ABSTRACT
This book was written for both personal and professional reasons. The personal reason began when I became fascinated listening to old people and their accounts of their lives and the history of their communities. I enjoyed listening to my grandmother and other elderly relatives. Then, as a professional community worker and volunteer, I was involved with visiting elderly people and setting up services with them. I gained an insight into my family’s history and could locate this in the social changes of the last one hundred and twenty years: in the rural-urban migration of skilled artisans to London, and in the subsequent expansion and suburbanization of London. An insight into changes in the British working-class movement came, not from books, but from the recollections of participants whose names would never reach the history books. Being involved in local government as an elected councillor and trying to provide improved services for elderly people led me to realize the extent to which problems concerning elderly people in our society are little understood and underresearched, and I was able to turn this into a systematic academic study. Finally, my position as a university lecturer, my training as a social anthropologist and my knowledge as a sociologist enabled me to attempt this study, for my growing personal interest coincided with a more general growth of interest in the subject and an increasing demand for research in the field, which clearly coincides with demographic changes in our society and across the world.
