ABSTRACT
Roughly five hundred people kept diaries for Mass-Observation at some point during the Second World War and, as we have seen in the preceeding chapter, five times that number responded to its directives on a variety of questions from 1937 to 1951. With pre-and post-war directives and the continuation of some of the diaries beyond 1945 this is a substantial body of material and one, in contrast to the reports produced by Mass-Observation, which comes closest to fulfilling the aim of an anthropology ‘of ourselves, by o»urselves\ The diaries, however, as we shall see, were of a different quality and nature to the directive responses. They represent some 20% of the Mass-Observation archive, a collection of diaries that has few equivalents for this period anywhere in the world.1
