What does age look like in 2017?
Four leading Cantabrigians talk about why old age is no longer what it used to be.
Forget the slippers, give up your idea of a quiet cottage by the sea and prepare to release your inner grey panther. Historian Roderick Braithwaite (Queens’ 1951) reckons it’s time that the younger generations realise what awaits them in their sixth, seventh and eighth decades — and beyond.
Writing to CAM a few months ago, he declared: “The Cambridge input lasts at least a lifetime. Whatever sized smoking volcano we once were, we are not all automatically extinct the moment we reach 65 and there must be many of us who are continuing to ‘produce’ way into the so-called grey panther stage.”
So what is it really like to work beyond the normal span? We talked to four leading Cantabrigians about why old age is no longer what it used to be.
Roderick Braithwaite (Queens’ 1951), corporate historian
Retirement is a dirty word to me. I have retired, but I never use the word. Life for me is like a football game, it has two halves. At 85, I’ve been out of corporate life longer than I was in it.
I did my national service in Germany — on the Russian border — in MI8 and then went to the Southeast Gas Board. I found myself in the publicity office and loved it. Next, I got a job with an advertising agency and was finally CEO at Charles Barker. When I retired at 55, it opened unknown doors.
I’ve always had itchy fingers, but I only discovered that I could write books in my late years. My first book was published in 1991. I had a black tin box, which my late wife told me to open. In it, I discovered [documents about] an ancestor who went to west Africa in 1849, so I took them to SOAS and as a mature student I spent a couple of years in their archives researching and writing the book. As a result, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
I discovered I was a linguist at Mill Hill School and got an open scholarship to Queens’ in languages. After a year I decided I didn’t want to go on reading Goethe and Schiller, so I switched to law. I should have read history, but it was only late in life I discovered how much I loved it.
What I got from Cambridge is intellectual integrity: knowing whether you’ve done a good job or not. A great friend, who died two years ago, called me a terrier. Once I get my teeth into a project I only let go once it’s done.
Cambridge shaped my life after retirement in quite a subliminal way. Cambridge to me was about achievement, not just sitting back and enjoying life but doing things, getting somewhere, having targets.
When Mill Hill School asked me to write their history, it took me two seconds to say yes. Then the publisher asked me to do the history of the Fuellers, a livery company. One of the Fuellers was Lord Ezra, former chairman of the National Coal Board, and nobody had written about him. We met once a month and I fashioned his memoirs — and what he told me about D-Day led to my new project on The Transportation Plan.
Asking someone at 85 what their next project is is a wonderful question. Most people wouldn’t think of what’s next, except a holiday in Ibiza or a cruise. I don’t think that way. Whatever brain cells I’ve got left, I’d like to make them work for their living. I will retire into the earth, that’s where I’ll retire.
Joan Bakewell (Newnham 1951), journalist
I’m 84 and thinking what will I do next, what’s my next project? I’ve always wanted to work. It was very hard when I started out in the 1950s and 1960s. There wasn’t much going for women. I was relentless in my pursuit of opportunities. I just wouldn’t give up. What I’ve been able to do isn’t the result of intellect and intelligence but sheer determination and willpower — I’ve just not let go! I’m a great one for thinking up ideas and shopping them around. If you think up enough, then some will take.
I came from Stockport, which was smoky factories and post-war scarcity. When I arrived in Cambridge — this golden, sunlit, beautiful place — I just wanted to walk around and talk to everyone. I didn’t go to Newnham to become a doctor or a judge or a teacher. I went for the benefit of a broad education in all its meaning. I learned about argument and how to write a decent essay. Those were the superstructure to support the development of ideas. And that time informed everything: today there are so many ideas in the air, so many conflicting views, and I’m chasing them all and trying to work out what I think. So ideas matter hugely.
Has my attitude to work changed? I don’t know that it has, much. Freelance work in older age can be isolating. But it suits my temperament because I like periods of being alone — I can’t sustain the continual adrenaline rush of being in a team day after day. It’s exhausting. Work does get thinner on the ground as you get older, not least because my own generation’s dying off, so they’re not going to phone me. I depend on the friendship of young people. That’s very important.
It’s important as you get older to keep up with technological change, and I’m struggling to do it. But if I’m feeling a bit glum, I’ll fire off a few tweets before I get out of bed in the knowledge that, by the time I’ve had breakfast, people will have responded.
