Family Stories: Retirement, Old Age and Generational Thinking in Britain

When we look for everyday understandings of retirement and old age in the recent past, what we frequently find are family stories: of a grandfather who died ‘in harness’; of a widowed aunt who travelled the world; of parents who moved to the seaside and regretted it. Intimate others, including the deceased, have offered Britons subjective resources for facing what Susan Sontag has called the ‘ordeal of ageing’. In this lecture, I trace this kind of generational thinking through life-writing, oral history and archived social science sources across the later twentieth century, when old age was being remade in Britain in important ways. Moving beyond the millennium, I show how a new mode of generational thinking emerged centring the ageing ‘baby boomer’ cohorts, whose collective experience of welfare universalism, social mobility and capital accumulation became a theme for polemical commentary. Here, family stories became entangled with potent public narratives of intergenerational unfairness, creating a tense equilibrium observable in our present moment of fracture in the social contract between old and young.