This month’s edition of The Session is hosted by, er, us, on the subject of Mass Observation. Get involved, bloggers and let us know about your posts here, on Twitter, or by email! In the meantime, here’s our contribution.
Pub near harbour, small town, Cornwall. One large bar with mezzanine; dining room; outside smoking area (covered and heated); garden. All on one floor.
Three cask ales (traditional handpumps); Guinness (large illuminated font with rugby ball on handle); Korev lager (large chrome font with condensation); Guinness Hop House 13 Lager (large font with condensation); Carslberg, San Miguel, Amstel lagers on standard keg bar; Rattler (with cartoon snake head handle) and Strongbow ciders on same.
Pub is dominated by a party of nine (six men, three women) playing poker on a lage central table, formed by moving several other tables from the periphery. A green baize temporary playing board covers most of the surface. Loud discussion about the rules of the game at points.
We’re hosting the 113th edition of The Session in July and we’re asking you to go to the pub, observe, and report.
In the late 1930s a team of social researchers descended on Lancashire and spent several years observing the people of Bolton and Blackpool as they went about their daily lives. As part of that, in 1937 and 1938, they made a special study of pubs, which led to the publication of one of our favourite books of all time, The Pub and The People, in 1943.
This is an extract from a typical entry from the original observation logs, probably from 1938, describing the Vault of a pub in Bolton:
13 men standing, 8 sitting. 4 playing dominoes. 2 of the sitters are postmen.
2 men, about fifty, short, sturdy, caps and scarves, shiny worn blue shirts quarrelling about politics. One keeps saying, ‘If ee don’t like the country why don’t ee go away? No one stops me getting a living.’ Then he suddenly shouts ‘Why shouldn’t the king and queen be there. I’m for them! They should be there.’ … Barman comes round with a small canvas bag, jangling it, asks me if I want a penny draw for a pie. So I put my hand into the bag and get out a worn brass disc about size of a half penny, which says Riggs Pies and has a number in the middle. The draw takes place somewhere else. Number 9 wins… and he gets a small hot pie, the sort you can get for fourpence.
What we want people to do for The Session is to recreate this exercise in 2016: take a notebook to a pub or bar — any one you fancy — and write a note of what you observe.
How many people are drinking?
Which beers are on tap, and which are people actually drinking?
What are they eating?
How are they passing the time?
What are the topics of conversation?
How is the pub decorated?
How many TVs are there and what are they showing?
Are there pot plants, parrots, spittoons?
How many smokers are there? And vapers?
Is there a dartboard, pool table or quiz machine, and are they in use?
Over the years, people have fretted about Mass Observation’s attitudes to privacy and so, in line with original Mass Observation practice, you might want to anonymise the pub — city centre sports bar, suburban dining pub, industrial estate brewery tap, and so on. And it’s bad form to give names and details which might allow individuals to be identified from your descriptions.
And an Optional Extra
As a chaser, after your observations, write whatever you like spurred by the idea of ‘The Pub and The People’. Really, whatever you like, as vaguely related to theme as it might be. Or instead of making any observations, even. The main thing is that you feel inspired to write something.
How this Works
Do your observing in the next few weeks, publish your post on or near FRIDAY 1 JULY and let us know about it by Tweeting (@boakandbailey), emailing (contact@boakandbailey.com) or commenting on this post. We’ll publish a round-up in mid-July to allow for stragglers.
If you’ve never taken part in The Session before, or have lapsed, do join in — it doesn’t have to be a huge effort and it’s a great way to connect with other beer bloggers worldwide.
“These special customs, and especially those associated with the annual booze-ups of New Year’s Eve (when you may kiss almost anybody in public), St Patrick’s Eve, Whitsun, Oak Apple Day, Trinity Sunday, June Holiday and Christmas, are a simple part of the pattern of the year, its pre-industrial, pre-Christian even, background. A background of sowing and reaping, winter death and spring rebirth, a rhythm that, like the rhythm of the week, determines so much of behaviour… now dominates Worktowners who never think what it’s all about or know the difference between wheat and barley.”
Is this post a good idea? Our review is late by either four years (the edition we have was published by Faber in 2009) or seventy (it was first published in 1943). The thing is, it’s made us so giddy with excitement and amusement that we’ve got to tell someone, and you, loyal reader, are in the frame.
The Pub and the People: a Worktown Study by Mass Observation.
‘Mass Observation’ was a social research group founded in 1936 founded by an anthropologist called Tom Harrisson, along with filmmaker Humphrey Jennings and poet Charles Madge. It ran, in its first incarnation, until the nineteen-sixties, and the ‘Worktown’ study was its first major piece of work. It saw Harrisson and a team of observers (some locals, others from academia) descend on the Lancashire town and, for three years from 1937, watch and record everything, however apparently inconsequential.
Time travel
If you were to attempt to recreate the experience of visiting a pub in Bolton in 1937, this book would give you everything you could possibly need. Pub architecture, the drinks on offer, the clothing and manners of the customers, the behaviour of the bar staff, and the nature of conversations in the saloon, lounge and taproom are all recounted. Graphs and tables tell you how much people of each ‘type’ drank in a session, on each day of the week, in what measures, and at what pace. (63.8 per cent of drinks were consumed in between 6 and 10 minutes on a Sunday.)
