CORONATION DAY STUDY

Evening Star, Issue 22817, 27 November 1937, Page 22

CORONATION DAY STUDY

WHAT THE CROWD THINKS A novel study of what a crowd thinks is made in a book published recently with the title ‘ Mass-observation Daysnrvey ’ (says the London ‘ Daily Telegraph ’). It is the first book issued by an organisation called “ Mass Observation,” which chose Coronation Day for noting crowd behaviour. The organisation consists of people who have agreed to co-operate in writing down, simply and accurately, the life that goes on around them. In the book are collected the reports of observers in London and throughout the country who set down in detail all that they saw and heard. This is what one woman thought when seated in her husband’s office, overlooking the route of the royal procession:— “ Wonder how I will get through the day—got out Linklater’s ‘ Life of Mary, Queen of Scots,’ and bottle of beer for husband; also portable wireless set. “ Find myself perfectly happy watching the crowd (‘ Mary, Queen of Scots ’ is not opened once). Children equally happy, especially as they find a hack window overlooking first-aid station, and can watch crowd casualties. “ Notice queer swaying movementlike a parrot on perch—that seizes different sections or crowd from time to time. They rock faster and faster, and after a fainting form (usually female) is dragged out.” A schoolmaster near Parliament Square describes the reception given to the main procession in these words: “ The crowd cheered loudest troops from the most distant parts of the Empire, the Indians, the Australians. . . , The cheers were also loud for bands if they were playing—not otherwise— and for troops in red, as far as I could judge, rather than those in other colours. Scotsmen and pipe bands were loudly cheered. . . . The King and Queen got the loudest cheers of all. They looked young and very small in their heavy gilt setting.” HUGGING A SYPHON. A girl typist in Leicester Square station at 11 p.m. reports: “As we go up the escalator we are amused to see a young man, hugging a soda-water syphon, come sailing down the belt of the bannister; as he comes in contact with a lamp on the slide the bottle is broken, and he sails on his way merrily—too drunk to mind anything.’ There are 400 pages of similar reports, and the reactions of people who stayed at home and listened to the wireless are not forgotten—nor the celebrations in the provinces. The editors—there are seven of them —make some slight attempt to draw deductions from it all. They point out that people “ forgot to be angry with the busmen for being on-strike.” That, they think, was because “ any break-up of the routine of life is satisfactory to most people.” They declare that there was little evidence that the crowd had any clear realisation of what it was that moved it when a procession passed.