Richard Smith

Could people afford to retire in the past? There is a belief that until widespread retirement became the norm in the second half of the 20th century, men and women were expected to labour until debility or decrepitude made this impossible.  

Attitudes to work in past society 

It is widely assumed that in pre-industrial societies people worked only just enough to fulfil their subsistence needs. This implies that people would work less if their incomes rose, a pattern that economists have termed a ‘backward sloping supply curve of labour’.  

This theory has been challenged by the alternative notion of an ‘industrious revolution’ in the later 17th and 18th century. This revolution, defined by an intensification of hours worked, allowed people to acquire an expanding range of consumer goods.

But neither theory has addressed how these differing circumstances impacted on the working behaviour of older people. 

Sociologists long argued that with a shift away from economies dominated by subsistence agriculture to more economically diversified and increasingly capitalistic labour markets, there would be a negative impact on the labouring lives of the elderly. In increasingly competitive market economies, elderly farmers would be left with unprofitable land, and elderly workers would be pushed out of the labour force. 

Measuring labour force participation of elderly males 

Figure 1 above is based on data from Cardington (Bedfordshire, 1782) and Corfe Castle (Dorset, 1790).  

In neither setting is there any indication that men worked less in their 60s and 70s than earlier in their lives. The data appear to suggest that in the late 18th century the labour force participation rates of elderly males remained close to 80 percent – a level very similar to that found a century later in the 1881 national census. In 1881, older male workers were consistently over-represented in relatively low paid, low status occupations in agriculture, clothing, and general labouring, and underrepresented in high paid and new sectors such as engineering, transport, glass, and electricals.  

Evidence for the three centuries before 1881 shows that the efforts expended by many men in old age to retain a presence in the paid labour force was an enduring feature of their lives.  

Roland Vivian Pitchforth, Old Stone Waller. Manchester Art Gallery.

Older men of all social levels retained a strong preference for self-sufficiency and independence, but those in possession of significant resources could achieve that status most easily. Elite men as they aged were able to sustain well-paid public activities in administration and governance at both local and national levels. For instance, of the 954 English MPs whose ages could be determined between 1754 and 1784, over a third remained in post after age 60, and of those nearly a half only vacated their positions because of death. 

There was an increasing likelihood that poorer men as they aged patched together an ‘economy of makeshifts’ by combining whatever resources and earnings they could gather. This could include pasturage of a cow on the common waste, keeping a pig or poultry, or receiving payment from the overseers of the poor to perform small tasks, such as ridding the parish of vermin or repairing the highway. There was no precise age at which elderly men would cease to engage in these forms of labour. 

Measuring labour force participation of elderly females 

Elderly females also showed little tendency to stop working after age 50, although with some regional variation depending on what work was available. For example, women in their 50s and 60s in Cardington were almost twice as likely to be employed as those of a similar age in Corfe, reflecting the substantial presence of spinning and lacemaking in Cardington. 

George Harvey, Old Spinner. The Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum.

An important factor affecting female participation in paid labour was marital status. In Corfe, only 8 per cent of married women over 60 were employed, but 83 percent of elderly widows were listed as in paid employment. In this instance, the loss of a husband would propel women into paid work. In Cardington, women were likely to be in paid employment both during their marriage and in widowhood. Overall, therefore, elderly widows were highly likely to be in some kind of paid employment. 

However, because women’s work was frequently ill-defined, encompassing housework and part-time assistance to their husbands, particularly in agriculture and trades such as inn-keeping and retailing, there may have been under-recording of the extent of their income-generating labour, particularly in old age.  

Elderly working-class women were expected to continue paid work outside and unpaid work inside the household. They were likely to have secured work charring, taking in laundry, and petty trading. Remuneration was minimal, although elderly women were often more successful than old men in finding informal work outside the home. Like men in labouring jobs, low pay for women of lower social status made it difficult for them to accumulate savings.  

John Widdas, An Unidentified Retired Female Servant at Bramham. Leeds Museums and Galleries.

Diaries and correspondence show women in the upper classes actively managing their households and estates. Women from business families and those of the middling sort had opportunities to pursue ventures in later life; many liquidated their late husbands’ assets and loaned cash on interest. A third of elderly female witnesses before London church courts in the 17th and early 18th centuries were maintained by their husband or worked with him, particularly as inn- and shopkeepers.  

Ten percent of those female witnesses who were widowed had a ‘private income’. Fewer than 10 percent are described as ‘supported by their family’, and a further 10 percent were supported in whole or part by the parish. Hence most elderly females relied on themselves or their husbands rather than their wider families or the parish.  

Did the elderly participate in an ‘industrious revolution’? 

On average, witnesses appearing in the Session Papers of the Old Bailey and the Northern Assizes increased their working hours by around 20 percent over the course of the 18th century, although it is not clear if this applied to older people as well as to younger. This intensification of working hours may in part have been driven by a desire to acquire the broadening array of consumer goods including the proliferating colonial groceries of tobacco, tea, coffee, and sugar. Alternatively, the drive to work more days and hours might have been falling wages and rising dependency ratios.  

