Wartime Social Survey

The surveys were carried out by fifty-five trained female fieldworkers, disparagingly called "Cooper's Snoopers" (after founder Duff Cooper) by the press,[1] divided into two teams who were able to travel around Britain in order to carry out their surveys.

These were so distributed around Britain that they could cover large centres of population as well as smaller towns and rural communities.

[4] The benefits of these arrangements were that the mobile teams of fieldworkers could carry out surveys in any part of the country as required, of that they could all be sent to one area.

[4] The Wartime Social Survey had 35 technical, administrative and clerical staff and had an annual budget of about £40,000.

[3] The orientalist Margaret Smith worked for the Survey translating and writing texts for broadcasting in the Middle East and teaching Arabic to military personnel.

Members of staff at the Wartime Social Survey collate information in the coding room. Information from interviewers arrives in the form of ringed answers to questions on a questionnaire, and, here in the coding room, these answers are all given a code number (1944)