Growing Old with the Welfare State: Eight British Lives

About the Book

The combined effect of the welfare state and medical advances means that more people now live longer lives than ever before in history. As a consequence, the experience of ageing has been transformed. Yet our cultural and social perceptions of ageing remain governed by increasingly dated images and narratives.

Growing Old with the Welfare State challenges these stereotypes by bringing together eight previously unpublished stories of ordinary British people born between 1925 and 1945 to show contemporary ageing in a new light. These biographical narratives, six of which were written as part of the Mass Observation Project, reflect on and compare the experience of living in two post-war periods of social change, after the first and second world wars.

In doing so, these stories, along with their accompanying contextual chapters, provide a valuable and accessible resource for social historians, and expose both historical and contemporary views of age and ageing that challenge modern assumptions.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Part I. The Interwar Generation
1. Backgrounds
2. ‘To me, life and work are linked’ - Ivy Miller
3. ‘I never stopped learning all my life’ - George Borrows
4. ‘Mine has been a privileged generation’ - Ron Turpin
5. ‘People assume the elderly aren’t interested in sex’- Amy Saunders
Part II. The Wartime Generation
6: Backgrounds
7. ‘Life is better than I could ever have imagined as a child’ - Joy Warren
8. ‘An apprentice old dear’- Randall Jenkins
9: ‘Politicians need to chat up the older generation’ - Brenda Allen
10. ‘The young do not have exclusive rights to love and happiness’ - Joanna Woods
Afterword.
Appendix: FCMAP, MO and the U3A

About the Author :

Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University, UK. He has published extensively on contemporary literature and culture and is the author of Mass Observation and Everyday Life (2010).

Jennie Taylor completed her PhD in History at the University of Sydney, Australia, and worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Brunel University, UK. She has published on Mass Observation and leisure.

Philip Tew is Professor of English at Brunel University, UK. He has published numerous books, including Zadie Smith (2009), Writers Talk (2008), and Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B. S. Johnson, (2013).

Review :
The eight autobiographies are very rich in detail, exploring poignant and tragic incidents in the authors’ lives as well as the aspects that provide them with joy or meaning ... Growing Old with the Welfare State will be of great importance to those working on experiences of ageing, citizenship, and welfare in Britain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It will also be highly valuable to historians and sociologists of emotions, intergenerational relations, and time. An important intervention in a youth-centered culture. Growing Old with the Welfare State tells us what it is like to grow old in modern Britain. Each chapter focuses on the experience of a single individual recorded over a period of twenty years. Each shows that growing old is an active process, that can be marked by love and unexpected opportunity as well as by loss and anxiety. But the book offers more than a series of beautifully moving individual histories - it also shows us the complex ways in which age, historical context and generational identity work together to frame attitude and experience. This rare use of individual narratives provides new and rich insights into the ageing process and how, as we age, we make not only our own but, also, collective history.This revealing narrative account successfully weaves individual life stories with the broad sweep of political and cultural history, and is essential reading for those interested in ageing and the welfare state.