Planning for Retirement in Postwar Britain

Improved pensions, home ownership and widening educational opportunity fuelled new expectations of security and leisure in later life in the postwar period. Retirement became a collective social experience which could be actively envisaged and planned for, whilst presenting new challenges of psychic and interpersonal adjustment. This paper explores how Britons embraced a planning mindset through a focus on the movement for ‘pre-retirement education’, which emerged in the late 1950s to help the older worker prepare for the end of working life. As well as tracing the fortunes of this movement, the paper uses Mass Observation life-writing and archived interviews with retired steelworkers from the early 1980s to show how retirement planning was practised critically and idiosyncratically, often with an awareness of its psychic risks as well as rewards. The paper ends by reflecting on pre-retirement education’s eclipse in the 1990s by a more narrowly defined focus on the management of financial risk, drawing out the implications of this story for broader metanarratives of change across the postwar period.