If I have an episode in my life when I lapse and don’t take an interest in things, my spirits fall very fast and I get a bit low. But it only takes a contact or an event, such as calling an election or someone asking me to do a voiceover or give an award, for my spirits to pick up.
There are so many more older people, and this cohort of the old is quite healthy and affluent and is flexing its muscles. We have to tell the young what we expect, and keep ourselves fit so we can look after ourselves — and each other. It’s the next social revolution. We’ve all got to help make later life worthwhile. It’s very valuable time.
Dr John Gurdon, distinguished Group Leader, Wellcome Trust/CRUK Gurdon Institute and Nobel Prize Winner
I still work full-time; you can’t really go half-time if you’re using lab space. If the project you’re working on isn’t complete, there’s a very strong incentive to go on working.
My week starts with a group meeting, then I obtain the experimental materials I need for the week. I still do a lot of bench work; I’m usually in just before 8am and finish at 4pm.
At home I do outdoor work for a couple of hours — we have a large garden — or play tennis. Remaining physically active is quite important. If you can keep physically and mentally active you last longer and can contribute more.
Cambridge is conducive to working beyond retirement because work is close to home. I often have experiments that need to be stopped or frozen in the evening and it’s helpful to be able to drop in and do things in the evening.
In some ways, work is easier than it was 40 years ago. I don’t have student lectures or committee work. As life proceeded I didn’t really think of retirement. Age came up and I had the opportunity to do things, so I kept going. I didn’t plan a retirement. It’s people with terrible jobs who reach retirement with great relief.
The fundamental question I’m interested in is how do our cells remain functional without changing? In your brain you don’t find liver cells, or skin cells in your muscles. Once they settle down to become something, cells are remarkably stable.
The other half of that question is that you can experimentally make cells change from one thing to another. That can be extremely useful; it gives the prospect of cell replacement. The practical application is extremely clear — you can now take a small piece of skin and convert it into cells in the eye. Eye cells deteriorate, and this relates to age-related macular degeneration.
I work quite hard. It may be because I was brought up during the war. It was amazing how people managed, grew their own food, and I still have a curious residue of that time in that I can’t leave a room without turning out the light. Being economical is engrained in me. That correlates with working hard.
My father left school at 16 to work for a rice-broking firm in Burma. When he retired, he gave a lot of his time to transcribing books into Braille. He was an example of how it’s desirable — if you can — to continue to contribute, rather than just passing the time of day.
Miriam Margolyes (Newnham 1960), actor
Ours is a business that builds in insecurity. Without the work we do, we don’t know if we really exist. It’s proof of being. If nobody asks you to act, then you’re not an actress, so we’re all very anxious, insecure people.
When you do get asked to work you feel you must do it, because who knows when the next job will come along. I’ve been very lucky in my life. To think that I’m 76 and I’ve been able to sustain a career from the time I started without doing any other jobs.
I have more work than I’ve ever had in my life. But it’s not always work that I want to do. It’s work that I do to earn a living. I would like to do more in the theatre, and I would like to be considered more of a serious actress doing important work. So far I don’t think I’ve achieved that.
At the moment I’m working in a play in the theatre [Madame Rubinstein], which is a very demanding role and it’s seven performances a week. A friend from Newnham, Professor Nelson, was at the show recently. We were on University Challenge together and I hadn’t seen her for 30 years.
Cambridge gave me everything that I have. It gave me knowledge, friends, emotional excitement; it was an extraordinary emotion-filled, action-packed time — exactly what it should have been.
In a professional sense, it is the study of Dickens that has been professionally vital to me. I did my own show, Dickens’ Women. People had to take me seriously then because it was a combination of scholarship and artistry which was very impressive. I’m extremely proud of it — I’m not going to be humble — and it was only possible because of what I learned at Newnham and in the English Faculty through Jean Gooder and FR Leavis.
The thing about Cambridge is that I feel terribly emotional about it. Whenever I come back I’m in tears half the time because I see round every corner the ghosts of the people I knew, the ghost of myself riding down Sidgwick Avenue on my bicycle. It is full of precious ghosts. It was a time that I loved, when I was fully alive, when I became fully myself — it gave me the person I am.
It allowed me to do some very good work in plays like Long Day’s Journey into Night and Macbeth, and I was somebody in Cambridge — I think I had a sense of myself. It was a magic time, no question about it. And it’s gone, it’s gone for good and I shall never have that again, and I mourn its passing — but I am so grateful for it.
Article by Becky Allen.
This article first appeared in CAM — the Cambridge Alumni Magazine, edition 81.
