Olivia Cockett (1912–1998)

Olivia Cockett was born to a middle-class family in Brockley, a southeastern neighborhood of London. She is known primarily through the diaries she wrote for the Mass Observation Project, which was founded in 1936 to catalog the daily lives of Britons. She was 27 and working as a civilian employee of Scotland Yard when she began writing for Mass Observation on the eve of World War II. After the war, she became a senior civil servant.