Observing the 1940s

The publication of four volumes of edited diaries, written for the social research organization Mass-Observation (M-O), in the space of 13 months is an unusual and welcome event for historians, signalling a revival of interest in the richest and least used collection of material in the M-O Archive. The 500 personal diaries are the largest collection of diaries from the 1940s Britain, easily exceeding the second biggest collection of diaries at the Imperial War Museum. The diary collection, which approaches one million pages in length, has not been included in the Adam Matthew project to make more of the M-O Archive available on microfilm. This decision reflects the fact that many researchers find the diaries, which haven't been indexed or summarized, too dense to use effectively and chose to concentrate on the topic collections and file reports. Given that resource constraints force researchers to adopt a strategy of picking the lowest, ripest fruit first, the publication of a handful of these diaries in an accessible and affordable format is good news for historians with limited time and money. Nella Last's War, the first edited M-O diary to be published back in 1981, is now a standard source for historians, cited regularly in articles and monographs on everyday life in wartime Britain. Extracts from Last's diary have been included in a recent anthology of war diarists.1 In time, the four edited volumes of diaries will become standard sources too

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