The Diaries of Nella Last

by Patricia Malcolmson

  M-O (or MO)

  Mass-Observation

  mules

  a kind of slipper or light shoe

  mulligrubs

  ill temper, grumpiness

  Newmarket

  a gambling card game

  ninon

  a lightweight silk dress fabric

  nowty

  moody, sullen

  offcomer

  outsider, newcomer

  parkin

  a kind of gingerbread or cake made with oatmeal and treacle

  pied

  mixed up, muddled

  plovers

  small, short-billed gregarious birds, typically feeding near water

  points

  credits used to buy controlled and rationed goods

  polypodies

  ferns

  pontoon

  a card game

  posset

  a drink of hot milk, curdled with alcohol (a delicacy)

  pullet

  a young hen

  purdah

  women screened from men by a veil or curtain

  put on dog

  put on airs, act pretentiously

  rackety

  noisy

  Rawlinson

  Nella’s maternal family name (said to be a ‘proud’ people)

  RCAF

  Royal Canadian Air Force

  RNVR

  Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve

  Sanatogen

  restorative tonic wine

  skit (verb)

  to ridicule, attack

  slack

  inferior coal

  sloes

  fruit of the blackthorn

  smudge fire

  a smoky fire used to protect against insects or frost

  snaggle

  tangle

  soul case

  the body, especially under stress

  suited

  made agreeable

  swale

  shady place

  Sylko

  brand of sewing thread

  tack

  to stitch temporarily

  tarbrush

  having signs of black ancestry

  tiddler

  a small fish

  topiary

  plants/shrubs clipped to make ornamental shapes

  Turog bread

  whole meal bread ubiquitous in the north of England

  WAAF

  Women’s Auxiliary Air Force

  wee man

  fairy, spirit

  whims and whamseys

  fanciful, capricious ideas

  whin

  gorse bush

  WVS

  Women’s Voluntary Services

  Yard

  Vickers-Armstrongs shipyard in Barrow

  MONEY AND ITS VALUE

  During Nella Last’s lifetime British currency was calculated in the following manner:

  12 pence = 1 shilling

  20 shillings = £1

  One shilling was written as ‘1s’, a penny as ‘1d’. A farthing, by then little used, was a quarter of a penny. A guinea (‘1 gn’) was worth 21 shillings. A sum of, say, two pounds and four shillings was usually written at that time as £2-4-0 or £2/4/0; such an amount is presented in this book as £2 4s 0d.

  Efforts to propose modern monetary equivalents are rarely helpful. Since the 1940s were years of widespread rationing, both during and after the war, the price of an item was sometimes less important than its availability (so while wages went up in wartime, finding suitable ways to spend money could be a challenge). Moreover, the household economy was for most people simpler and more spartan than it would be a couple of decades later. Material expectations were generally modest, some produce was home-generated, borrowing and bartering might be an alternative to buying, and recycling was normal. Nella was very price-conscious, and she is constantly reporting the prices of items in shops and elsewhere.

  Among the reference points to keep in mind is the weekly wage: most full-time male wage-workers in Barrow in the 1940s were probably earning between £4 and £10 a week: the former for unskilled labourers, the latter for workmen with desired skills. Men were almost always paid considerably more than women. In 1947 Nella was paying her cleaning helper 1s 6d an hour, plus a hot lunch; and in 1948 an older man who was working for her as a gardener charged ‘only’ 2s an hour. During most of the 1940s Will supported his parents with £2 10s every week from his joinery business (one of the reasons Nella had to be frugal). It is useful to keep in mind that Nella’s housekeeping budget in the early 1950s for one week was £4 10s 0d, and from this sum she had to pay for sundry items such as medications, periodicals and bus fares as well as make her purchases of meat, fish and fresh and processed food, not to mention the shilling a week that she bet on the football pools. Her husband seems to have been responsible for maintaining the car. The Lasts’ household had little leeway for luxuries, especially after Will retired in 1950. They (for example) rarely ate out in the early 1950s, except on food they brought from home.

  EDITING NELLA LAST’S DIARY

  In her vast diary the four topics that Nella Last writes about most often are the weather, ill health, preparing meals and shopping. Together they probably comprise at least half of her output. These matters appear infrequently in this book for they rarely show her at her best as a writer. Writing about such mundane matters did, however, ensure that she was never out of practice, and that words always flowed readily from the tip of her pencil or pen. When she did have something interesting to say – stimulated, perhaps, by a Sunday outing in the car or an encounter in a shop or on Abbey Road, or an acquaintance arriving at 9 Ilkley Road, or some incident that brought back memories of childhood – she was well poised to put her thoughts into words. These are the occasions when she was most likely to tell a good story, or recount a lively conversation, or compose a vivid description of the countryside, or disclose some of her deeper feelings about the meaning of life. And these are the passages that we have chosen to highlight. Since they appear irregularly and often unexpectedly during the sixteen years covered in this book, some periods of her writing life are represented much more fully than others. For the editors of her writing it is as if they are viewing a collection of tens of thousands of snapshots, taken daily over many years, and choosing only the best to publish regardless of the date.

