Ageing in the British Archives

💡This video is a recording of the first Health Humanities Lecture of the academic year 2022-2023. The speaker is Charlotte Greenhalgh (University of Waikato, New Zealand). The talk is about what social research archives in Britain reveal about old age and the way it is perceived in society.

📜This video investigates the ways older people in Britain experienced and narrated their own lives between the 1930s and the 1970s. Over this period, the circumstances of old age transformed, and older people spoke to the British public in new ways. Britain, like other western nations, developed a welfare state stronger than any seen previously. Politicians and policymakers relied to an unprecedented degree on the data and recommendations of social researchers. Such investigators were better funded than ever before to seek out the experiences and views of the population groups for whom governments were making policy. Mid-century researchers left behind a mountain of material attesting to the ideas of older people. But to what extent did social researchers consider the testimonies they so carefully gathered, recorded, analyzed, and stored? This video seeks out the voices of older people in social research archives. In doing so, the speaker charts ageing Britons’ efforts to shape public understandings of old age in the twentieth century and asks whether they were heard.

👩‍🎓Dr Charlotte Greenhalgh teaches and researches in the History Program at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She is the author of Aging in Twentieth-Century Britain (University of California Press, 2018).

📆This talk was recorded on Thursday 9 February 2023.