Growing Old with the Welfare State

Reviewed by: Growing Old with the Welfare State: Eight British Lives ed. by Nick Hubble, Jennie Taylor, and Philip Tew Kate Bradley Hubble, Nick, Jennie Taylor, and Philip Tew, eds. –Growing Old with the Welfare State: Eight British Lives. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 159. Growing Old with the Welfare State is a collection of eight autobiographical accounts by British people who either took part in responding to Mass-Observation directives or who were involved with reading groups that formed part of the Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing project at Brunel University between 2009 and 2012. Of the eight, four were born in the interwar period and four were born in the early stages of the Second World War. Therefore, whilst the eight people write from the perspective of looking back over their lives, this is also a study of how the welfare state evolved alongside and was intertwined with their lives and times, as it was founded in the authors' childhood or early adulthoods. 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. The accounts, however, do not follow standard literary approaches to autobiography, which tend to produce linear accounts of lives. This reflects both the editorial process of the book and the contexts in which the autobiographical accounts were written. Mass-Observation was set up in Britain in 1937 as a means of creating an "anthropology of ourselves," of casting a sociological and anthropological gaze upon the British. Data collection took several forms, including volunteerparticipants keeping diaries and responding to "directives," or a request for written observations on specified themes. Mass-Observation became a commercial market research company from the later 1940s, but its social scientific and historical role was revived in 1981 (see the Mass-Observation website, www.massobs.org.uk, for further information). Those authors in the volume whose writing comes from [End Page 206] the Mass-Observation Archives were part of this change from the 1980s, and their contributions are responses to directives. Editorial intervention was required to ensure that the responses flow well as book chapters, as well as to remove any identifying details, but what remains is engaging, rich, and very often moving. The voices of the authors are clear and authentic. The editors provide useful supporting chapters and chapter introductions that present the contexts in which the authors' writing was prepared and that pull together relevant points about the individuals' lives and experiences. As the editors point out, these autobiographical accounts are better suited to being read and considered in their entirety rather than being used as raw primary source materials from which extracts can be taken. As the volume offers eight accounts, it cannot—and does not pretend to—offer a definitive account of ageing in twentieth-century England. Mass-Observation, in its anthropological mode, was and is not representative in a truly socially scientific sense, as its participants were self-selected volunteers who saw themselves as having an opinion or experience that was worthy of being studied and archived. As mentioned above, these accounts have been retrofitted to an extent in order to serve as reflections on ageing from responses to directives, in some cases, or to reading group discussions in others. Despite the call to not use them in this way, the accounts will remain useful for those who are looking for extracts to provide insight into experiences of specific events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their greatest value, however, is in offering eight different accounts of growing older in the context of a welfare state, over a lifetime. All eight authors reflect on what "old age" means to them. They try to offer definitions of when old age might begin, often referring to their memories of "old people" in their youth, who were probably not as "old" as they thought they were. Common to most is a sense of not feeling substantially different in themselves but noticing that their bodies could not do as much as they wanted them to, or as quickly. Bodies ail, and bodies fail. Some of the Mass-Observation respondents

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