Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The enrichment of retirement went hand in hand with a dramatic improvement in elderly people’s finances. In 1900, the aged had been just as poor as anyone else. By mid-century, however, rising wages for the employed, on the one hand, and limited welfare provision for the retired on the other, made old age synonymous with poverty. In 1970 Britain, pensioners made up every second household below the poverty line. Thirty years later, this had dwindled to a mere quarter. In the United States, in the 1980s, the elderly ceased to be poorer than the rest of the nation. By now, the Dutch, the Italians, the French and the Germans were leapfrogging Americans into early retirement, although Scandinavians remained industrious – fewer than a third of fifty-five to sixty-four-year-old Italians and Belgians were in paid work in 2005; in Germany, it was 41 per cent, while in Denmark and Sweden it was 62 per cent.67 In Germany in 2003, the average pensioner household was worth a quarter of a million euros. In Japan at the same time, elderly households (sixty-plus) held four times the financial wealth of their younger neighbours.68 Across the developed world, the 1960s–’90s were the golden years for seniors, although widows and singles continued to find themselves more easily trapped in poverty. Pensions came to stand for a salary rather than charity, and redistributed wealth from young to old. European welfare regimes accepted that the elderly in care homes, too, had a right to at least some discretionary spending.

  Under affluence, the definition of basic needs widened. In Germany, the ‘basic pocket money’ (Grundtaschengeld) had been calculated in 1964 to cover the simplest needs: every person on welfare benefits should be able to afford half a bar of soap, 80 grams of noodles and three bottles of beer per month. By 1980, most pensioners received DM66 on top of the ‘basic’ DM90. When, in 1982, the government proposed cutting into the extra pocket money, there was an outcry. The minister in charge, Antje Huber, was bombarded with complaints from old-age homes. The Grey Panthers demonstrated in Bonn, the capital. ‘PENSION CUT: GRANNY COMMITS SUICIDE’, announced the headline of one tabloid newspaper. What united the protesters was simple. To age decently and stay connected in an affluent society, half a bar of soap and three bottles of beer were no longer enough. Old people had a right to pursue their small pleasures and enjoy a bit of entertainment and distraction – the monthly trip to the hairdresser, a visit to the cinema, a nice blouse, musical records and presents for the grandchildren. One outraged labour charity itemized for the minister what the elderly in care homes actually spent to meet their ‘basic needs’ and participate in social life – the list included a monthly pedicure and ten cigarettes a day, flowers and magazines, visits to restaurants and the theatre. The pocket money needed to be doubled, not cut, it said. In the end, the luckless coalition government gave in and agreed to a compromise. The extra money was cut, but the basic pocket money was raised from DM90 to DM120 and renamed ‘cash for personal use’. Those who lived in homes and contributed to their cost from their pension received another 5 per cent of income on top. Across the land, hairdressers and confectioners breathed a sigh of relief.69

  The living conditions of the elderly edged closer and closer to those of the rest of society. By the mid-1990s, consumer spending by older couples in Finland and the United Kingdom reached 81 per cent and 85 per cent of that of younger cohorts; and this figure excluded housing. In Germany, Japan and New Zealand, they even outdid the young. Active ageing translated into yen and euros. An elderly Japanese couple, for example, spent 132 per cent as much on recreation and culture as a younger one; in Germany it was 115 per cent.70 These figures manifested a historic shift: working income ceased to be the all-important ticket into the world of consumption.

  Possessions, travel and beauty – all signalled the apotheosis of the elderly consumer. In London in the 1950s, most septuagenarians made do with a few old clothes and chairs and a small number of photographs and personal possessions. Single elderly men and widows especially lived barren material lives. The Hammersmith survey of 1954 listed the budget of a single man who ‘cooked only once a week and made things last over, eating one potato only for dinner . . . He was still wearing clothes he had had since 1914 and they and his furniture were in a very poor condition.’71 Many elderly people possessed only bedroom slippers for shoes. From 1947, local authorities in Britain were required to register all belongings on admitting someone to an old-age home. Such inventories make for grim reading. In his ground-breaking investigation of homes for the aged, Peter Townsend in 1962 catalogued page after page of ‘one broken wall-clock; two wooden chairs, one with a loose leg; one role of yellowing wall-paper’; a single cardboard box filled with ‘broken ornaments, hairpins, rusty screws, a broken pair of scissors’.72

