Is 90 too old to work? Meet the golden oldies still earning in their twilight years

Time was, people couldn’t wait to get to the age of 65 so they could retire, spend pleasant mornings doing the crossword with a pot of tea and some toasted muffins, maybe potter about in the garden for a while, then pop down to the shops to buy something for dinner before catching Countdown in the afternoon.

That’s all changed. Let’s have a case study. Liz turns 91 in April, but she hasn’t set a retirement date yet. She’s been in the same job for an amazing 65 years as of this week, and save for a short illness over Christmas that kept her away from her usual duties, she’s generally been as fit as a fiddle and never missed a day’s work.

But why does she do it? Wouldn’t she rather be kicking back and enjoying her retirement, spending some time with the (great) grandchildren? It’s a safe bet she doesn’t really need the money, so she must do it because she loves it. Or perhaps it’s a sense of duty; Liz doesn’t have a job like the rest of us. Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, to use her Sunday name, is of course the Queen of England, now officially our longest reigning monarch.

Perhaps not the best case study, come to think of it. But while she’s not exactly dragging herself out of bed before dawn to face the daily commute, followed by eight hours in the office with an hour for lunch and a couple of smoke breaks, Her Maj isn’t alone in working past the usual retirement age.

Take June Brown. She turns 90 next Thursday and has been doing the same job for more than 30 years – playing Dot Cotton in BBC soap EastEnders. Again, not exactly a nine-to-five grind, but perhaps a bit more full-on than being Queen. And, given Dot famously chuffs through Silk Cut like they’re going out of fashion (actually, fags are, aren’t they?) she actually got to smoke on the job for much of her career.

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And working into your nineties can certainly pay dividends, especially when you get to the position of “national treasure” on the greasy career pole; June has reportedly been offered a very nice £300,000 by the Beeb to stay on in Albert Square for another year after her contract runs out in March.

But the Queen of Walford and the Queen of, erm, the rest of the country have nothing, age-wise, on Vera Lynn. The Forces’ Sweetheart hits her century in March and is celebrating with the release of a brand new album featuring re-orchestrated versions of her classic hits. They start them young in showbiz, so Vera’s already clocked up a whopping 93 years in the game, and seized the record for the oldest living artist to have a British number one album a full eight years ago.

And we must give an honourable mention in this list of retirement-busting women to Patricia Greene, who has played matriarch Jill Archer on the long-running BBC Radio 4 soap The Archers for more than 60 years now. Which isn’t bad for an actor whose drama teacher told her she’d never make it in radio (Patricia told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs a year ago) because she sounded like “a fairy in hockey boots”, and whose first drama credit was “sexy blonde in a tea tent”.

Which, of course, is all very well if you’re TV, radio or showbusiness royalty, or, of course, actual royalty. We might admire these women for their tenacity and career longevity, but what of those of us with perhaps more prosaic jobs? Do we get to stay on working past 65? Do we want to? Do we need to?

Well, the good news – depending on whether you leap like a spring lamb out of bed every morning in preparation for work or have to drag yourself from your pit after seven hits of the snooze button with a groan that would impress even Marley’s ghost – is that the days when you had a carriage clock forced into your hands by your boss on your 65th birthday and then escorted from the premises by security have long gone.

Although that’s the age when state pension kicks in (people reading from the future: sorry if you don’t know what this is) you don’t have to stop working, unless your job has an age limit set by law, for example firefighter, or it has certain physical requirements that it just isn’t practical or safe to expect a senior citizen to do.

You can even start drawing your pension while you’re working, though if you defer it until you need it, you can get an even bigger weekly bonus than the current £119.30, and that’s not counting any private pensions you might have.

But why would we want to carry on working? According to Chris Brooks, senior policy manager at the charity Age UK, there are currently around 1.25 million people in the UK working at the age of 65 or above.

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“That number has increased quite a lot in recent years,” says Brooks. “There are quite a lot of benefits to working past retirement age, and one of the biggest is that people like to maintain the social contact they have had through work.

“If there’s a sudden exit from work that the person hasn’t prepared for and doesn’t have some proper plan in place, it can actually be damaging to health.”

Some people, of course, do continue working but not in their old job – they might have to become carers for a spouse, or even elderly parents. Many take on a childcare role for grandparents. And some switch to volunteering – none of which are formally measured in government figures.

And many companies are getting switched on to the value of having older workers, either keeping staff on or recruiting the recently retired. They bring maturity, experience and diversity to the workplace. Brooks says: “Employers are increasingly seeing the benefits of keeping on workers and going the extra mile to keep people working for them. This is something that bigger companies are good at and we’re working to make small and medium-sized companies more aware of the benefits.”

The flip-side to all this, of course, is that some people simply cannot afford to stop working, whether they want to or not. Brooks says, “We know from research into pension provision that many people would like to retire but their pensions do not provide the quality of life they would hope to have when they are older, so they are forced to carry on.”

Back to our first case study. Liz is unlikely to be short of a bob or two, and we know that there’s someone to take her place when she does decide enough is enough… as it happens, her son Charles has already reached retirement age, and back in 2013 did indeed start drawing his state pension, though he donates it to charity.

For the rest of us, it’s perhaps best to check your pension provision and not count down too firmly to the age of 65. You might be sick of the sight of your office desk, but the chances are that post-pension age, in the words of good old Vera Lynn, it’s a case of not goodbye, but we’ll meet again…