PENSIONS FOR DIRECTORS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 14 June 1930, Page 5

PENSIONS FOR DIRECTORS

The recent announcement by an English manufacturing company that it had decided its directors should retire from executive positions at 70, was criticised by Sir Hugh Bell, who is a director of several engineering and colliery companies, of the Yorkshire Insurance Company and of the London and NorthEastern Railway—and is in his 87th year. “I think people live too long, but I think they have a right to work so long as they can,” lie said. “I should not mind being ‘put down’ by anaesthesia, but while I am alive I want to work. What are you going to do with the old men, and why select 05 as the age at which their usefulness ceases? There are some men at half the age who could better be dispensed with than some men half as old again. In the last few years the world has been more and more carried away by mere phrases, and noy there are half-a-dozen phrases which are thrown at your head as solving any question. There is standardisation and rationalisation, to mention two of them, and I am inclined to doubt the validity of any term ending in ‘isation’ —including civilisation.”- If the age of retirement is standardised —at 05—every man who reaches that age “will became a parasite, unless, indeed, he does the reasonable tiling, and, having no money to maintain himself, takes to his lied, and so in a week or two lie doesn’t wake up in the morning. For when the lifetime of a mail is fixed at 65, after that he lias no right to live.”