Description
The Mass Observation Archive’s first project was embedded field work in Bolton and as part of this, a project was undertaken with a group of 41 girls at Pikes Lane Elementary School. In ‘The Class of ’37’, accomplished contemporary historians Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer rediscover the words, personalities and worlds of these 12-14-year-olds, the last generation to leave school before the Second World War, and to finish school at the age of fourteen. With them we will discover how the girls’ vibrant, articulate and passionate writing on everything from their homes, the Royal Family (this was Coronation year) and their futures, over the course of hundreds of original essays, can speak to us across the decades. Yet if their childhoods ended before the horrors of war and the salve of the welfare state – two of the defining events of the twentieth century – their adult lives would be shaped by both.
