational guidance, and her generosity and encouragement throughout this project. I am also very grateful to the ESRC for fully funding this research (PTA-030-2004-00614). Outwith academia, the support that friends have shown is gratefully acknowledged: Vicky Chamberlain, Sarah Lambson, Ujwala Donde and Vicky Turmaine deserve particular mention. Finally, my nearest and dearest Fabian Wedekind and Brenda Salter cannot be thanked enough for their daily kindnesses, forbearance, perspective-giving and, in the case of the former, ferocious proof- reading. Thank you! This thesis is dedicated to my father Frank William Salter (1947-2005) 4 Women’s M-O Diaries: Writing, Time & ‘Subjective Cameras’ Abstract This thesis concerns women’s wartime diaries written for the radical social research organisation Mass-Observation (M-O) between 1939 and 1967, treating these as ‘social texts’ informed by social and temporal practices which also influence what ‘a diary’ is more widely perceived to ‘be’ as a genre of writing. It analyses the centrality of time and temporality to these social practices, to the relationship between writing and representation, and also to what it was to write a diary specifically for M-O and thus to position oneself as a ‘subjective camera’. Chapter One overviews the genesis and activities of M-O, its co-founders’ research perspectives and how these influenced activities in Worktown and the Economics of Everyday Life project and also in Blackheath, London. Blackheath activities are examined in detail because M-O’s Directives and Day-Diaries were organised from there, the latter providing the material for Jennings and Madge’s (1937) May Twelfth , the basis for their conceptualisation of ‘subjective cameras’ and also the starting point for the wartime diaries. Chapter Two discusses the origins of the wartime diaries, and analyses anthologies compiled using this material, the individual M-O diaries that have been published, and two attempts in the 1940s to produce M-O books from the diaries, discussing how previous uses have influenced my own analytic approach. Chapter Three examines the complications that M-O diaries make to popular understandings of the diary form, in particular by the multiple and diverse influences impinging upon writing a diary for M-O. A key example concerns overlaps between M-O diaries and letters, showing that epistolary conventions and practices are extensively drawn on by M-O and its diarists and that inscription of times and dates are central to this. Chapter Four examines temporal aspects of the diary- genre and analyses their writing ‘over time’ by focusing on the long-term diary written by Nella Last, what she did with time in its pages, and how the methodological approach I utilised for sampling and analysing it impacts on interpretation of temporal matters. Chapter Five analyses diary-entries written by different women for the same dates, exploring discrete specific temporal points to examine what is happening with time in relation to this, again reflectively commenting on the interpretational consequences of methodological strategies. The Conclusion considers M-O’s idea of diarists as ‘subjective cameras’ and theorises its connections to time and diary-writing. 5 Women’s M-O Diaries: Writing, Time & ‘Subjective Cameras’ Guide to Reader The spelling, punctuation, grammar and emphases used in the manuscript Mass-Observation materials have been followed as closely as possible and are retained in the extracts used in this thesis, unless otherwise indicated. With some extracts (usually, but not exclusively, when quoting more than one diary-entry written by the same diarist in succession or when quoting from M-O organisational notes/letters), I have also attempted to retain their format to give an impression of the layout of the text, although I acknowledge that in most cases the word-processing of this thesis will have made a difference. I have used ellipses to indicate where words from quotations have been excised and, to the best of my knowledge, all such editorial interventions are ‘marked’ in the text, although I of course recognise the likelihood of my own error. I have used square brackets to show where I occasionally insert additional and non- original text within the text of diary-entries and other quotations. And in a few cases I have enclosed a question mark within these square brackets to denote words in the original manuscripts that could not be confidently interpreted. Mass-Observation Abbreviations : Mass-Observation M-O Mass-Observation Archive M-O A Diarist Number D 5353, for example Directive Respondent DR 1061, for example Topic Collection TC File Report FR WT Worktown N.B. Other abbreviations have been inserted in footnotes where relevant because of their infrequency. 6 Women’s M-O Diaries: Writing, Time & ‘Subjective Cameras’ ~ Chapter One ~ Mass-Observation: Ordinary People and Their Lives “… No war is ever like another – the dreadful slaughter of the First World War – the misery & squalor of the trenches, then the destruction of the cities, the terror of Air Raids.
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