‘Their finest hour’: older people, oral histories, and the historical geography of social life

When investigating older people, human geographers have been almost exclusively concerned with distributive features or experiences of ageing, the latter often in relation to residential and caring environments. From both healthcare and welfare perspectives, these fields of research are extremely important. Notwithstanding, in an attempt to broaden geography's current engagement with older people, we argue for attention to be paid to older people's pasts through their oral histories; hence focusing on when they were younger as a means to explore and understand past social life. As a case study, we interviewed twelve older persons on their experiences of life in the English coastal town of Teignmouth during World War II. The data indicate how older people are not only located in local histories and the making of places, but also how the histories of places—from bricks and mortar to social and cultural dimensions—are equally located in their narratives. Indeed, rich, remarkable and often neglected modern oral histories of everyday social life are ‘there for the telling’, histories not captured by other methods and approaches. We argue that although a wide range of positional, theoretical and methodological issues require discussion, geographers might move beyond our case study to consider older people more frequently in their historical representations of social life, place and landscape. Such a project might unite historical and social geography in a new direction and provide unique viewing platforms onto existing debates.