  At first, televisions, telephones and consumer durables were slow to reach the households of the old. By 1990, elderly Britons had caught up. A decade later, the sixty-five- to seventy-four-year-olds could lay a greater claim than the twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds to that most precious possession: a home.73 Cramped rooms and council flats had largely given way to home ownership. A similar trend is evident elsewhere. A Swedish study of over 100,000 households in 2004 found that thirty- to fifty-nine-year-olds on average had ‘access’ to 5.5 of the following: a second home, a car, a boat, a caravan, a video recorder, a dish washer, a daily newspaper and a holiday. Those aged seventy still enjoyed five items from this group and were slightly ahead of those in their twenties. Even in their early eighties Swedes managed to enjoy at least four of these.74

  Behind these rising rates of ownership lay two developments. One was simply that a new cohort arrived, those born during the post-1945 baby boom, who had reached adolescence in the age of affluence and carried their material lifestyle with them into old age. This so-called ‘cohort effect’ is visible, for example, in their disproportionately high rate of VCR ownership, in which the baby-boomers had acted as trendsetters. Yet when it came to televisions, and telephones and household goods more generally, all cohorts showed rising levels of ownership, those born in the 1920s and ’30s as much as those born in the ’40s and ’50s – sign of a ‘generational effect’.

  The main lesson to take away from these trends is that seniors have come to be equal participants in consumer society. With the partial exception of car ownership, crossing the threshold into old age no longer triggers dispossession.75 And with equality came greater independence and personal choice. It was not that elderly people had been completely bypassed by goods in the past, but, once they stopped working and were unable to support themselves, they became dependent consumers, at the mercy of their children or the community for food, fire and a bed. In eighteenth-century England, the country with the most generous welfare system, a good deal of aid had been in kind, although some parishes gave the aged poor cash in addition. In Puddletown, Dorset, in the 1770s, for instance, the septuagenarian widow Judith Biles received fuel and one new under-gown a year, plus a ‘purging mixture’ and medical ‘drops’.76

  The recent surge of possessions has not reached all elderly equally. Residential homes and geriatric hospitals are not the same as private homes, and the minority living in the former – 3 per cent in Spain and Italy, 12 per cent in France, the Netherlands and Ireland – continue to make do with few personal belongings.

  In the post-war period, possessions gained new advocates among gerontologists across the West. There was a growing recognition that things were an anchor of personality and mental health. Research in the 1950s highlighted the psychological damage concentration-camp inmates suffered from being stripped of their possessions. In the following decade, studies diagnosed similar effects of ‘depersonalization’ in long-term care. Canadian advocates for the elderly started to speak up for seniors’ rights to property and individuality. To take their possessions away was to take away a piece of their identity. In 1961, psychiatrists compared three mental hospitals in Britain and noted a correlation between high levels of disturbance and low levels of personal possessions and leisure. In one, almost all female schizophrenic p
atients had their own dress and make-up, comb, mirror and jewellery – in the more ‘disturbed’ one, only the minority did.77 A decade later, the Department of Health issued guidelines for geriatric hospitals on the minimum required clothing. The health authority in Yorkshire in 1988 required all residential units to give individuals a chance to experience a degree of the independence, choice and individuality they would have enjoyed in their own homes. Such directives notwithstanding, progress was painfully slow. In the late 1980s, two British psychiatrists were ‘appalled’ that a generation after the well-publicized exposures of institutional misery, many of the Alzheimer’s patients they visited were still ‘denied personal property to the extent that some aspects of the concentration camp are being replicated and basic human rights (such as the wearing of one’s own underwear) are not being met’.78

  The last half-century has been an age of unprecedented mobility, for old and young. Travel, too, has become a natural part of active ageing. The Long Beach recreation department started its ‘Golden Tours’ in 1957 for anyone aged fifty or over. There were excursions to Disneyland and Yellowstone, Las Vegas and Santa Monica. Most cost $2.25. Travel ceased to be a luxury. In six years, the Golden Tours covered 240,000 miles, a trip further than to the moon, as one volunteer cheerfully pointed out. ‘See Earth First!’ was their motto.79 A study of three US corporations in 1980 noted that frequent travel shot up when employees retired.80 In Britain, SAGA began offering holidays for the over-fifties in 1951; by 2003, it had a turnover of £383 million.

