Nella Last's Peace

by Patricia Malcolmson

  While many people start to write a diary, few persist for very long (only a small minority of Mass Observation’s almost 500 diaries continued for more than two years). Nella not only persisted, she did so at extraordinary length, often producing at night an essay on the happenings of the day. Why did she do it? What drove her to produce a million words or so every two to three years, and to post her writing each Friday to Mass Observation’s headquarters? No doubt her diary gave her satisfaction in various ways, some of them therapeutic. However, it seems that the critical fact for Nella was that she had always wanted to be a writer, and that MO allowed her to become one. With time this writing became a habit, a part of her way of life and her identity, and almost certainly a pleasure. Words flowed, images came to mind, vignettes of ordinary life called out for description, smiles and laughter were to be remembered, surprises and peculiarities caught her writer’s eye, and crises concentrated the mind and needed to be grappled with by means of pencil or pen and paper. ‘My childhood craving to be a writer has materialised,’ she remarked on 20 November 1948, ‘if not quite as I planned.’

  So, from her suburban semi-detached home in an industrial town in north-west England, recording her life in semi-secrecy, Nella Last became a noteworthy writer. ‘Of all gifts I crave,’ she wrote on 7 September 1946, ‘that of “expression” would be my dearest wish. I’ve met such interesting people, and always heard unbelievable stories about people’s lives. If I could put all in written language and sequence, I could write books, I’m sure. Maybe I’ll get my wish in some future reincarnation!’

  * Max Dimmack, Clifford Last (Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, 1972), pp. 4–6.

  * In September 2007, both Norah Redhead and Margaret Procter – the Atkinson sisters – remembered ‘Mr Last’ as ‘a lovely man’, but quiet and reserved. Will had been a school friend of their father. Both were sons of joiners.

  GLOSSARY AND

  ABREVIATIONS

  MONEY AND ITS VALUE

  In the later 1940s, 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 was a quarter of a penny. A guinea (‘1gn’) was worth 21 shillings. A sum of, say, three pounds and ten shillings was usually written at that time as £3–10–0; this amount is presented in this book as £3 10s.

  Efforts to propose rough modern equivalents seem pointless. Since the 1940s were years of widespread rationing, the price of an item was sometimes less important than its availability. Moreover, household economies were for most people simpler and more spartan than they would become a few decades later. Material expectations were generally modest, some produce was home-generated, borrowing and bartering were often an alternative to buying, and recycling was customary. Nella was very price-conscious, and she is constantly reporting the prices of items in shops and elsewhere. One reference point worth keeping in mind is the weekly wage: most full-time male wage-workers in Barrow immediately after the war were probably earning between £4 and £10 a week. Men were almost always paid considerably more than women. In 1947 Nella was paying her cleaning lady 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. Will supported his parents with £2 10s every week from his joinery business.

  CHRONOLOGY

  Detailed portraits of life in post-war Britain are presented in two highly informative books: David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007) and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2007), Part One, surveys the period admirably.

  1945

  1946

  1947

  1948

  EDITING NELA LAST’S DIARY

  Nella Last’s handwriting is in some respects eccentric, and even after one gets used to the peculiarities of her ways of forming letters, from time to time individual words emerge that would challenge almost any reader. In some cases we have examined a word at least a dozen times before getting it right (we think). We believe that we have eventually solved almost all problems of legibility, but it may be that a few misreadings remain (we hope they are rare). We also exercised judgement in deciding what to insert in the diary in the way of editorial additions. These are mainly in two forms: brief italicised phrases in square brackets placed in the text of the diary; and occasional footnotes designed to identify or explain something that Nella wrote about.

  We are responsible for several other interventions, of which the following are the most important. (1) Since Nella did not use paragraphs, wherever they now exist they are our creations. (2) Her punctuation was casual – this is not uncommon in diaries – whimsical, even bizarre at times. 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 (for example, she spelt ‘even’ as ‘evan’), and phrases that lack a necessary word, such as a preposition, article or conjunction. (4) Occasionally an additional word or two is needed to convey the meaning of a sentence. In these 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, 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 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. (7) Three dots are used to indicate omissions in a selection other than those omissions made before a selection starts and after it concludes. Omissions at the start and at the end of what she wrote on a given day are more the norm than the exception, for her first and last sentences are often less interesting than what comes in between. Many entire days of her writing – and she wrote almost every day during these years – have been omitted altogether.

  This might 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 it or perhaps even to re-read what she had written. So her writing, while rich and robust, tends to be raw. The photograph opposite shows a page from her handwritten diary and gives a sense of the decisions that any editors would routinely have to make in converting her diary into pages suitable for a book.

  Mass Observation

  Mass Observation, the organisation for which Nella Last wrote her diary, was set up in 1937. It was created to meet a perceived need, which, in the eyes of its founders, was 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 Charles Booth in the late nineteenth century) – how, it was asked, could the nation’s citizens adequately understand themselves? This ignorance was thought to be especially pronounced with regard to the beliefs and behaviour of the majority of Britons: that is, those who lacked social prominence, and who had little political or intellectual influence.

