Conclusion: Mass-Observation Reassessed

Abstract

The ‘rediscovery’ of M-O by Addison and Calder set in motion a process of changing our perception of the history of the Second World War and its consequences. In particular, it has helped to highlight how modes of representation developed by M-O, itself, privileged a universalised image of the working class as the embodiment of a Britishness, which still endures through powerful symbols such as the monarchy and the National Health Service. The historian Ross McKibbin has written a powerful description of the political and cultural shift caused by the war:

By the end of the 1930s the Conservative Party had created a huge, heterogeneous, but stable coalition. There was nothing to suggest it was provisional; everything to suggest it was a natural historical outcome. The only obvious threats to it were external. In this sense the Second World War threw British history, and even more, English history, off course … More or less everyone in the interwar years agreed that England was a democracy. The question was — whose democracy? Before the outbreak of war the question seemed to have been answered … the ruling definition of democracy was individualist and its proponents chiefly a modernised middle class; in the 1940s the ruling definition was social-democratic and its proponents chiefly the organised working class. The class, therefore, which in the 1930s was the class of progress became in the 1940s the class of resistance (McKibbin 1998: 531–3).