  The taste for holidays developed into a desire for a more permanent place in the sun. In the United States, elderly snowbirds started their migration to the sunny south in the 1930s. By the 1970s, one in four Americans above the age of sixty-five lived in three states: Florida, California and New York. In St Petersburg (‘Sunshine City’), one in three residents was over sixty-five, in Miami every other, although St Petersburg took the honour of having the biggest shuffleboard club in the world.81 For others, being on the move came to define retirement. Trailers had been a part of the American landscape since the 1930s, but then they were primarily about offering a cheap, mobile home to the poor and to migrant workers. In the 1960s, nomadic seniors took to the road and founded trailer clubs; by 1991, more than 8 million recreational vehicles (RVs) were registered in the United States. ‘My wife and I have completely changed our lifestyle since retirement,’ one former accountant who had retired early, at sixty, recalled in 1972. For the first couple of years they travelled around the country. Then they joined the Wally Byam Caravan Club International and found new friends. In the summer, they travelled with their thirty-one-foot trailer to visit family and sightsee along the way. Come November, they would drive to Melbourne, Florida, where ‘we . . . square dance and party all winter’.82

  Without a Florida of their own, elderly Britons did the next best thing – they moved to the English south coast, to Spain, or to Australia. In 1981, pensioners made up a third of the population in ten towns on England’s ‘Costa Geriatrica’. In the course of the decade, the number of British and German residents in Spain doubled. Many were elderly. The Royal British Legion has over a thousand members on the Costa del Sol. The Germans had tried hard to claim their own ‘place in the sun’ in the scramble for colonies in the 1890s. They were not to be beaten this time. The first wave of winter tourists arrived in November 1962, when Luis Riú struck a deal with a charter company and kept his hotel in Mallorca open in winter. By 2005, the holiday Club Schwalbe (swallow) hosted 4,000 seniors on Mallorca. The consul general in Malaga estimates that up to half a million Germans aged sixty or over spend a good part, or most, of the year in Spain; another 100,000 are believed to have picked South Africa.83

  Cheaper travel, better health and, in the case of Western Europe, transferrable pensions and health services all facilitated the move to the sun. It would be misleading, though, to treat it entirely as a new commercial phenomenon born out of the charter and holiday boom of the 1960s. Earlier experiences of migration and war had already whetted the taste for a peripatetic life and retirement in foreign lands. In the case of Britain, the empire left a distinct legacy. Raymond Flower, the first Briton to buy a farm in Italy’s Chianti, for example, had been raised in Egypt and served in Italy during the Second World War. On the Algarve, a property developer recalled the ’60s, when many of the early British residents came straight from East Africa, after independence: ‘it was a bit like the days of the Raj down here then . . . Servants were a-plenty, booze was cheap and the climate was good.’84

  A host of age-specific initiatives has courted the expanding ‘silver market’. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) introduced a Grand Circle for elderly travellers as early as 1955, but the real take-off came in the 1980s and ’90s. In the meantime, old age has started earlier and earlier. In Tokyo, in 1984, the Yutaka Club introduced a tourism club and cruises for those over sixty-five. Neckermann, the German travel group, offers special city tours for seniors over fifty-nine; the AARP introduced its own waiting rooms at JFK Airport in 1986. Austria and Switzerland pioneered a network of ‘50plus Hotels’ that combined discounts with the ‘pronounced hospitality’ supposedly prized by that age group. Scotland has a Club 55 card for rail travellers. Only in rich Norway does one have to reach sixty-seven to qualify for discounts on the Hurtigruten cruise.

