ABSTRACT
From time to time, during the early interviews with old people in Britain, we learnt of friends passed on, children moved to distant places and pensioners with no children and apparently few friends. In America, some churches have societies to keep in touch with the ‘shut-ins’ as they were described. In Britain, because of a much smaller church membership proportional to the total population, a great many of these housebound old people would be overlooked but a variety of benevolent individuals and agencies have promoted voluntary ‘good companion’ or ‘friendly visitor’ schemes whereby active, well-disposed citizens are organised, on a non-sectarian, anybody-visited basis, to call on sick, especially elderly, citizens. The experience of these societies shows that there is a need for this kind of service, but there is often little information about the actual number of old people involved or the size and scale of the service really needed, except that present provisions in some localities are often seen to be inadequate. Neither do we know much about steps taken by old people, themselves, to replace old friends by new ones. Are many lonely because they could not be bothered to cultivate friends when they were younger and more active? Need they be lonely now if they took the trouble to seek friends?
