Retirement

Edward Higgs

The recording of data on retirement in the British censuses was patchy and incomplete in the years before the Second World War. The early censuses from 1801 to 1831 asked local officials for the numbers of persons or families 'chiefly employed' in broad economic sectors, but did not mention retirement (Higgs, 1989, 5–7). From 1841 onwards census taking was the responsibility of the General Register Office (GRO), and the local civil registrars of births, marriages and deaths who were administered by it. The registrars appointed temporary enumerators, who collected information about the inmates of households by giving householders a household schedule. These were to be filled out by the householder using the instructions provided. The Victorian GRO appears to have wanted to know the former occupations of people, even if they were retired, in order to calculate occupational life-tables for actuarial purposes.

In 1841 retirement was not mentioned but in 1851 householders were instructed that:

Persons of advanced age who have RETIRED FROM BUSINESS to be entered thus — 'Retired silk merchant,' 'Retired watchmaker', &c.

The instruction in 1861 was similar, although the clause 'of advanced age' had been dropped. In 1871 and 1881 the householder's instructions retained the wording of the 1861 instructions with respect to the retired. In 1891 and 1901, the guidance regarding retirement was broadened, with the instruction that: 'Persons who have retired from their profession, business, or occupation must state their former calling with the addition of the word "Retired"' (Higgs, 1989, 92). Generally, similar instructions were given in the early twentieth century.

The returns respecting retirement in the manuscript census returns available to public inspection (those prior to 1911) are plainly imperfect. Information on retirement is seldom given in the manuscript returns consistently. The inmates of prisons, hospitals and workhouses often have specific occupations against their names, although they might more properly be regarded as retired or unemployed. People are sometimes described as 'annuitants' (the term could refer to someone receiving an annual allowance, as well as to a person with an investment producing an annual return), although many were probably institutionalised pensioners. Often very elderly people have no occupation recorded at all, although one might regard them as having been retired. The list of such ambiguities could be extended.

Part of the problem was the difficulty in making a definite distinction between being in employment, being retired, or being unemployed. When work was very casual and stoppages frequent, especially in the later years of people's working lives, the distinction might be very difficult to draw. Someone in business, or a farmer, might have handed over control of the business for all practical purposes to a son, and yet still have regarded themselves as the titular head of the firm or estate. Similarly, despite the introduction of the New Poor Law in the 1830s, many paupers receiving out-relief still had some employment. Hence entries such as 'in receipt of parish relief and straw-bonnet maker', or 'pauper and charwoman', or 'Carpenter (parish pay)'. The concept of a definite 'age of retirement' probably only became current after the passage of the 1908 Old Age Pensions Act, which gave people aged 70 and over a pension if they fulfilled certain criteria. But the elderly appear to have been increasingly dropping out of the labour market from the 1880s onwards, perhaps under the impact of technological change (Woollard).

The returns under these heading must, therefore, be used with great caution. Certainly some common-sense rules have to be applied to the inmates of institutions, who cannot be regarded as part of the economically active population. The problem is, of course, to decide which of the inmates were temporarily out of the labour market, and which were permanently institutionalised. In later years the GRO's own solution was to regard all such people in institutions aged 60 years and over as having retired, but to count the rest as having a current occupation (Higgs, 1989, 93). More generally, up to and including 1871 people described as 'retired' from any stated occupation were included in the published reports under that occupation. But from 1881 onwards such retired people were included in the 'Unoccupied' group (Office of Population Censuses and Surveys and the General Register Office, Edinburgh, Guide to Census Reports, Great Britain 1801–1966, 51).

REFERENCES

Edward Higgs, Making sense of the census. The manuscript returns for England and Wales, 1801–1901 (London, 1989).

Office of Population Censuses and Surveys and the General Register Office, Edinburgh, Guide to Census Reports, Great Britain 1801–1966 (London, 1977).

Matthew Woollard, 'The employment and retirement of older men, 1851–1881: further evidence from the census', Continuity and Change, 17 (2002), 437–63.