  These commercial campaigns do not exist in a vacuum. Ever younger ageing consumers have also become the darling of public authorities. Like so many elements of contemporary consumption, they are partly the creature of public policy. In 1999, Nordrhein-Westphalia, the biggest state in Germany, established a special resort for Seniorenwirtschaft to stimulate markets and services for the elderly. The Teutoburg Forest, where German warriors once ambushed Romans, now lures those over fifty with ‘wellness’ packages. Swords and battleaxes were replaced by Nordic walking sticks. Some towns have built ‘smart homes’ designed for the elderly and provided seniors with their own internet cafés. European regions started a silver economy network (SEN@ER). In ageing societies, the old became the market of the future.

  If we step back and look at these various forms of active ageing together, they reveal a central tension at the heart of ageing in affluent societies. On the one hand, active ageing stressed that people were only as old as what they did and how they felt. The barrier with younger cohorts was blurred. Seniors had just as much right to have fun, go on a city break and pick up new hobbies as anyone else. In a 1990 British study, there was nothing that united the sixty- to eighty-year-olds as much as a dislike of old people’s clubs run by younger members of the middle classes who treated them as passive. People, they said, liked to get together because of shared interests, not a pre-determined biological birth age.85 On the other hand, there was an exodus to trailer parks and retirement communities that gave rise to new forms of age segregation, particularly pronounced in the United States but also visible in ‘geriatric’ seaside communities in Europe.

  ‘Wake up and live in Sun City’, a radio advert urged listeners in 1960, ‘for an active new way of life . . . Don’t let retirement get you down! Be happy in Sun City; it’s paradise town.’86 The retirement community in Arizona offered each resident a ‘Lip’ (Leisure Interest Profile) – at one point, there were plans to build a Legoland for the elderly (see Plate 59). ‘Leisure World’, a gated retirement community in California, was built in the late 1960s. By 1971, it had 14,000 inhabitants who lived in 8,300 units spread across 918 acres, with its own tennis courts, theatre productions, picnics and hobby sales. Such exclusive, resort-style retirement communities have attracted their share of criticism. A sociologist who planted himself for one year in one such community in California in the early 1970s left with a dismal verdict. The settlement had a town-hall-activity centre, but neither mayor nor politics. It had 92 clubs and offered 150 daily activities, but only one in ten of the 5,600 residents – all white – regularly heeded the town motto to enjoy an ‘active way of life’. Eve
n shopping was no fun, because there was little choice and no public transport. Many, in fact, went out of town to shop and play golf, because it was better and cheaper there. The streets were clean, the ranch-style houses orderly, but all looked alike and unlived in. Those who arrived hoping for paradise were in for a shock. Other studies have been more optimistic. A survey of the 5,000 senior clubs and centres in the United States by the National Council on Aging put the figure for those participating in active and creative activities higher, at three to four out of ten. A leisure expert who had advised the Walters-Gould Corporation behind Sun City found that most residents felt their needs were met.87

  The ageing body was simultaneously liberated and shackled by the ideal of staying young and active. Old age is no longer treated as a bar to exercise and adventure. Seniors cruise through powder and enjoy après-ski in the Alps.88 No challenge is high enough. In 2012, seventy-three-year-old Watanabe Tamae from Japan became the oldest woman to climb Mount Everest; a seventy-six-year-old Nepalese holds the record for men. More and more, the cage of biological age has opened up. The 1950s introduced the ‘third age’ as a new life-stage of creative fulfilment, before the descent into a ‘fourth age’ of ill health, dependence and death; in addition to the initial third-age universities, there are now online gaming clubs and other services.89 In recent years, even that distinction has been loosened. The fourth age is not necessarily all bad, just as the third age is not all good, critics point out. There are octogenarian athletes. A study of male and female athletes in Australia has noted how sport continued to be about fun, sociability and competition for those aged into their eighties. Few were in denial of their age. Sport was about keeping their body moving so they did not ‘rust up’.90