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Recording Leisure Lives: Sports, Spectacles and Spectators in 20th century Britain
Tuesday 3rd April 2012 at Bolton Museum in collaboration with Bolton Museum and the Leisure Studies Association
Keynote speakers include Matt Taylor, author of The Association Game: A History of British Football, Jeffrey Richards, author of Cinema and Radio in Britain and America, 1920-60,
The conference sub-themes are:
Sporting mega-events
Papers (20 minutes) on leisure in the twentieth century which relate to any of these themes are invited. A volume of post-conference papers will be published by the Leisure Studies Association. Please submit proposals to R.Snape@bolton.ac.uk and to Matthew.Constantine@bolton.gov.uk by 20th January 2012.
Cost (Including refreshments and lunch) £35
Concessions (Students and non-waged) £20
For a full conference outline or to book a place please click here.
FutureEverything: Mass Observation at 75: Critical Mass
FutureEverything has announced the theme of the 2012 FutureEverything conference. ‘Mass Observation at 75: Critical Mass’ will mark the 75th anniversary of the Mass Observation movement by exploring the evolving character of mass participation and development of citizen-led content within digital and open public spaces. For more information about the conference visit the FutureEverything website.
Observing the 1980s
The University of Sussex has been awarded JISC funding for a project called ‘Observing the 1980s’. This project will make selected material collected by Mass Observation during the 1980s, together with oral history interviews from the British Library, available through an Open Educational Resource (OER). More information about the project will be announced once as the project starts.
The Mass Observation Anniversary Lectures Series and Mass Observation Anniversaries Conference
In 2012 it will be 75 years since Mass Observation was founded. The newer Mass Observation Project is 30 years old in 2011. To celebrate we are hosting a series of lectures starting in October 2011 and ending in May 2012 and a three day conference in July 2012. Click here to find out more about the lecture series and here to find out about the conference.
Exploring Mass Observation - short course
The Centre for Community Engagement at the University of Sussex is offering a short course using material from the Mass Observation Archive. Students on the course will learn about the history of Mass Observation and discover how it records community histories.
Length: 4 sessions
Time: Wednesdays, 10am - 4pm
Dates: 19, 26 October; 2, 9 November 2011.
Fee: £90 (full), £45 (concession)
Venue: University of Sussex, Falmer
Click here for more details about the course.
Annual Social History Society Conference
The Annual Social History Society Conference is taking place at the University of Brighton next year, 3-5 April 2012. This is the leading annual social and cultural history conference in Britain. In previous years there have always been a great range of papers that draw on and engage with Mass Observation.
Abstracts for individual papers and panels of 3 to 4 papers are invited and can be submitted via the Social History Society's website where you can also find further details of the conference.
The deadline for abstracts is 26 October 2011.
Lives at War
Lives at War is a groundbreaking digital resource aimed at secondary school children
Image from the Lives at War game
learning about life on the Home Front during the Second World War. With funding from the Digital Film Archive Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund, Lives at War allows schoolchildren to engage with the Second World War in a 3D virtual environment.
The content of the game has been developed with a group of school children aged 14 – 15 working with older people from Brighton who remember the War. The intergenerational group has been supported along the way by filmmaker Annis Joslin, with additional input from a range of teachers, historians and archivists. Together they have visited a number of museums and archives including the Mass Observation Archive to research and select material for the game.
Lives at War has been developed in partnership with the Lighthouse, Screen Archive South East, Corporation Pop, and the Mass Observation Archive. To play the game visit here.
The Really Big Summer Diary
Change4Life is calling for young people and their families to keep a 300 word diary of a fun activities they take part in on Saturday 13 August 2011. It is one of many summer activities planned as part of the Really Big Summer Adventure - a project to inspire children and adults to keep active.
The organisers say: "Whatever you're up to, we'd like to know! You can do it as an individual, a family, or a group of friends. The idea is to record the active fun you had so that it forms a snapshot of what people in Britain were doing that day."
Completed entries should be emailed to summerdiary@dh.gsi.gov.uk. Entrants can include their names, ages and home towns if they wish, but it's not essential.
The diaries will be posted on the Mass Observation Online Community website for the public to view for five years, before forming part of the permanent Mass Observation Archive collection. For more details about the project visit the Change4Life website.
