Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 322

Mass-Observation was founded in 1937 by Tom Harrison and Charles Madge to create ‘an anthropology of ourselves’. This was to be achieved by enlisting ‘ordinary people’ as volunteers to ‘observe’ the world around them and report to the organization on a regular basis through open-ended questionnaires (‘directives’). These asked for opinions on current events, fashions or simply everyday life. They were also asked to observe other people going about their day-to day lives. In 1939 fearing (unjustifiably as it turned out) that the organization would be suppressed under wartime regulations, they asked their members to keep diaries for the duration of the War with a view to producing a unique record of the conflict.

The M-O observers responded well. In the next six years several hundred diaries were sent to M-O in London. A few lasted all six years, more, like the one reprinted here, lasted only part of the War. What is certain is that the vast majority succeeded in their aims and present a unique insight into the experiences of the people of wartime Britain. The diaries, and the rest of the collection covering the period 1937 to 1947 is now held in the Mass-Observation archive in the library of the University of Sussex.

However, very little of the material generated by M-O is rural. The reasons for this are simple. Although there was no attempt to discourage rural writers, those who founded M-O believed that the nature of ‘mass’ modern society was urban, and much of their own work was centred on Bolton and London as representative of that society. Nevertheless there is some rural material in both the directives and especially in a small number (about 20) diaries. These vary in quality and interest for the agricultural or rural social historian. There is, for instance, the diary of a Cambridge undergraduate which contains excellent material on wartime farming. Despite being medically unfit, he wished to contribute to the war effort and worked as a farm worker in Buckinghamshire and then as a forestry worker in the east Midlands. Another diary, that of a rural schoolmistress in Sussex, gives a detailed account for the whole of the War of village social life.

The diary of Rachel Dhonau is one of the ‘rural’ diaries, although it has to be said it offers little, on the surface at least, for the agricultural historian. Against that, it does present a fascinating account of a rural small town, Sheringham on the north Norfolk coast, in the middle years of the war. Although born in Norfolk, Rachel and her husband Jakob spent the immediate pre-war years in Paris. With the fall of France they returned with their young son to London, and then with the onset of the blitz they moved in September 1940 to Rachel’s mother’s home in Sheringham. At that point Jakob volunteered and entered the army as a private.

By 1941, when the diary begins, Rachel was very unhappily separated from Jakob and working full-time in the Sheringham food office, one of some 1500 local offices dealing with the administration of wartime food regulations. In March 1942, she took up a teaching post in Norwich, where she stayed two or three nights a week in a hostel.

Like many of the other wartime diaries, Rachel’s is at the core a personal account. We know what she reads, what films she saw, what programmes she listened to on the radio and what she thought of them all. In March 1942 the News of the World is delivered instead of the Ob server and she is horrified, ‘… what an incredible paper. Murder, rape, pornography. What a world this is’ (p.115). She also reports the war and especially the rumours of war, which are again a feature of most diaries. It is difficult from the standpoint of the present-day to see how much credence was given to rumours of invasion, always thwarted with terrible German casualties, and secondhand accounts of the carnage inflicted by bombing. She herself experienced some of that first hand in Norwich, and wrote an account of bombing and morale for M-O which is included as an appendix. Aircraft, ours and theirs, provide a constant, noisy and fearful backdrop to the whole text.

It is in these details of the everyday that the strength of the diary lies – an authentic voice of rural, provincial England all too seldom heard in accounts of wartime. However, to many who read this journal the account of the food office with its day-to-day bureaucracy will provide a real insight into the local world of wartime food production and distribution. In August 1941, for example, she confronts the seasonal demands of agriculture alongside the normal work of the day:

I dealt with the harvest applications (most of the farmers who have already applied and had permits for tea, sugar and margarine begin again with applications for cheese), bee applications, counterfoils, coupons (Monday being the day when butcher’s supplementary permits have to be issued), queries about milk and eggs (p.19).

She also dealt with animal feed and with farmers confused and angered by wartime regulations:

… did a few animal feeding stuff permits and took phone calls, largely from milk retailers, informing us they wouldn’t retail milk under the rationing scheme. All this milk business is made difficult because we also have the Milk Marketing Board to cope with. These poor farmers feel quite confused having separate sets of instructions to cope with (p.25).

As well as the particular needs of the farming community, the day-to-day business of rationing, of shortages and even the black market recur, constantly giving an insight into local problems which are absent from the bigger accounts of wartime. There is also a memorable description of the petty tyrant who ran the office, was universally disliked and, in the end, was her main reason for leaving to teach in Norwich.

Very few of the M-O diaries are available outside the archive, and for that reason alone this is a very welcome publication. But there is more than that. It gives a very unusual inside account of the war from, if not the countryside, at least a country town. It is full of insight on day-to-day life which constantly reminds us of the local, mundane realties of wartime, but it also speaks to national concerns. Rachel, in common with many diarists, comments on the war and social change. As someone who was broadly left-wing, she welcomed Beveridge and supported the Soviet Union, even starting to learn Russian. However, especially given the years of the diary which are reprinted here (there are a further 14 months in the archive) it is the grimness of wartime provincial life which comes through time and again. Rationing, widespread shortages of the items of everyday life, the absence of a loved one, and, in the middle of the war, no real end in sight, dominate, and point out time and again, just how central simply making ends meet was, especially for a woman. She sums this up in a part of the diary not printed in full: ‘I am getting extremely tired of this shoddiness. Everything is shoddy – paper, clothes, wool, food. Ersatz. Truly the era of the second rate’ (p.241).

Yet like many of her generation she had hopes for the future. Beveridge promised a better land after the War in both rural and urban areas. She read widely and critically and was very uncertain about the conduct of the war, especially the bombing of Germany. But she hoped for better. In September 1942 she replied to an M-O directive on post-war problems which mentioned agriculture. Her comments, not in the diary, are simple and express the feelings of many country people of her generation: ‘I wish things could be arranged that my husband and I could have a farm after the war’. Unfortunately this was not to be.