Modern British History Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2025: Helen McCarthy

Family Stories: Retirement, Old Age and Generational Thinking in Britain since the 1970s

About this Event

The Ben Pimlott Lecture is hosted by the journal Modern British History, Oxford University Press Journals and King's Contemporary British History. This lecture series was established in 2006 in honour of the late Ben Pimlott and in association with the Institute of Contemporary British History, with which Ben had close ties. The lecture will be followed by a reception to which attendees are warmly invited. Each lecture is published in Modern British History and is available free online.

This year’s lecture is given by Professor Helen McCarthy. Professor McCarthy is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary British History at St John’s College, Cambridge. She is the author of three books, including Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood (Bloomsbury, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize. Her current book project is a social and cultural history of retirement since 1945, to be published by Penguin (Allen Lane). Between 2015 and 2020, Professor McCarthy was Managing Editor of Modern British History.

Professor Helen McCarthy

Family Stories: Retirement, Old Age and Generational Thinking in Britain since the 1970s

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 tools for envisaging life after work and making sense of it once it arrived. 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. Yet the enduring power of family stories, I argue - and the affective bonds that they both describe and reinscribe - ultimately won out over these narratives of conflict rooted in rigid generational categories and identities.

The lecture will be held in the History Department (8th Floor) Open Space, KCL Strand Campus, London, WC2R 2LS. The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

All Welcome

Free Admission

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