There are several tests by which one might judge a system of pensioning for old age. A sine qua non is that it should be affordable by the employer and/or employee. Equally fundamental from the point of view of the employee is that the lifetime savings implicit in a pension scheme should lead to secure build-up of entitlements sufficient to support old age retirement. The private occupational pensions movement, at least until recently, has quite failed to meet this test. In the twentieth-century decades taken as a whole, neither the majority of those who have been members of occupational schemes nor the majority of their dependants have ever drawn a pension of any kind. In the early days this was quite often because death intervened, and widows' benefits were not initially well developed. Even in schemes designed in the days before the First World War for middle-class employees (with their greater longevity), it was usually expected that, of those who joined at age twenty and stayed with an employer throughout their working life, more than four in ten would be dead before they reached the normal retirement age of between sixty and sixty-five.