Founded in early 1937, Mass Observation (MO) is a groundbreaking, social research organisation. It has focused its investigations on the ‘ordinary people’; its founders believed that their attitudes and opinions were constantly being misrepresented, stifled and disregarded in the press and by politicians. It pioneered techniques to enable the people to ‘speak for themselves’. It appealed to them, voluntarily, to submit diaries to the organisation, recording their daily experiences, and their private thoughts and feelings. It also asked them to answer questionnaires which probed sensitive issues – their marital relationships and income, views on race and religion, and on every aspect of life on the home front during wartime. For the Second World War, the MO archive provides a comprehensive and unique source for the study of civilian life. This is especially so as the national press was then state-censored, and government files often fail to record the experience of ‘ordinary people’.
Five residents in Northern Ireland submitted diaries to Mass Observation almost exclusively during the war period, and replied to its questionnaires. This book is the first to examine and make accessible these invaluable records in full; it contains the text of respondents’ diaries, summarises their replies to the questionnaires and provides a comprehensive, biographical account of each of them. It captures and illuminates the lived, everyday experience of these ‘ordinary’ individuals at that time: their intimate thoughts and opinions, joys and passions, anxieties and idiosyncrasies. It provides an unparallelled and novel record of quiet lives which were confronted with, and transformed by, extraordinary and traumatic events which lay far beyond their power to control.