  While the main task for editors of Nella Last’s manuscript diary is to select what to publish and to shape these selections into chapters, there are several other ways in which we have exercised judgement and revised what she wrote. The following are the most important of these editorial interventions. (1) Since Nella did not use paragraphs, wherever they now exist they are our creations. (2) Her punctuation was casual, often whimsical. (Mispunctuation is a common feature of M-O diaries, indeed, of most diaries whose authors lacked the time or incentive to revisit what they had written.) We have routinely re-punctuated her writing to make it as clear and smooth-flowing as possible. (3) Obvious errors – she almost certainly wrote in haste, and usually at night – have been silently corrected. These include misspellings and phrases that lack a necessary word, such as a preposition, article or conjunction. (4) Very occasionally an additional word is needed to convey the meaning of a sentence. In these rare cases we have silently supplied a suitable candidate. (5) We have standardised the usage of particular words in order to ensure, for example, that a word is always spelt the same way, or that it is consistently capitalised or not capitalised, and that the prices of goods and services and other numerals are presented in a consistent form. (6) Nella was much given to underlining words for emphasis and to putting a great many words and phrases in inverted commas. We have eliminated these practices except in cases where they are helpful or even essential to grasping her full meaning, such as when she is reporting words actually spoken by others or when she had chosen language that was regarded as colloquial or not yet in common usage. (7) Three dots are used to indicate omissions in a day’s entry
other than those made before a selection starts and after it concludes. Omissions at the start and the end of what she wrote on a given day are more the norm than the exception, for her first and last sentences are generally less interesting than what comes in between. Many entire days of her writing – and she wrote almost every day – have been omitted altogether.

  This may seem like a rather long list of editorial interventions. The need to make them stems in part from the fact that Nella had no reason to think that she should edit her own work, to polish or perhaps even to re-read what she had written. So her writing, while frequently rich and robust, tends to be raw. The photograph overleaf shows a page from her handwritten diary for Tuesday 26 March 1940 and gives a sense of the decisions that any editors would routinely have to make in converting her handwritten diary into pages suitable for a book.

  MASS OBSERVATION*

  Mass Observation, which was set up in 1937, was created to meet a perceived need – to overcome Britons’ ignorance about themselves in their everyday lives. MO aimed to lay the foundations for a social anthropology of contemporary Britain. Given that so many basic facts of social life were then unknown – opinion polling was in its infancy, social surveys and field studies had just begun (with a few exceptions, such as those of London by Charles Booth in the late nineteenth century) – how, it was asked, could the nation’s citizens adequately understand themselves? This lack of knowledge was thought to be especially pronounced with regard to the beliefs and behaviour of the majority of Britons: that is, those without social prominence, and who had little political or intellectual influence.

  It was vital, according to MO’s founders, to focus on norms, customs, routines and commonalities. The goal was to help bring about a ‘science of ourselves’, rooted in closely observed facts, methodically and (sometimes) laboriously collected. And in order to pursue this science of society, MO recruited hundreds of volunteer ‘Observers’, who were asked to describe, to pose questions to others, to record sights and sounds, and sometimes to count. Their efforts at observing were likened to those of an anthropologist working in the field. One of the early publications that drew upon these findings was a Penguin Special from early 1939 written by MO’s two leading lights, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Britain, by Mass-Observation, which attracted lots of attention at the time.

  Volunteers were crucial to MO. Without them it would not have been possible to acquire the facts on which a proper social science would have to be based. And it came to be accepted by MO’s leaders that these Observers would not only be data-collectors; they could also function as ‘subjective cameras’ that captured their own experiences, feelings and attitudes, and circumstances of living. This acceptance of the legitimacy of subjectivity in MO’s enquiries was a major reason why diary-keeping came to be promoted as a promising vehicle of both social and self-observation. A diary was one way of recording; and it was a way that inevitably tapped into the individuality and inner life of one personality. MO’s striving for a better social science, then, facilitated the production of a particularly personal form of writing; and from late August 1939, with another great war imminent, some people responded to MO’s invitation to keep a diary and post their writing regularly (usually weekly, fortnightly or monthly) to MO’s headquarters. Nella Last was one of the dozens – eventually hundreds – who responded to this initiative. She was, though, one of the few who wrote regularly during the war and continued to write regularly after 1945 – and her diary entries were unusually detailed.

  These diaries – some 480 of them – have been held since the 1970s in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. Numerous books have drawn upon these riches. Sandra Koa Wing (ed.), Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War, by the Writers of Mass Observation (London: Profile Books, 2008), is an excellent anthology of extracts from MO’s wartime diaries. Dorothy Sheridan’s edited volume Wartime Women: An Anthology of Women’s Wartime Writing for Mass Observation (London: Heinemann, 1990; later paperback editions) includes extracts from numerous diaries. Simon Garfield has edited three collections drawn from the MO Archive, all published by Ebury Press: Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain (2004); We Are at War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times (2005); and Private Battles: How the War Almost Defeated Us – Our Intimate Diaries (2007).

