Still from Spare Time, dir. Humphrey Jennings. View this clip. You'll need the Real plug-in, download it here.

Mass Observation was not only the product of a desire to change society, but also of pure chance. If King Edward VIII hadn't fallen in love with Wallis Simpson, the project might never have happened. The abdication crisis of 1936, during which Edward gave up the throne to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, was a shock for left-wing intellectuals because it revealed the powerful hold that the monarchy still had on ordinary people's affections.

Great minds

As left-wingers debated their ignorance of the 'masses' in the New Statesman, Charles Madge wrote a letter to the journal saying that the public reaction to the abdication needed to be studied by 'mass observations'.

By coincidence, another intellectual, Tom Harrisson, had a poem printed for the first (and last) time in the New Statesman - on the same page as Madge's letter. He'd had a similar idea as to how to find out about working people, and contacted Madge.

Madge was a poet, born in 1912, who'd read science at Cambridge University but who left to become a journalist without finishing his degree. Humphrey Jennings had met him at university, and the two men shared an interest in surrealism and Marxism.

Harrisson was a year older and, while still a pupil at Harrow, had published a guide to local birds. Like Madge, he left Cambridge with no degree, and did eccentric things such as walking barefoot with his toenails painted red. In 1933 he went on an anthropological trip to the New Hebrides, where he studied a tribe of 'cannibals'.

After many adventures, including being taken off the island by Hollywood's Douglas Fairbanks Sr on his luxury yacht, Madge returned to Britain. Finding himself penniless and cut out of his angry father's will, he went to Bolton in Lancashire, where he did manual work and studied local working-class customs.

In 1937, Harrisson, Madge and Jennings teamed up and founded Mass Observation. Their aim was to look at British society with the same passion and precision that the new academic discipline of anthropology applied to so-called tribal cultures in the Third World.

Record keeping

Mass Observation pioneered a method which involved making precise observations of what people did during their daily routines. For example, it looked at how many people wore bowler hats in pubs, how often spittoons were used, how people behaved at war memorials, and who told what kind of dirty joke. Bolton was called 'Worktown' and its people were extensively studied.

By the end of 1937, Mass Observation had recruited more than 500 people as unpaid volunteers. Their first project was to keep a detailed account of everything they did from waking to sleeping on the 12th day of each month for a year. Later, special days - such as Easter Day and August Bank Holiday - were chosen and recorded in the same way.

During the war, even more significant events, such as the Blitz and Prime Minister Winston Churchill's defeat in the 1945 general election, were recorded on the level of what ordinary people thought and did. As such, these reports provide a unique archive which covers everything from the intimacies of marriage to the behaviour of holidaymakers in Blackpool.

Insiders' view

Not only did these observations provide a mass of objective detail about people's ordinary lives, they also provided left-wing activists with ammunition for political strategy. Humphrey Spender, who later worked for Picture Post, took about 800 candid photographs of Bolton people. Mass Observation reached a peak during the war, then tailed off in the 1950s.

As well as helping to edit some of the first volumes of Mass Observation reports, Jennings also designed the covers. He claimed that Mass Observation created a new kind of literature. Indeed, there is some connection between the experimental writing of the French surrealists and the bizarre facts unearthed by Mass Observation. In Bolton, for example, a 'tough' man in a pub suddenly took a tortoise out of his coat.

Jennings's involvement with Mass Observation was brief. Already part of John Grierson's GPO Film Unit he soon put all his energies into filming reality.

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