Keeping an eye on the masses

IN JULY 1921 the Prince of Wales, later to be briefly King Edward VIII, came to visit Bolton. He specifically asked people not to dress up in their Sunday best to mark the occasion, because he "desired to see Bolton wearing her work-a-day garb, and her people in their everyday clothes".

The Prince was not the first member of the Royal Family to visit our town in the aftermath of the Great War.

His brother, the Duke of York, later to be King George VI, had unveiled the War Memorial for the Bolton Artillery in Nelson Square in 1920.

But the Prince's visit was to be joyful and not sombre.

Also the Prince was socially-minded and interested in the state of his future subjects. Hence the request that he should see the town and its people as they appeared during the working day.

Just how much the Prince saw, or what he thought, is not recorded.

But he was, at least indirectly, responsible for a genuine attempt to portray Bolton warts and all.

When King Edward VIII abdicated in December 1936 it was a shock to the nation.

Reactions varied from the children who sang: "Hark the Herald Angels sing / Mr Simpson's pinched the King" to serious speculation on the future of the monarchy.

A letter appeared in the New Statesman written by the Cambridge academic Geoffrey Pike.

He said that an anthropological survey should be made of the British people to see how they had reacted to the shocking news.

This request came to the notice of man who was then living in Davenport Street, Bolton.

His name was Tom Harrisson and he was to be the father of Mass Observation.

Harrisson had been born in South America, the son of a British General who had become the Director of the Argentine National Railways.

Tom was educated at Harrow and first came to attention as an ornithologist, studying birds.

Later he graduated to studying cannibals in the New Hebrides. And then he moved to Davenport Street -- his mission, to look at the people of Bolton (or Worktown, as he called it) in the same way that he had studied people-eaters in Malekula.

Mass Observation was, and is, the act of acquiring detailed information about any subject in ordinary life.

Whether it was advertisements in a chemist's window, the order of service at a church on Sunday, overheard conversations in pubs or chip shops, or the number of children using a park playground between 3.30pm and 4.45pm, Harrisson and his observers recorded the small details that go to make up ordinary life.

In this way they hoped to create a real picture of life as it was lived in Britain in the 1930s.

Harrisson was a man from a privileged background, and so were many of his colleagues -- people like the future MPs Tom Driberg, Woodrow Wyatt and Richard Crossman, the noted photographer Humphrey Spender, and artists like Julian Trevelyan, William Empson, William Coldstream and Graham Bell.

These young men often found it difficult to fit in to life in a working town.

Spender in particular found himself "terrified", "depressed" and "frightened", and looked on the locals as foreigners who he couldn't understand.

It is ironic that his photographs form such a vivid picture of Bolton life at the time.

He took them quickly and in secret, hiding the camera under a long, shabby overcoat.

One of the few genuinely working-class observers was a local recruit called Bill Naughton. The son of Irish immigrant parents, Naughton had worked in a weaving shed and as a coal bagger and driver for the Co-op before joining Mass Observation in 1938.

Presumably he had no difficulty fitting in to the Worktown Environment.

In 1939 he moved to London and started on the career that would lead to Alfie, The Family Way and Spring and Port Wine.

What did Mass Observation achieve?

Some critics of the time were scathing: "Scientifically about as valuable as a chimpanzee's tea party" said the Spectator, while the novelist Evelyn Waugh described 's first publication as "a great deal of pseudo-scientific showmanship".

The Daily Herald simply described the Mass Observers as "psychoanthroposociologic nosey parkers."

And it is indeed a fact that most of the material gathered by Mass Observation in Bolton has never been published.

All those lists of types of sweets in shop windows and conversations overheard in Gents' Toilets remain in an archive, waiting for someone to make use of them.

Interested readers can find much information stored on microfilm in Bolton Central Library Archives. On the plus side, Bolton gained much publicity from the work of the observers.

Humphrey Spender's photographs are particularly famous and served to establish a visual impression of life in the industrial north that persists to this day.

It was against a background of depression that the mass observers did their work.

The cotton industry was especially badly hit throughout the 20s and 30s.

In 1900 Britain, and particularly the North West, manufactured 67 per cent of all the cotton cloth in world, and cotton goods made up 26 per cent of all British exports.

By 1938, when young Bill Naughton was snooping for , Britain made 28 per cent of the world's cotton cloth, a 39 per cent reduction in the market share. And cotton made up only 14 per cent of the country's exports.

The causes for this slump stretch back to the First World War.

The war economy and the restrictions on trade between 1914 and 1918 meant that the cotton industry couldn't supply all of its overseas markets, especially those in the Far East.

With British goods out of the picture, the cotton industries in India, Japan and the USA received a boost and started to sell to these markets.

Being new industries they could use the very latest technology while British manufacturers were stuck with machines made in the 19th century.

When the war ended the overseas markets were lost.

The cotton industry faltered and the banks would not lend the money that was required to modernise.

People were thrown out of work. The dole queues lengthened.

Of course life went on. Bolton, with its diverse industry was less hard hit than many towns.

The construction of the Crescent in the town centre kept 800 people busy between 1931 and 1939. And it is not in our character to dwell on misery.

There were compensations. Royalty visited again in May 1938, the King and Queen being greeted by 3,500 schoolchildren in Haslam Park.

Later, in the Town Hall Square, their Majesties met ex-servicemen and the King, who had fought at Jutland, recognised an old shipmate from HMS Cumberland.

Foreign royalty also stopped by -- King Faud of Egypt and King Feisal of Iraq both called in 1926 and visited Musgrave's Spinning Company and Tootal, Broadhurst and Lee.

And there was always sport. The Dog Track opened in 1927. The mass observers joined happy crowds to watch all-in wrestling.

And best of all, the Wanderers won the FA Cup in 1923, the year of the White Horse Final, and in 1926 and 1929.

In the latter year the town initiated Civic Week, intended to "make the name of Bolton sound through England; to have it recognized on the Continent; to give the population a greater knowledge of their town and the pride that will come with that knowledge; in short to boost Bolton".

Part of the celebrations was a parade that was to feature the town's Elephant and Castle coat of arms.

Which is why the following bizarre advertisement appeared in the Bolton Evening News: "Wanted, an elephant. Any Boltonian who has an elephant to spare is invited to send it round to the Civic Week Offices in Mealhouse Lane, by post or passenger train."

Sadly, it is not known whether anyone answered this request.