  It was vital, according to MO’s founders, to focus on routines, norms, customs and commonalities. The goal was to help bring about a ‘science of ourselves’, rooted in closely observed facts, methodically and laboriously collected. And in order to pursue this science of society, MO recruited hundreds of volunteer ‘Observers’, who were asked to describe, to question, to record sights and sounds and sometimes to count. Their efforts
at observing were likened to those of an anthropologist working in the field.

  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 was 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 social observation was a major reason why diary-keeping came to be promoted as a promising vehicle of both social and self-observation. A diary was another way of recording; and it was a way that inevitably tapped into the individuality and inner life of one personality. MO’s pursuit of a better science, then, facilitated the production of a particularly personal form of writing; and from late August 1939, with another great war imminent, many people responded to MO’s invitation to keep a diary and post their writing every week or fortnight 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 throughout the war, one of the few who wrote at length, and one of the very few who continued to write regularly after 1945. (James Hinton has written a summary of her life for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), vol. 32, pp. 606–7.)

  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.), 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 diarists. Dorothy Sheridan’s edited volume, Wartime Women: An Anthology of Women’s Wartime Writing for Mass Observation (London: Heinemann, 1990), includes extracts from numerous diaries. Simon Garfield has edited three collections drawn from the MO Archive, each published by Ebury Press: Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a Forgotten Britain 1945–1948 (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, edited by Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming. (The 2006 edition published by Profile Books includes photographs, a new preface, and an afterword by Clifford Last.) A little later Dorothy Sheridan edited Among You Taking Notes …: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939–1945 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985). Several other MO diarists have now been published in volumes of their own. These include Wartime Norfolk: The Diary of Rachel Dhonau 1941–1942, edited by Robert Malcolm­son and Peter Searby (Norfolk Record Society, 2004); 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, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2008); A Woman In Wartime London: The Diary of Kathleen Tipper 1941–1945, edited by Patricia and Robert Malcolmson (London Record Society, 2006); and A Soldier in Bedfordshire 1941–1942: The Diary of Private Denis Argent, Royal Engineers, edited by Patricia and Robert Malcolmson (Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, forthcoming 2009).

  The collection is open to the public and visited by people from all over 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 finances the Archive, which is a charitable trust, is available on its website: www.massobs.org.uk.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Several people who knew Nella Last or were connected with her in some way have given us valuable help in preparing this edition. We met and spent several hours with two of her grandsons, Peter Last and Jerry Last, the former in Cornwall, the latter in Bath, each of whom helped us better to understand the Lasts’ family history. Peter also kindly allowed us to borrow a family photograph album from the 1940s and 1950s. Nella’s third grandson, Christopher Last, who had spent some time with Cliff Last, replied informatively by mail to our enquiries. We are grateful to all three brothers for their assistance and support. During our visit to Barrow-in-Furness in September 2007 we took the liberty of knocking on the door of 9 Ilkley Road (without prior notice) and were warmly received by its present owners, John and Margaret Williams – they acquired the house from the Lasts in the late 1960s – who showed us around the property and led us to the two daughters of the Lasts’ next-door neighbours in the 1940s, the Atkinsons. Norah (Atkinson) Redhead still lives in Barrow, her sister Margaret (Atkinson) Procter in Pickering, Yorkshire. We met them separately and both were exceptionally generous in giving us information and opinion, and in lending us photos from the mid 1940s. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance they graciously provided.

  A number of other people helped in various ways, notably Richard Broad, Jocelyn Fisher, James Hinton, David McGinn, Peter Searby, Aidan Jones of the Local Studies Library in Barrow and Camilla Hornby of Curtis Brown. Caroline Pretty, our copyeditor, offered sound advice and proposed numerous refinements to the text. We depended on Sue DeMille and Janice Wilson of Cobourg Digital Imaging & Printing for technical support and services at various times.

  The Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, where the original of Nella’s diary can be read, is held in high esteem by researchers, and for good reason. Its head, Dorothy Sheridan, who has herself written widely about the MO’s sources and the work of its Observers, is impressively knowledgeable and efficient and always helpful, and both of us have benefited from her advice on numerous occasions during the past decade. It was she who suggested our names to Profile Books as possible editors of Nella Last’s post-war diary, and we are appreciative of this recommendation. Dorothy’s leadership of the MO Archive is supported by the work of an excellent staff, and we are glad to be able to acknowledge the help given by Fiona Courage, Mell Davies, Jessica Scantlebury, Karen Watson and Adam Harwood.

  Our final debt is the most substantial. Since early 2007 we have been in regular contact with our editor at Profile Books, Daniel Crewe, and these exchanges of opinion and information have had a major impact on the character of this book. Daniel posed sound questions, raised reasonable doubts, detected problems that we had not noticed, offered many constructive suggestions and was excellent both in sensing the overall shape of the book and in spotting details that needed our attention. As a result of his contributions, this book is much better than it would otherwise have been. We are very happy to have been associated with him in bringing to light more of the writing of a remarkable woman.

  Cobourg, Ontario

  June 2008