The late 18th and early 19th centuries were characterised by a tightening labour market and an unprecedented expansion of the population entering the work force. Under these conditions, elderly men may have been less able to secure additional hours of paid working time, and it would be hard to characterise any resulting unemployment as voluntary ‘retirement’. 

Funding retirement

How many people stopped work in old age and were able to enjoy a leisured retirement? We have already noted that old age for many was a time when work could not be avoided or abandoned since it was essential as a source of income. Not working might be more a reflection of lack of suitable employment, or perhaps a physical inability to undertake work as the ageing process took its toll.  

However, there were some opportunities to prepare for and guard against the loss of employment at older ages. “Friendly societies” (insurance or savings clubs) grew significantly, and parliamentary returns from 1802-3 record nearly 10,000 such societies with over 700,000 participants. At that time, it was not uncommon to find 40 to 50 percent of the adult male population registered as members of friendly societies in some urban centres. 

However, such societies frequently folded – being of modest size, they often matured with too high a ratio of elderly beneficiaries relative to those of working age paying into them. This would leave the elderly even worse off, having paid into a fund that did not generate any returns. 

By the late 18th century retirement did have a presence, but this was mainly among the elite. There was a growing sense that a pensioned retirement was something deserved following a lifetime of service, especially service to the state. This was first realised among those who had been in the military as well as the civil service. (This was very different to the idea that support in old age was an entitlement for everyone.) 

A Greenwich Pensioner. Wellcome Collection.

Who retired?

Late 19th century Census Enumerator Books (CEBs) of England and Wales differentiate between those described as ‘retired’, those ‘formerly’ in an occupation, and those with ‘pauper’ status. An important study based on CEBs from the West Riding, Cheshire, Glamorgan, Hampshire and Hertfordshire has unearthed some telling patterns of the capacity to retire.  

Overall, men were much more often described as ‘retired’ than women. Regionally, far more males were described as ‘retired’ and far fewer described as ‘paupers’ in Cheshire and West Riding. Here wages were higher and the economies more differentiated, enabling the accumulation of savings and the means to leave work voluntarily.

The overall percentages of old men enumerated as ‘retired’ in the CEBs were more substantial than has been previously assumed. In 1891, over 10 percent of all adult males were enumerated as ‘retired’ in these five counties, and in some registration sub-districts the proportion reached 22 percent.  

Being in an occupation that conferred status, or one based upon property ownership and invested capital, facilitated a voluntary exit from the workforce. Being an army officer, an innkeeper, or farmer meant that one was far more likely to be ‘retired’. There was a notably negative correlation between the proportions of old men listed as ‘retired’ and those receiving poor relief. 

 On the contrary, agricultural and general labourers, domestic servants, laundresses, and charwomen were very likely to be listed as ‘formerly’ in an occupation or as ‘paupers’. 

British School, An Elderly Garden Labourer. National Trust, Erddig.

Conclusion

The historical evidence does not fully endorse the preference for leisure over labour at any stage in the life cycle, as implied by the theory of the backward bending supply curve of labour. Working until it became physically impossible to do so was the norm.  

However, by the late 18th century, small sections of elderly society were in receipt of pensions that would certainly have enabled them to have lived comfortably without any requirement to work.  

At the same life-cycle stage, circumstances for the labouring poor were very different. There was a noteworthy deterioration in the value of parish welfare allocated to elderly females, as well as reduced employment chances for older men in areas where capitalist agriculture and de-industrialisation predominated. A modestly comfortable withdrawal from labouring in old age was therefore a limited possibility for most, but by no means all, sections of society.  

In 1908 a national non-contributory, but far from generous, old age pension was introduced for all citizens aged 70 and over with an annual income of £21 or less, not in receipt of poor relief and of good character. However, it would not be until the mid-20th century that an adequate nationwide old age pension was in place, and retirement rather than labouring throughout most of an extended old age became the norm. 

Further reading

• Boyer, G., ‘“Work for their prime: the workhouse for their age”: Old age pauperism in Victorian England’, Social Science History 40 (2016), 3-32. 
• Heritage, T., ‘The Elderly Populations of England and Wales, 1851-1911: A Comparative Study of Selected Counties’ (University of Southampton, Ph.D. thesis, 2019). https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/444061/
• Johnson, P., and Falkingham, J., Ageing and Economic Welfare (Sage Publications, London, 1992). 
• Mathias, P., ‘Time for Work and Play: Relations between Work and Leisure in the Early Modern Period’, Vierteljahrsdchrift für sozial- und Wirtshaftsgeschichte 81 (1994), 305-323. 
• Saito, O., ‘Who Worked When: Life-Time Profiles of Labour Force Participation in Cardington and Corfe Castle in the Late-Eighteenth Century as Mid-Nineteenth Centuries’, Local Population Studies 22 (1979), 14-29. 
• Thane, P., Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (Oxford University Press, 2000), chapters, 6, 14 and 19. 
• Voth, H. J., Time and Work in England 1750-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2000).