Tom Harrisson

Tom Harrisson founded Mass-Observation in 1937 with Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, recruiting volunteers to keep diaries and answer regular questionnaires about everyday British life, while paid observers recorded conversations in pubs and streets, often without people knowing. The method raises obvious consent questions, but the archive, now at the University of Sussex, holds an unrivalled record of ordinary wartime life, and the project was revived in 1981.