My stepfather, Bruce Watkin, who has died aged 98, was one of the founder members of Mass Observation, the social research organisation set up to record everyday life in Britain.
Bruce was in at the beginning of Mass Observation in 1937, listening anonymously to ordinary conversations and watching people at work while keeping detailed diaries of what he saw and heard. He served with an eclectic bunch of talented colleagues that included the larger-than-life anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the film-maker Humphrey Jennings, and the poets Charles Madge and Kathleen Raine.
Bruce was initially part of the Worktown project in Bolton, observing people in pubs and taking notes of conversations – a project that led to him becoming one of the main contributors to The Pub and the People, a book published in 1943 by Victor Gollancz. But his work was interrupted by the second world war, during which he served with the RAF in the workshop of the engine designer Harry Ricardo, testing burner-atomisers for the first jet engines.
After the war Bruce went into town planning in Leeds, Staffordshire and London. He was one of the first students at the Open University, obtaining a BA in earth sciences in 1975, and went on to become field adviser for the National Parks Commission and a chief advocate of the setting up of Exmoor national park in south-west England. In his 70s he was secretary of the Somerset Archaeological Society.
A keen observer of people, buildings and the English countryside, he was also the author of two Shell County Guides – on Surrey (1977) and on Buckinghamshire (1981). Ever candid, when he received a post-publication memo from his publishers asking whether he actually liked Buckinghamshire, he wrote: “The answer is not ‘no’ but that I was disappointed with it.”
Bruce was born in Bloomsbury, London, to Frank Bailey, a businessman, and Eve (nee Lewis), a travel writer. After his parents’ divorce he was adopted by Paul Watkin, a GP in the East End of London, and took his surname. He went to school at Bishop’s Stortford college in Hertfordshire and then Christ Church, Oxford, where he read classics, then geography. Although his sympathies at the time were close to being communist, and he had little money, he was known for giving some of the best parties in Oxford – including one, with his friend Alan Hodge, for the poets Robert Graves and Laura Riding on their literary visit to Oxford in 1937. He was also a founder member of the Experimental Theatre Club in Oxford.
Bruce was married first to Brigitte Paneth, and after their divorce moved to south-west England to live with Joan Keenleyside. After Joan’s death he married my mother, Joan Haldane. He is survived by two sons, Brian and Keir, from his first marriage.
