“Making the Best of My Appearance”

Older women and men were celebrated in fashion and beauty culture during the middle decades of the twentieth century. In British Vogue, for example, the character Mrs. Exeter modeled glamourous clothing and advised older women about style from 1949 until the mid-1960s. Dashing older men graced the magazine’s pages beside her. Many older people who wrote for social research organization Mass Observation paid careful attention to their appearances. This group of Britons had sufficient resources to spend time and money on shopping and grooming. Many among them felt joy when they selected the ‘right’ outfits and were proud of their attractive complexions, hands, or hair. This chapter explores personal responses to physical aging, including the pleasure of looking good.

Talking with Peter Townsend

The family lives of elderly people attracted fresh concern in the postwar years when more old people lived alone and used welfare services. Sociologist Peter Townsend spent many hours speaking with each of 203 interviewees when he researched the topic in East London in 1954–1955. Townsend highlighted ignored contributions of older people to family life. He showed that families, not the state, did the real work of aged care. During interviews, older people told life stories that illustrated their hard work and stoicism, and that challenged sociological theories. Most did not fear death, but only the suffering of loved ones. While a few could not find the words, the majority were confident storytellers: this chapter explores their unpublished stories.

Aging and Twentieth-Century Britain

Existing scholarship on the history of old age displays several puzzling contradictions. Its chronological definitions of old age, which usually begin at around sixty, encompass people of enormous diversity in health, wealth, and even age. Meanwhile, older people themselves reject such definitions. Instead, elderly Britons have typically looked to their own lives in order to understand what it has meant to grow old. In the twentieth century, experiences of old age were shaped by the increasingly humane treatment of older Britons. Yet the British state simultaneously tolerated persistent poverty among the aged. This book addresses these tensions by uniting the public and private histories of aging and by putting the particular challenges of researching old age at the heart of its account.

Games with Time

Postwar social changes ranging from slum clearances to full employment sparked public interest in working-class lives during the first half of the twentieth century. From the late 1950s, technical developments including lithography and offset printing lowered the cost of printing and increased its speed. Community presses published newly diverse autobiographies. Older authors described youthful scenes that were set in the distant past and parsed social changes that had occurred over half a century or more. Many among them knew that memories were unreliable but found that the past constantly intruded on the present. Later life delivered new perspectives on childhoods that featured deprivation and violence as well as joy, and elderly autobiographers were quick to celebrate the achievements of the present.

Into the Institution

In 1958–1959 Peter Townsend interviewed almost 500 residents of old age homes for his project The Last Refuge. Townsend investigated what had changed since the Labour Government introduced new legislation for residential care in 1948. Old age homes had become symbolic of continuous state support from cradle to grave. Yet the delivery of residential care was uneven, and it divided the aged by social class and health. Meanwhile researchers, workers, and elderly people often disagreed about the ethics of aged care. Townsend drove change within these institutions. During interviews, for example, researchers and residents enacted the ideal of respect for the inner lives of the old, even if midcentury research methods sometimes recreated the disempowering conditions of institutional life.

Experts and the Elderly

Researchers and policymakers became increasingly interested in improving the lives of older Britons over the course of the twentieth century. Expert attention was first drawn to the particular poverty of the elderly during the late nineteenth century. Charles Booth both surveyed elderly paupers and argued for state pensions (introduced in Britain in 1908) in order to alleviate their poverty. Subsequently, the growing popularity of psychology encouraged greater attention to the private lives of the aged. Postwar reformers contributed to the expansion of welfare services for older Britons after 1945 and aimed to improve their inner lives. Yet many researchers still omitted the testimony of the old from their studies. Postwar research became skewed towards problems that the state welfare system could solve.

Epilogue

What it means to be old is among the most pressing questions of our time. International organizations describe population aging as one of the most significant social transformations of this century with potentially dire effects. Yet there has been debate over measurements of population aging since it first became a topic of concern in the 1930s. Since then, the British state has established collective markers of old age such as retirement and residential care, but individuals experienced aging before, after, and independently of these apparent parameters of late life. Older people raised their voices in diverse fields of twentieth-century life and they spoke with particular authority at midcentury. In so doing, older Britons asked to be understood through the course of their own lives.