New publications
A number of books using material from the Mass Observation Archive have been published.
Belfast Blitz: The people's story by Stephen Douds (Blackstaff Press Ltd) uses letters, Mass Observation diaries, and newspaper accounts to tell the story of the Belfast Blitz. The book covers the idyllic days of peace before the raids began, the worst days of the bombing and the aftermath when a mortuary was set up in St George s Market.
Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation is a new book by Professor Ruth Finnegan. Professor Finnegan, a former MOA Trustee, commissioned the 2006 directive on quoting and has used some of the responses in her book. You can purchase the book online from the Open Book Publishers.
An extract from James Thomas’ Mass Observation occasional paper “Beneath the mourning veil: Mass Observation and the death of Diana” has been published in Lest We Forget: How We Remember the Dead (The History Press Ltd). The book is endorsed by the Royal British Legion, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year. Click here for more information about the Mass Observation occasional paper series.
Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in the Second World War is the latest book by Virginia Nicholson. The book uses diaries from the Mass Observation Archive to explore what daily life was like for women living during the Second World War. The book has been published widely by Viking.
Unmasking age: The significance of age for social research (Policy Press). Drawing on a long career in social research the book's author, Bill Bytheway, critically examines various methods and discusses ways of uncovering the realities of age. This publication uses material from the Mass Observation Project and other social research organisations.
A Portrait of the Ordinary Festival-goer
As part of the Southbank Centre's 60th Anniversary of the Festival of Britain the theatre company, Inspector Sands have created two 15-minute mini-shows which will be performed on the weekend of 2th July 2011
In their lifetime, the average visitor to the Southbank’s summer festival will have eaten 9,100 eggs, sent 670,000 emails, have had three regularly recurring stress dreams and watched a day's worth of footage on YouTube. They will have eaten cereal for breakfast, be carrying £1.73 in loose change and wake up once a week with a song stuck in their head. They will be worried about an uncertain future and nostalgic for the simpler days of the past.
Inspired by the spirit of the original festival and the work of the Mass Observation movement, Inspector Sands invite you to join their mission to create ‘A Portrait of the Ordinary Festival-goer’ through which they will take stock of the past, try to understand the present and work out what to do next… For more details visit the Southbanks website.Mass Observation at HumberMouth
Simon Garfield will be talking about his book Our Hidden Lives (which uses diaries found in the Mass Observation Archive) at the HumberMouth literature festival in Hull on 9th July. For more details visit the HuberMouth website.
New Trustee for the Archive
The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive have welcomed a new member to the Trustee board. Jeremy MacClancy is a Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences and Law at Oxford Brooks University. His research interests include social and culturally-based food practices and research methods for the anthropological study of food and its consumption. He is also the Director of ACCEND (the Anthropological Centre for Conservation, Environment and Development). Professor MacClancy joined the Trustee Board in June 2011.
Mass Observation Online - Update
Adam Matthew Digital have published the second update to Mass Observation Online. The update includes:
Mass Observation Online: Update to the digital archive
Directives: Men & Women, 1943-1945
The Worktown Collection
Topic Collections:
TC 26: “BRITAIN CAN MAKE IT”
TC 42: POSTERS 1939-47
TC 63: SMOKING HABITS 1937-65
TC 85: DRINKING HABITS
TC 86: GAMBLING
For more information visit the Adam Matthew Digital website.
12th May 2011 - Be a Mass Observer for the day
The Mass Observation Archive is calling for electronic day diaries written on the 12th May.
The call is open to everybody. For more information, and to find out how to submit your diary click here.
Census & Society: why everyone counts
Mon 7 Mar 2011 - Sun 29 May 2011, Folio Society Gallery, British Library
A new exhibition at the British Library called Census & Society: why everyone counts explores why we collect population statistics and considers what the results tell us about Britain.
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Why a Census? published by HMSO, 1961 (credit BL)
Exhibits include:
• 19th century maps and charts showing population distribution and other features
• Punch cartoons, and others, satirising the census and our attitudes to completing the forms
• Copies of a census return for Annie Besant, a 19th century political author and campaigner
• Material produced by alternative projects, including photographs taken by Mass Observation’s photographer, Humphrey Spender, as part of their Worktown project.
