The Pub, The People. And Orwell.

New Pub Study Backs Orwell’s Conclusions

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In a little-known, unsigned article, George Orwell reviewed The Pub and the People, in January 1943 for the Listener. The book is the first of a series which Victor Gollancz commissioned from Mass Observation – and is based on interviews with people in pubs in ‘Worktown’ (actually Bolton). Orwell is clearly fascinated by the book. And while it highlights the decline in pub-going and the general trend in people’s leisure ‘from active and communal forms to those that are passive and individual’, Orwell is more concerned to stress that the Mass Observers have ‘no difficulty in showing that there was extraordinarily little drunkenness in the period they were studying’ (see Richard Young, Orwell Society Journal, No. 8, 2016, pp 16-17).

Cover of First Edition from blogspot, Mass Observation Class Codes

Now, a major new study of The Pub and the People, by academics Jennie Taylor and Simon Prince, largely confirms Orwell’s conclusions. Writing in the latest issue of The Historical Journal, they point out that the Mass Observers tended to idealise the world of the pub, representing it as largely socially harmonious and egalitarian with individuals generously buying drinks for their companions. Looking into the pub study’s archive, Taylor and Prince discover material that contradicts the published findings. Observers actually turned in reports focusing on ‘authoritarian conduct, hierarchical power structures’ and heated discussions about contemporary politics. The Pub and the People does describe a fight between ‘Jack’, ‘Peter’ and ‘Peter’s woman’ and one heated argument at Waterloo Tavern. And occasionally observers became involved in heated discussions. But, as Orwell, stressed these moments of tension were, remarkably, very much the exceptions.

Taylor and Prince are clearly unaware of Orwell’s review. They merely quote the main organiser of the ‘Worktown’ project, Tom Harrisson, dismissing Orwell as a member of an ‘old Eton group slumming’.

See ‘Temporalities, ritual and drinking in Mass Observation’s Worktown’, by Jennie Taylor and Simon Prince, The Historical Journal. Available online here.

• Richard Lance Keeble was chair of The Orwell Society 2013-2020.