The social-research organization Mass-Observation was founded in 1937. In this book, the true extent and significance of Mass-Observation's unique role in the formation of postwar Britain's idea of itself through the examination of everyday life across the long twentieth century. An excellent guide to Mass-Observation and the period generally, this scholarly work also provides surprising insights into the role social research has played in the development of policy and mass democracy.

Mass Observation was founded in 1937 with the aim of researching the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. One of its best-loved publications is The Pub and the People (1943), a unique study of one of Britain's best-loved pastimes, describing how people behaved in pubs, what and how much they drank, and the decor and layout of the average pre-war alehouse. Alongside sociological interest it offers amusing insights into an era when supping pints was only for the roughest customers, and beer was considered helpful not only to general health ('There is no bad ale, so Grandma said') but also (contra the porter in Macbeth) to the act of love. 'The authors of this book have unearthed much curious information.' George Orwell, Listener 'Anyone with an interest in the history of beer and pubs in Britain ought to read it.' Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog

Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain critically analyses the role that visual culture played in the early development of Mass-Observation, the innovative British anthropological research group founded in 1937. The group?s production and use of painting, collage, photography, and other media illustrates not only the broad scope of Mass-Observation?s efforts to document everyday life, but also, more specifically, the centrality of visual elements to its efforts at understanding national identity in the 1930s. Although much interest has previously focused on Mass-Observation?s use of written reports and opinion surveys, as well as diaries that were kept by hundreds of volunteer observers, this book is the first full-length study of the group?s engagement with visual culture. Exploring the paintings of Graham Bell and William Coldstream; the photographs of Humphrey Spender; the paintings, collages, and photographs of Julian Trevelyan; and Humphrey Spender?s photographs and widely recognized ?Mass-Observation film?, Spare Time, among other sources, Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain positions these works as key sources of information with regard to illuminating the complex character of British identity during the Depression era.

During the crisis of the Second World War in Britain, official Air Raid Precautions made the management of daily life a moral obligation of civil defence by introducing new prescriptions for the care of homes, animals, and persons displaced through evacuation. This book examines how the Mass-Observation movement recorded and shaped the logics of care that became central to those daily routines in homes and neighbourhoods. Kimberly Mair looks at how government publicity campaigns communicated new instructions for care formally, while the circulation of wartime rumours negotiated these instructions informally. These rumours, she argues, explicitly repudiated the improper socialization of evacuees and also produced a salient, but contested, image of the host as a good wartime citizen who was impervious to the cultural invasion of the ostensibly 'animalistic', dirty, and destructive house guest. Mair also considers the explicit contestations over the value of the lives of pets, conceived as animals who do not work with animal caregivers whose use of limited provisions or personal sacrifice could then be judged in the context of wartime hardship. Together, formal and informal instructions for caregiving reshaped everyday habits in the war years to an idealized template of the good citizen committed to the war and nation, with Mass-Observation enacting a watchful form of care by surveilling civilian feeling and habit in the process.

The third and final part of the hugely popular and critically acclaimed trilogy of diaries drawn from the Mass Observation Archive. Beginning at the height of the Blitz in 1940 and ending with wary victory four-and-a-half years later, this is the intimate story of five ordinary lives caught up in the most dramatic of events.

A fascinating re-evaluation of the social history of the second world war, looking at the diaries kept by nine 'ordinary' people in wartime Britain for the Mass Observation social research organization.

How well did civilian morale stand up to the pressures of total war and what factors were important to it? This book rejects contentions that civilian morale fell a long way short of the favourable picture presented at the time and in hundreds of books and films ever since. While acknowledging that some negative attitudes and behaviour existed-panic and defeatism, ration-cheating and black-marketeering-it argues that these involved a very small minority of the population. In fact, most people behaved well, and this should be the real measure of civilian morale, rather than the failing of the few who behaved badly. The book shows that although before the war, the official prognosis was pessimistic, measures to bolster morale were taken nevertheless, in particular with regard to protection against air raids. An examination of indicative factors concludes that moral fluctuated but was in the main good, right to the end of the war. In examining this phenomenon, due credit is accorded to government policies for the maintenance of morale, but special emphasis is given to the 'invisible chain' of patriotic feeling that held the nation together during its time of trial.

The authors of this book analyze the Mass-Observation Project as a way of understanding the nature of writing and the social conditions within which people write, the social purposes they use writing for, and how writing fits in with their life histories, all of which define writing itself. The authors are also interested in how writing is implicated in power relations, and how it is used to establish identities and to transform social situations and relationships. The Mass-Observation Project is a unique institutional context for writing. From the beginning, in Britain, the project involved ordinary people observing and writing about life and collecting those writings for future use by researchers, the media, students and the public in general.

'We Are At War' continues Garfield's successful formula of interweaving five ordinary lives from the Mass-Observation archive begun with 'Our Hidden Lives'. Beginning in the weeks before the war, and ending a year later with the Battle of Britain, the book tells the story of the war on the home front.