For more information about the exhibition visit the British Library’s webpage or for more information about the 2011 census click here
The Second World War: Popular culture and cultural memory
13 July 2011 - 15 July 2011
The Centre for Research in Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton is hosting an interdisciplinary conference which will examine popular culture of the Second World War. For more information about the conference visit the Centre’s website.
Sussex Archive Linked Data Application (SALDA)
This is a very exciting six month project which started in February to convert the catalogue records of the Mass Observation Archive into Linked Data. Linked Data is a way of sharing and connecting data using the internet and enables researchers find more resources. The project is funded by JISC . We have a blog to record the progress of the project and you can find out more here.
Life in a Day
On 24th July 2010, the Life in a Day team sent out a call on the internet for people from around the world to record a diary-style film and upload it onto the website, YouTube.com. Over 80,000 films were uploaded and the footage has now been edited into a film, executively produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.
Kevin Macdonald visited the Archive in early July 2010 to produce a short film to promote the project. In the film Macdonald explains that the Life in a Day project is inspired by techniques developed by Mass Observation during the late 1930s and 1940s. You can view the film here.
Life in a Day will premier at the Sundance Film Festival. The film will be broadcast on YouTube.com at 1am GMT on Friday 28th January (local time 5pm PST on Thursday 27th January). For more information visit the Life in a Day’s YouTube page
A word from Dorothy.....
In December 2010 I shall at last be bowing out from my job at the Mass Observation Archive. As regular readers of the MO website may know, the Trustees have been employing me to direct the MO Project on a very part-time basis since I retired from my full-time post in September 2008.
Now it’s time for me to move on again – to travel, to be a proper grandmother to my grandchildren in Australia, to see friends, to take part in other projects (like QueenSpark Books), to get more active politically and also to have time to read, or even just to sleep.... who knows? Mass Observation has defined me for so many years that I am not quite sure what lies ahead. I started work as Tom Harrisson’s assistant back in 1974 when he first brought the papers to Sussex and I have worked on the “new” MO since 1981. How amazed I would have been if someone had said to me back then that the MO Project would still be running in 2010!
I still plan to continue my links with the Archive and its Trustees in a voluntary capacity. I may even do research on the material I have helped to collect for so many years. It will be fun to work “on the other side of the counter” for a change, joining the ranks of students and scholars who sit in our reading rooms every day. Many thanks to all the Mass Observers - past and present - who have made my working life so rewarding and diverse, and to the MO Trustees for their faith in me, and of course to my colleagues at the Archive for their friendship, support and enthusiasm.
Nella Last in the 1950s
‘I can never understand how the scribbles of such an ordinary person ... can possibly have value.
Nella Last, 2nd September 1949 
The third instalment of Nella Last’s diary has been published. Edited by Robert and Patricia Malcolmson, Nella Last in the 1950s picks up where Nella Last’s Peace (also edited by the Malcomsoms) left off. In this volume Nella is in her 60s and is writing against a backdrop of a changing Britain. Her diary offers a detailed and moving account of her daily life and provides an insight into her thoughts and fears.
The diary is published by Profile Books. To buy it from Amazon click here
Recording Leisure Lives: Everyday Leisure in 20th Century Britain
The University of Bolton, in collaboration with Bolton Museum and Archive Service and the Leisure Studies Association, are hosting the annual Recording Leisure Lives Conference on 19th April 2011. Keynote speakers include David Fowler, author of Rolf Gardiner and English Culture, 1920-1950: the Apostle of Youth; Nick Hubble, author of Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory and Claire Langhamer, author of Women’s Leisure in England 1920-1960.
Inspired by Humphrey Spender’s ‘Worktown’ photographs taken in Bolton for Mass Observation in the 1930s, the conference will feature a themed exhibition of his images of everyday leisure in the Worktown gallery at the Museum.
The conference sub-themes are:Papers (20 minutes) on leisure in the twentieth century which relate to any of these themes are invited. A volume of post-conference papers will be published by the Leisure Studies Association. Please submit proposals to R.Snape@bolton.ac.uk and to Matthew.Constantine@bolton.gov.uk by 21st January 2011.
Cost (Including refreshments and lunch) £35; Concessions ( Students and non-waged) £20
For a full conference outline or to book a place please visit the University of Bolton's website
