Listen To Older Voices: Bid Aitken - Part 1

Welcome to Listen To Older Voices, a program produced Rob Greaves for Wesley Mission Victoria and podcast through the Toorak Times.


Listen To Older Voices presents the stories, views and opinions of our older citizens. It is predominantly in a life & times format, with interviewees reflecting upon their lives from earliest memories. An underlying principal of the program is to promote the concept of positive ageing, reinforcing the principle that older people have & continue to make a valuable contribution to both their local & wider community.

This is part 1 of a 2-part story featuring the Life & Times of Bid Aitken. This program was first aired in 2006 when Bid was 86 years of age. Her story is so interesting it deserved to be revisited. Born in 1920, Bid talks about what school life was like during this period and how respect and discipline were looked upon as being as equally important at learning facts and figures.

She left school at 15 years of age to work in one of the many guests houses in Melbourne’s Yarra Valley and it was here that she met her husband to be, Newton Aitken, who was a timber worker. In talking about him and his work she reveals the hurt she felt over the lack of recognition by Government for men like him, who were unable to enlist in the forces during WWII because they were deemed to be in an “essential service”. Bid's story is food for thought, especially with less and less people from her generation left to talk about their times.



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[Listen To Older Voices receives funding from the Commonwealth Government through the Commonwealth Home Support Program Program]