Giving Madge an immediate subsidy of £50 from his own pocket, Keynes urged the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) to fund the project. Harrisson and Madge, he wrote, “are live wires, amongst the most original investigators of the younger generation and well worth encouraging,” and this was “an enquiry of first class importance, which I have long wished to see undertaken…more purely economic-scientific [in] character than some of their previous enquiries,” and “vastly more deserving” than many of the dreary and fruitless academic projects customarily financed by the NIESR. (Hinton, 2013, p. 160)
Other cultural movers and shakers who joined the M-O movement were the painter Julian Trevelyan, Tom Driberg, and, as ever lurking behind the scenes, Sir Richard Acland. Tom Harrisson briefed Acland on the aims of M-O and Acland spoke in favor of M-O, while drawing “a sharp line—over-generous in the circumstances—between the WSS [Wartime Social Survey], whose findings provided the state with a secret weapon for the manipulation of public opinion, and the MO, who published its results for all to see” (ibid., p. 183. After Acland published his book, Unser Kampf (Our Struggle), he commissioned M-O to pretest his “Manifesto of the Common Man.”)
One of the aims of M-O was to popularize science and so introduce increased rationality into the public debate. Harrisson came up with a plan to provide the major newspapers with written reports of the latest scientific research. In 1940 he presented “Memorandum on Propaganda for Science” to Solly Zuckerman's scientific dining club, Tots and Quots, whose members included Julian Huxley. Popularizing scientific research was meant to combat
“the sway of superstition in the midst of science.” Another was to tackle the problem from the other end, by working directly with these “large new groups of semi-intellectuals and semi creative persons” employed in commercial entertainment, whose work played a role in encouraging superstitions and escapist modes of thinking among the masses. [Emphasis added. This included pop music and dance clubs.] Richard Acland had responded enthusiastically to Harrisson's suggestion of a meeting with “some people in the dance music world…I wonder if it would be worth trying to convert any of these to our ideas and try to get them to express them in dance tunes. I can imagine for example an immense popularity for something with the refrain of “When are they going to let us build a better world?” (Hinton, 2013, pp. 256–258)
M-O's interest in dance clubs was so extensive that a 375-page study of dance culture “On with the Dance: Nation, Culture, and Popular Dancing in Britain, 1918–1945,” cites M-O's findings 85 times. A brief perusal of this document makes clear that, not only were dance clubs of great interest to M-O as venues for observing British citizens and learning about their behaviors and interests, but dance music, and by extension dance halls, were an intrinsic part of an ongoing effort to shape public behavior and interests. Specifically, the study cites the plethora of dances that were contrived as a means to instill people with patriotic feelings during wartime! Like M-O itself, this is an aspect of history that seems to have gone mostly unremarked upon, but which very clearly shows how popular culture can be directed—and even created—to serve sociopolitical ends. Mick Jagger and LSE come to mind once again.
The British public also embraced this notion that the Lambeth Walk, and dancing in general, were symbolic of democracy and the national spirit. Mass Observation's Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge justified their inclusion of an entire chapter about the dance in a book about the national reaction to the Munich Crisis by noting, “we may learn something about the future of democracy if we take a closer look at the Lambeth Walk.”…This was a crucial time period, in which Britain moved closer to war, and ideas about national identity transitioned accordingly…. Some people seemed to have seen through the commercialization of the nation represented in the dance, and to have viewed the content as exploitative. Alec Hughes speculated in his report for Mass Observation that the timing of the dance was designed to coincide with the institution of conscription in the summer of 1939. (Abra, 2009)
Entertaining the masses to keep them distracted has worked at least since Roman times (bread and circuses); add to that a loosening of sexual mores means more women getting pregnant sooner, which is one way to ensure men are sufficiently motivated to keep their jobs and not to want to strike.
Allegedly Jimmy Savile started playing records in dance halls also in the early 1940s (when he was supposedly working down a coal mine). This is difficult to corroborate, but according to his autobiography at least, he was the first to use two turntables and a microphone at the Grand Records Ball, in the Guardbridge Hotel, in 1947. If so, it's perhaps not unthinkable that he was cutting his teeth as a teenager in local dance clubs at exactly the time Acland, Harrisson, et al. were working out how best to incorporate the dance club scene into social research and “progressive” movements.
The evidence provided by the Mass Observation material indicates that the world of pop music and dance halls was of crucial interest to the ruling class and, in fact, that it was being used to implement long-term social goals. Before attaining prominence as the dean of pop music in the 1960s, Savile (as well as the Kray twins) ran his own clubs in the 1950s, a period when wartime dance halls steadily morphed into gangster-run venues for drugs and prostitution. And not only did the budding new dance culture overlap with the crime underworld populated by the Kray twins and Jimmy Boyle (and possibly Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, and Savile's pal Peter Sutcliffe), it also intersected with the interests of Members of Parliament, from social reformers like Acland to occult-dabblers like Driberg and known child molesters like Lord Boothby. Is it a leap to suppose that Savile's involvement with the world of dance music was part and parcel with his connection to, or employment by, governmental agencies?
CHAPTER IX
Evolutionary theory and social engineering: Richard Acland's Common Wealth
“I've neglected to tell you so far about the role stress plays in Fabian evolutionary theory. Just as Hegel taught that history moves faster toward its conclusion by way of warfare, so evolutionary socialists were taught by Hegel to see struggle as the precipitant of evolutionary improvement for the species, a necessary purifier eliminating the weak from the breeding sweepstakes. Society evolves slowly toward ‘social efficiency’ all by itself; society under stress, however, evolves much faster! Thus the deliberate creation of crisis is an important tool of evolutionary socialists. Does that help you understand the government school drama a little better, or the well-publicized doomsday scenarios of environmentalists?”
—John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education
At the beginning of World War II, Norman Glaister and his friends joined Common Wealth, the new political party formed by Sir Richard Acland. Acland began as a “junior whip” for the Liberals. His politics apparently changed course and, in 1942, he broke from the Liberals to found Common Wealth with J. B. Priestley, thereby opposing the coalition between the major parties (see Acland, 1981). He helped form the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1957, of which my grandfather was a cofounder and, according to family history, helped design the famous Peace symbol that would be adopted by the counterculture. Common Wealth's interest in optimizing social organization consistent with its principles also led it to develop close links with the School of Integrative Social Research at Braziers Park.1 But we know all this.
Of Common Wealth, etc., George Orwell wrote: “I think this movement should be watched with attention. It might develop into the new Socialist party we have all been hoping for, or into something very sinister.” Orwell, like Kitty Bowler, believed that Richard Acland had the potential to become a fascist leader (Simkin, 2014). Richard Acland also wrote a bunch of books, including his homage to Mein Kampf and What it Will Be Like in the New Britain, in which he talks about the need to break down the family unit. It was published by Victor Gollancz in 1942 (Gollancz was another member of the 1941 Committee, and Alec sent him regular donations). Sixty years later, Gollancz, the publishing house, would be part of Orion House Publishing, which is owned by Hachette, one of “The Big Five” publishing houses. In 1992, Hachette merged with Matra, the French automobile and missile building company. Gollancz, a.k.a. Orion, a.k.a. Hachette, a.k.a. Matra, would publish my book Matrix Warrior: Being