Many firms had their own brass bands (especially in the north of England), and football and cricket teams to instil a spirit of community in their staff outside their working hours.
The first old-age pension as we know it arrived with the Old Age Pension Act 1908, when anyone over seventy in receipt of an annual income less than £31 and ten shillings a year received up to five shillings a week on a sliding scale. Until then, people might work until they dropped, with people describing themselves in census records as shoemakers, general dealers and hat makers well into their seventies. The alternative was Poor Law relief, pauperism and the workhouse – a miserable and bleak old age.
Certain occupations did receive pensions; the army from 1686 and the navy from 1693. The National Archives publish online research guides. A police officer (the London Metropolitan Police was founded in 1829, other police forces a decade later) received a pension after twenty-five years’ service. Plenty of genealogical books give advice on researching these.
Workers saved for their old age from their earnings; retirement was never a prospect for many. Quaker Joseph Rowntree (1836–1925) of York was one of the first to set up a pension scheme for his employees. Terry’s’ and Rowntrees’ archives are at the Borthwick Institute www.york.ac.uk/borthwick at York University. The Rowntree archive is online through Discovery (Formerly A2A) http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk, but Terry’s have no surviving pensions material.
Generally, until the welfare state and sick leave legislation, an ill worker earned nothing. Health and safety was not as we know it; in fact, it is safe to say there was no health and safety. You took your life, literally, in your own hands. Men working in the building trade fell from heights and smiths and butchers lost fingers. In September 1776, nine-year-old thatcher’s son William Marsters fell off Guilden Morden church roof. Whether he was a naughty lad climbing there or whether he was working (this was before the 1843 Act) we will never know. What we do know is that the vicar was so shocked by the accident that he recorded how the boy died in the parish register.