LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER VIII

      Mass observation and dance halls: Jimmy Savile's beginnings

      “[I]t would not be too far out of line to call the twentieth century the Fabian century. One thing is certain: the direction of modern schooling for the bottom 90 percent of our society has followed a largely Fabian design—and the puzzling security and prestige enjoyed at the moment by those who speak of ‘globalism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ are a direct result of heed paid earlier to Fabian prophecies that a welfare state, followed by an intense focus on internationalism, would be the mechanism elevating corporate society over political society, and a necessary precursor to utopia. Fabian theory is the Das Kapital of financial capitalism.”

      —John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education

      On January 2, 1937 (Northern Dairies’ birth year, again), a British surrealist poet named Charles Madge published a letter in the Fabian magazine New Statesman and Nation. With the title “Anthropology at Home,” the letter announced the formation of a group of writers, painters, and filmmakers committed to social documentation. Soon after, Madge (who was married to poet Kathleen Raine) joined forces with Tom Harrisson, whose poem was “coincidentally” published on the same page as Madge's letter.¹ Harrisson was an ornithologist-cum-anthropologist who wrote for The Observer and did intelligence work during WWII.² They were then joined by the filmmaker, Humphrey Jennings. Jennings had founded the Cambridge literary periodical Experiment in 1928, with two of my grandfather's known cohorts, Jacob Bronowski and Yorkshireman William Empson (who later joined Mass Observation). Jennings worked for Crown Film Unit, a filmmaking propaganda arm of the Ministry of Information, during WWII. Together, these “artists and poets” created an organization dedicated to developing what they called “a science of ourselves.”

      In its original guise, Mass Observation (M-O) was an organization dedicated to the documentation of everyday life amongst the British working classes…. M-O thus sought out facts and figures, through interviews and covert surveillance, which highlighted the nature of their fellow Britons’ day-to-day existence. The range of the Mass-Observers’ interests—from the “behaviour of people at war memorials, the aspidistra cult, [and] anthropology of football pools” to “bathroom behavior; beards, armpits and eyebrows; [and the] distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke”—was intended to form a comprehensive topography of workers’ lives, and in so doing, provide a new basis for social democracy. (Visual Culture and Mass Observation, 2015)

      This all sounds deceptively agenda-free, but the context for this program of national research into the mores of the common man is considerably more fraught than the calm, rational, faintly caring tone of the proposal, with its suggestion of a benefactor doing impartial social research to “provide a new basis for social democracy” (ibid.). The fraught social context, one major factor of it anyway, was that M-O came into existence in the years following the massive General Strike of 1926, a strike that “shook the British ruling class out of their thrones and showed brilliantly how collective working class action can change society” (Libcon, 2012). During the height of the strike, London transport was crippled:

      On May 4, 15 out of 315 tubes ran, 300 out of 4,400 buses (by the end of the week this was down to 40), nine out of 2,000 trams operated. By the end of the first day builders, printers, dockers, iron, steel, metal, heavy chemical, transport and railway workers were out on strike. All with the TUC [Trade Union Congress] stuck like rabbits in headlights. The working class was truly in the driving seat. Nothing moved unless the workers said it could move…. The ruling class had spent hundreds of millions of pounds but they would have lost had it not been for the concerted campaign of sabotage carried out by the TUC. Had the workers organized themselves into independent rank and file organizations and had the same revolutionary vision as their Spanish counter-parts did ten years later, then the results may have been very different. (ibid.)

      The workers’ struggle—an example of a genuine socialist movement?—was one that presented a genuine threat to capitalist interests, for obvious reasons. The ruling class needs “workers” (slaves) to maintain its rule and keep industry going. The idea of “educating” the mass populace—M-O's ostensible goal—was, in John Taylor Gatto's view at least, Orwellian newspeak for making sure they didn't educate and empower themselves. As Gatto writes in The Underground History of American Education:

      Forced schooling was the medicine to bring the whole continental population into conformity with these plans so that it might be regarded as a “human resource” and managed as a “workforce.” No more Ben Franklins or Tom Edisons could be allowed; they set a bad example. One way to manage this was to see to it that individuals were prevented from taking up their working lives until an advanced age when the ardor of youth and its insufferable self-confidence had cooled. (2006, p. 38)

      This indicates a deliberate policy of “hobbling” the working class to neutralize them as a threat to the entrepreneurial class. And not only were working class people rising up against working conditions, they were also protesting forced schooling—first implemented in Prussia in the 1700s expressly as a means to control human behavior and curb independent thinking, and steadily introduced in the UK and the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Nonetheless, the avowed aim of M-O (and no doubt many of its implementers believed it) was:

      to empower Britons with information about themselves and their country such that they could make informed political choices, take political action when necessary, or pick adequate political representation; properly interpret current events; and consequently, not become victims of baseless rumor or suggestion (particularly related to the situation in Europe) spread by mass media and the government. Yet these publications were not merely intended to pass information laterally, but also upward, such that the Prime Minister, Cabinet, and Members of Parliament could be informed of the “real” concerns of the nation…. Surveillance was an effective way of collecting information, if only because the individuals surveyed were unaware of that fact and thus presented themselves in a relatively natural state. Yet, once this method of research had been publicized, it likewise bred a form of popular paranoia. (Visual Culture and Mass Observation, 2015)

      M-O was supported by the aforementioned Fabian economist, John Maynard Keynes, in its early stages:

      Madge had renewed contact with Maynard Keynes, who responded enthusiastically to his offer

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