  Nella Last’s wartime MO diary was the first to appear on its own as a book, in 1981, and others followed, including Dorothy Sheridan’s edited Among You Taking Notes …: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison, 1939–1945 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985). Several other MO diarists have recently been published in volumes of their own. These include: two East Anglian diaries edited by Robert Malcolmson and Peter Searby, Wartime Norfolk: The Diary of Rachel Dhonau, 1941–1942 (Norfolk Record Society, 2004), and Wartime in West Suffolk: The Diary of Winifred Challis, 1942–1943 (Suffolk Records Society, 2012); Love and War in London: A Woman’s Diary, 1939–1942, by Olivia Cockett, edited by Robert Malcolmson (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005; 2nd edn, Stroud: The History Press, 2008); and four volumes edited by Patricia and Robert Malcolmson – A Woman in Wartime London: The Diary of Kathleen Tipper, 1941–1945 (London Record Society, 2006); A Soldier in Bedfordshire, 1941–1942: The Diary of Private Denis Argent, Royal Engineers (Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 2009); Dorset in Wartime: The Diary of Phyllis Walther, 1941–1942 (Dorset Record Society, 2009); and Warriors at Home, 1940–1942: Three Surrey Diarists (Surrey Record Society, 2012; one of these three diarists, Leonard Adamson, wrote for MO). James Hinton, who is preparing a history of Mass Observation, has recently published a stimulating account of some of MO’s most interesting diarists: Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  The Mass Observation collection is open to the public and is visited by people from around the world. In 2005 it was given Designated Status as one of the UK’s Outstanding Collections by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. Much helpful information, including details of the Friends scheme that helps to finance the Archive, which is a charitable trust, is available on its website: www.massobs.org.uk.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Working in the Mass Observation Archive, and with MO material, is always a pleasure, and we continue to be grateful to those at the University of Sussex who have supported our research. We wish in particular to thank Fiona Courage, Adam Harwood, Rose Lock, Jessica Scantlebury, and Karen Watson in Special Collections; and Owen Emmerson and Catrina Hey for doing a great deal of work on our behalf. Several people connected with Nella Last or persons mentioned in her diary have generously shared information with us, notably Kathleen (Holme) Emery and Margaret (Atkinson) Procter, both of whom also lent us family photographs, and Jerry Last and the late Peter Last, Nella’s youngest and eldest grandsons. We have also appreciated the advice given us by the BBC Written Archives and the Cumbria Record Office and Local Studies Library in Barrow-in-Furness. Matthew Taylor, our copy editor, saved us from numerous errors and confusions, and our discussions with Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown have always been helpful and clarifying.

  At Profile Books, we very much appreciate the keen interest of Daniel Crewe in Nella Last, her writing, and our work as editors. For this volume, we are especially indebted to Lisa Owens, who has been intimately involved in its production. She persuaded us to revise some of our editorial approaches, and this rethinking prompted us to produce a better and more wide-ranging book. She also made many detailed comments on the text, which gave us the opportunity to eliminate repetitions, tighten some passages, reconsider occasional statements, and anticipate possible questions and concerns of readers. We are glad to have been able to benefit from her sensitive editorial advice.

  Nelson, British Columbia

  June 2012

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Nella and Arthur, 1940 (Mass Observation)

  2. Cliff Last in wartime
(Photograph courtesy of Margaret Procter)

  3. Barrow Bombed, 1941 (Photograph courtesy of North West

  Evening Mail)

  4. Home from the Yard, 1950s (Photograph courtesy of North West Evening Mail)

  5. Relaxing on the Coast Road, 1950s (Photograph courtesy of North West Evening Mail)

  6. Jessie Holme with her daughter, Kathleen, late summer 1948

  7. George Holme and Kathleen, 1949 (Photographs courtesy of Kathleen Emery)

  8. The Poker Club at the Grammar School, 1950 (Photograph courtesy of Norman Raby)

  9. Ilkey Road from the back, late 1940s. (Photograph courtesy of Kathleen Emery)

  10. Cliff, in Australia in the 1950s (Photograph courtesy of Margaret Procter)

  11. Nella, Will, and their dog, Garry, around 1953 (Photograph courtesy of Peter Last)

  INDEX

  Only substantial information or commentary concerning people, places, and subjects has normally been indexed, with an emphasis on subjects. Since references to shops, shopping, food or other provisions, rationing and radio programmes occur on dozens of pages, only the more detailed and informative of these passages have been indexed.

  A

  air raids 23, 24, 27, 33, 46, 63–4, 89

  Barrow-in-Furness 47, 49–56, 97, 254

  people fleeing from 50–2, 55, 57, 63, 70, 83–4, 94–5, 131