Latest news

Celebrating Sandra

Two seats commissioned in memory of the Mass Observation Archive’s first Development

Officer, Sandra Koa Wing, have been installed in the reception area of Special Collections in the Library at the University of Sussex. The seats were designed and made by Brighton based artists, Marcus and Cath Laffan, and were purchased using the money kindly donated to a fund established to celebrate Sandra’s life and commitment to the Mass Observation Archive.

On 1 May this year the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive hosted an event to celebrate the publication of Sandra’s book, Our Longest Days: A people’s history of the Second World War, and to thank everyone who had donated to fund.

Written tributes about Sandra by Debby Shorley (Former chair of the Mass Observation Archive’s Trustees) and Dorothy Sheridan (Director of the Mass Observation Archive) can be found here.

 Angus Calder

The historian and poet, Angus Calder, has died. Angus was the author of The People's War: Britain 1939-1945 and was always very enthusiastic about the Mass Observation Archive. Dorothy Sheridan has written a tribute to Angus here.    

Nella Last’s Peace: The post-war diaries of “Housewife, 49”

After the success of Nella Last’s War and the ITV drama, “Housewife, 49”, Nella Last’s post-war Mass Observation diaries are to be published by Profile Books.

Nella Last’s Peace picks up where the first book left off. It is 1945 and the war has just ended. Nella is still a housewife living in Barrow-in-Furness and still faithfully sending in her diaries to the Mass Observation office in London.  Nella records daily events and writes her hopes and fears for the post-war world and her diaries provide a personal account of life after the Second World War.

Nella Last’s Peace is edited by Patricia and Robert Malcomson and published by Profile Books. It is available to pre-order here.

Pure, Flawless Happiness. A new novel by Michael Swaine

Michael Swaine has published a new novel inspired by Tom Harrisson’s Living Through The Blitz and Mass Observation diaries.

It is September 1938 and Neville Chamberlain is flying for the first time. War is fast approaching and the atmosphere everywhere is ragged and anxious. Edith Schwarz is a young, middle-class journalist, the recent death of her father and betrayal by her lover having left her deeply confused even without this newly-added general fear. The death
of a commercial traveller throws her life into further turmoil, while the presence of Joe, a dissatisfied pacifist and the young man of her close friend, completes her circle of uncertainty.

By 1940, she will somehow need to have turned this chaos around if she is to survive the horror of the most unrelenting civilian bombing campaign in history. Sixty years later; she is given a chance to come to terms with the devastation arising from these events.

More information about Pure, Flawless Happiness can be found at this website.

 
Become a Friend of the Archive

The Friends form for 2008-09 is now ready to download.

Since 1991 the Friends of the Archive scheme has provided essential financial support for the Archive's activities. Over the past year we have used Friends’ subscriptions towards several projects. One of these was the design of this website. To support the Mass Observation Archive and the current Mass Observation Project please become a Friend of the Archive.

Our Longest Days: A people’s history of the Second World War

Edited by Sandra Koa Wing and with a forward by Philip Ziegler, Our Longest Days chronicles life on the home front during the Second World War. Full of previously unpublished Mass Observation diaries (including some written by Nella Last), the book brings together the unheard voices of men and women who were affected by six years of air raids and rationing. The result is a powerful and heart-warming insight into what wartime life was really like for the ‘ordinary’ people of Britain

Read what the Observer newspaper thought of this book here.      

Our Longest Days has been published in paperback by Profile books and can be purchased from Amazon.

The Wellcome Trust’s People’s Award

We are pleased to announce that Professor Lawrence Haddad (Director of the Institute of Development Studies) and Dorothy Sheridan (Mass Observation Director) have been granted a People’s Award by the Wellcome Trust. The award will enable us to ask the Mass Observation panel their thoughts about global responsibility and poverty. This directive will be sent out in autumn 2008 and the responses will be available for research in early 2009.    

Recording Leisure Lives: histories, archives & memories of leisure in 20th century Britain

A one-day conference on 18 March 2008 hosted by the University of Bolton in association with Bolton Museum will explore how leisure practices have been recorded, archived and understood in 20th century Britain. The conference will coincide with the opening of a permanent exhibition of Mass Observation photographs taken by Humphrey Spender. For more information about this conference click here.   

Trustee news

The Mass Observation Archive welcomes two new Trustees, Elizabeth Dunn and Kitty Inglis.

Elizabeth Dunn is a solicitor. She specialises in commercial law, copyright law, and intellectual property.

Kitty Inglis is to be the University of Sussex’s new Librarian. Kitty will take up her post in April 2008 and will join the Trust as an ex officio member.

Elizabeth and Kitty will both attend the next Trustees meeting in June 2008.  
 

Rose Hacker

Rose Hacker, former Mass Observer and member of the Co-operative Correspondence Club, has passed away at the age of 101.

Rose Hacker was commited to many social issues. She led an extraordinary life working as a social worker, Marriage Guidance counsellor, and writer. Rose worked as an investigator during the first phase of Mass Observation and after the birth of her first son in 1933 went on to be involved in the Co-operative Correspondence Club (CCC), which was a private magazine for mothers. The CCC  ran for 55 years. In 2006, at the age of 100, Rose became a columist for the Camden New Journal.

The CCC  papers were donated to the Mass Oberveration Archive in 1990. Material in this collection was used in Can Any Mother Help Me? For more information about this collection please contact Special Collections at the University of Sussex.

 

Can Any Mother Help Me?

Can Any Mother Help Me? has been republished in paperback by Faber.

The book, edited by Jenna Bailey, brings together pages of a secret magazine produced by the Co-operative Correspondence Club (CCC). You can read more about this book here

Can Any Mother Help Me? can be purchased through our Amazon shop here.