There is also information on how much they smoked, and what they did with the fag ends; as well as how often they spat, where, and to what reaction from their friends — ‘He is called a “filthy bugger”’.
The various pubs are analysed and mapped — what’s the difference between the saloon, lounge and taproom? How many pubs have music rooms? What’s a ‘vault’? There are even statistics given for the distribution of pot plants.
Though at first it seems absurd — where will the obsession with minutiae end? — it eventually leads to an almost hypnotic sense of ‘virtual reality’.
Funny
Mass Observation had some of the trappings of a scientific study and had pretensions of objectivity. The fact is, though, that the personalities and prejudices of the editors, writers and observers comes through quite clearly. This often results in funny lines, either intentional or otherwise. This ‘observation’ (anecdote) is not only amusing in itself, but also because the writer is so coy about it:
Navvy type of person aged about 35, says ‘If I get three pints down me I can…’ (What he said is the sort of thing considered ‘unprintable’. It amounted to the fact that when he went home he was able to have sexual intercourse with his wife with the maximum of efficiency, and when he woke up in the morning he was able to repeat the process with the utmost satisfaction.)
Those under observation also often express themselves wittily or at least pithily: ‘You can do almost anything you bloody well like in the vault, short of shitting on the place.’ Entire pages are given over to illustrations of stream-of-consciousness, rambling banter, full of free associations and Pythonesque silliness which we recognise from pubs with ‘regulars’ who know each other well.
At one point, in an attempt to measure the social makeup of clientele in certain pubs, the authors use headwear as a proxy, and thus invent ‘the bowler hat index’. That really tickled us. What’s the modern equivalent?
Assume nothing
The pint, as we all know, is the one true measure — the only proper way to drink beer — and it has ever been thus. Except that’s not true, and The Pub and the People in fact devotes quite a bit of time to the strange phenomenon of those few oddballs who drinks pints, especially Irish navvies in their dirty, spit-and-sawdust, near-segregated pubs. Most Boltonians in 1937, especially the manliest of men, in fact drank ‘gills‘.
Binge drinking and town centre ‘no go’ areas are a new thing, too, right? Part of the collapse of our society? We already know about 1958and 1927, but the lengthy description in The Pub and the People of a weekend in Bolton reads like an episode of Cops With Cameras in a period setting. (Bobbies with Cinematographs?)
Passing down the street observer saw a man of 30 running across the road, through the entrance of this pub, up the steps and shouting. The next second the sound of breaking glass. The man then comes tumbling down the steps with another man on top of him. They begin to fight in the middle of the street… [Later] a sergeant with a stick and P.C. came up… ‘What’s the matter? What’s it all about? Now then, come on there, get out of it, get out of it!‘.
The pretentious bit
(OK — the more pretentious bit.) There are times when the observers’ prose reflects the poetry of its time. Some passages could pass for a lost bit of T.S. Eliot, such as this list of ‘things people do in pubs’:
There are lots of moments where an otherwise clinical description is enlivened by a startling piece of imagery or turn of phrase, which perhaps devalue the text as ‘observation’, but make it much more pleasant to read.
Conclusion
We’re not sure why this book isn’t talked about more. Anyone with an interest in the history of beer and pubs in Britain ought to read it, but don’t let that ‘ought’ make you think it’s an ordeal: it’s engrossing, compelling and amusing, despite the academic framing.
The Mass Observation book The Pub and the People continues to offer eye-opening nuggets which suggest that beer and pubs aren’t so different now to how they were nearly eighty years ago.
1. Some landlords prided themselves on buying from small, local producers
The landlord here says he gets his beer from a small brewery in Derby Street. He doesn’t care for large breweries, he says: “It’s all done with chemicals”… beer from big breweries goes off in no time…
And why was this particular landlord so fussy? Because he’d identified a new market.
2. There were a small number of beer geeks
Most pub-goers simply drink the cheapest available beer, while a minority exist for whom quality is most important.
This statement is backed up an account from the same landlord quoted above of the word-of-mouth buzz which surrounded a particularly well-matured barrel of bitter which sat in his cellar for six months before being tapped when a stranger visited the pub.
The stranger said that it was wonderful — ‘like wine’. This man took to calling in regularly for it, until the barrel was finished. It went soon because he told his friends, and they came in for it too.
Did he use Twitter or the Ratebeer forums? Or maybe he wrote about it on his blog?
Another drinker made this statement to the survey team:
There is, I think, many different brands of beer which so far I have not had the Pleasure of Tasting. Those I have, such as: Magee’s, Walker’s, Hamer’s, Cunningham’s, and one or two others, all have a nice Flavour… The Price question I will not Dispute, because I do not Drink Excessively, so I don’t favour any particular Beer.
Idiosyncratic prose style aside, isn’t that a familiar sounding beer geek statement?
In the late 1930s a team of social researchers descended on Lancashire and spent several years observing the people of Bolton and Blackpool as they went about their daily lives. As part of that, in 1937 and 1938, they made a special study of pubs, which led to the publication of 
