Reflections on British Royalty

Jennifer J. Purcell is Professor of History at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, USA. Using Mass-Observation diaries and directives, her first book, Domestic Soldiers (2010), seeks to understand the day-to-day lives of six women on the home front during the Second World War. She is also the author of Mother of the BBC: Mabel Constanduros and the Development of Light Entertainment on the BBC, 1925-1957 (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Mass-Observation: Text, Context and Analysis of the Pioneering Pamphlet and Movement (Bloomsbury, 2023). Fiona Courage is Deputy University Librarian and Director of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, UK. Her publications include 'Recipes for co-production with children and young people' in Time, Technology and Documentation in a Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2018; with Liam Berriman and Kate Howland) and 'Mass Observing Sport' in Recording Leisure Lives: sports, spectacles and spectators in 20th-century Britain (2013; with Jessica Scantlebury).

1. Introduction
2. Coronation of George VI (1937)
3. Royalty in Wartime
4. Royal Wedding (1947)
5. Coronation of Elizabeth II (1953)
6. Ordinary or Extraordinary? The Royal Family in the 1950s and 60s
7. Middle-Aged Royalty: The 1977 Silver Jubilee
8. Mass Observation Project: 1980s-1990s
9. Mass Observation Project: Today
Index