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On the first pension day, 1 January 1909, old people queued outside post offices and were handed five shillings that was theirs by right, and some of them wept. Because Britain had no state pension until 1908. And behind that fact hides a stranger one: for ordinary people, there was no such thing as retirement at all.

You didn't retire. You worked until your body failed and then you took the lighter jobs the young didn't want: scaring crows, minding a gate, sweeping a crossing until you couldn't. Retirement was a luxury only the propertied could afford. This is the story of how that changed: the shipowner whose own survey of poverty horrified him, the example of Bismarck's Germany, and the reforming chancellor, Lloyd George, whose first old-age pension was so bitterly resisted that the fight over how to pay for it, the "People's Budget", set off a battle with the House of Lords that redrew the British constitution itself. All over five shillings a week for the old.

The whole modern idea that old age can be a funded rest, not a slow fall into the workhouse, began here within living memory of your great-grandparents.

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