This summer Lucy Robinson invited Ben Jones to use the Observing the 80s resources to write a paper for the New Times Revisited conference held at the University of Birmingham. The panel included papers by Lucy and Jill Kirby, who expertly introduced the resource. Here Ben reflects on how the material challenged his assumptions about people’s social identities and opened up new questions about the relationship between politics, ‘race’ and everyday life in Britain since the 1960s.
I have long been fascinated by how ordinary people experienced the momentous events of the twentieth century. As both an undergraduate and post-graduate student at the University of Sussex I spent hours poring over the diaries, ephemera and directive replies collected by Mass Observation (1937-c.1949) and the later Mass Observation Project (1981-present). When Lucy asked me to write a paper for an academic conference based on the online material digitised for observing the 80s I was excited and also a little apprehensive. Given that I needed to produce a fifteen minute paper, I had some concerns: would I be overwhelmed by the data? Conversely, would there be enough material to produce a coherent argument? What if I couldn’t find anything compelling to say?
These anxieties were soon dispelled by a combination of serendipity, having a more or less coherent research agenda, and immersing myself in the richness of the archive. I have a long-standing interest in social identities and the ways in which people talk about class – both the common experiences which bind them together and the markers of occupation, lifestyle, accent & deportment which signal difference and social distance. Both the oral histories and the directive replies opened up a multiple perspectives on these themes. Coherence was provided by the spring 1990 directive on social divisions. Here respondents were asked, among other things, for their views on the royal family, the establishment, their attitudes to people of different ethnic groups, their understanding of national ‘character’ and what it meant to be middle and working class.
My methodology was a combination of what is sometimes rather grandly titled ‘grounded theory’ (allowing the themes to ‘emerge’ from the material – from what the respondents themselves wrote) and serendipity. For example, it soon became clear that I had to rapidly get to grips with recent research on ‘race’ and immigration in Britain since the 1960s. Fortunately my colleague Camilla Schofield was able to provide me with crucial reading, not least her own ground-breaking work on Enoch Powell and his working class supporters, now published as Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain. This enabled me to historicize some of the claims being made about ‘race’ and belonging, however the sheer range of questions asked and the depth of replies recorded meant that some themes couldn’t make it into the paper. Discussion of people’s family histories of class, mobility and occupation would have to be limited as would their often lengthy rationalisations of who they would choose to sit next to on a train and their hierarchies of different jobs. I also reluctantly decided there was no room for people’s experiences of snobbery – although I will return to this theme in later research.
Two core themes emerged around claims to ‘ordinariness’ and these formed the basis of my discussion of the material. Firstly working class respondents largely situated themselves as ‘ordinary’ compared to both ‘the poor’ and the middle classes or ‘the rich’. Secondly, some respondents identified as ‘ordinary’ compared both to certain, defined minority groups who were perceived to be claiming ‘special’ rights and privileges and social elites who had enabled or allowed immigration. Other views of ‘race’ and ethnicity were more complex than this suggests with a number of respondents praising integration and cultural pluralism. See the full paper here
The New Times Revisited conference showcased the vibrancy of research on what one might term the ‘long 1980s’. Audience responses to the paper were critical and encouraging. I sometimes worried that respondents positioning of themselves as ordinary to identify as working class became lost in wider discussions in which ‘the ordinary’ seemed to stand in for all sorts of everyday practices & experiences so that the historically specific, classed claims of this social positioning became obscured. However, participants pointed out key questions which need to be addressed as the project progresses e.g. how ‘typical’ are the 18 digitised responses of the much larger number collected by MOP? Does the emphasis on working class respondents reproduce problematic assumptions about working class racism, obscuring the attitudes of the middle classes? To what extent are respondents encouraged to thinks of themselves as ‘ordinary’ and ‘representative’ through their participation in MOP? And perhaps most importantly, how are the experiences of black and ethnic minority Briton’s to be accessed & represented, given the overwhelming ‘whiteness’ of the panel?
Using observing the 80s forced me to confront important lacunae in my previous research: the space where class and ‘race’ intersect to mould social identities and shape political action. I will be pursuing this research online – exploring other directives and listening to complementary interviews – before getting down to the Mass Observation Archive itself when it reopens November 2013. In 2014 students on my Twentieth Century Britain course at UEA will be selecting and analysing sources from Observing the 80s as part of their coursework – I’ll be drawing on my own experiences to help them to contextualise and evaluate the sources – they will no doubt be developing new lines of inquiry which hadn’t even occurred to me. It is this potential for mutually enriching the co-dependent activities of teaching and research which makes working with Observing the 80s resources so exciting.
Ben Jones is a lecturer in Modern British History at the University of East Anglia. His book The working class in mid twentieth-century England: community, identity and social memory is available now.