Underwritten Weekly

On Tuesday evening I watched Kevin McCloud present a documentary about iconic buildings. The Lloyd’s building was one of them, so of course I tuned in avidly.

He mentioned Edward Lloyd’s coffee house. He mentioned the Lutine Bell. He mentioned Richard Rogers and the pipes and the glass lifts. Fine. Standard. Anyone could have done that.

But if it had been me presenting that show – and to be clear I am irritated I wasn’t asked – I would have shown the Great British Public what they really want to see. The 1928 underwriting box, preserved on the ground floor like a little wooden shrine. The bank of old payphones on the upper basement, the ones you can practically hear a 1987 underwriter shouting down to his office from. The fastest lift to Gallery 12. The fact that the quietest toilets are on Gallery 11. (Tower 5, if you’re interested)

The public would have been gripped, I’m certain!

Kevin McCloud has a BAFTA. I have a Lloyd’s pass and opinions about the toilets. It should have been me presenting that show, but I’m not ojay to talk about it.

Kevin saw the pipes and the lifts. What television can’t show you is what actually happens in that room, so let me tell you about a slip that was signed in 1914.

In 1914, the adventurer Ernest Shackleton wanted to cross Antarctica on foot. He had a ship – the Endurance – and 27 men crazy enough to join him. What he needed first, before any of that could happen, was someone willing to insure the ship into Antarctic waters.

Nobody would. Every expedition before him had insurance that stopped at the last port, South Georgia. Beyond that: nothing. The ice zone was, as far as the market was concerned, someone else’s problem. Until one underwriter disagreed….

He eventually found someone to say yes, we’ll insure that, for the first time in history.

This happened in 1914 so it’s probably safe to call out the underwriter now, but it wasn’t their finest day in the office. The ship promptly sank.

The ice closed around the Endurance in January 1915, and while the crew played chess, ate penguin, and kept a ship’s cat called Mrs Chippy, the expanding ice gripped the ship and eventually prized the timers apart. When the ship finally went down they camped on the ice underneath upturned lifeboats, sleeping in bags that their own body heat, combined with the ice, turned to soup. All in all they spent over seven hundred and fifty days without setting foot on dry land.

But Shackleton knew something. He knew that in a room in London, on Lime Street, his name was on a slip. He knew the market was watching. He knew that when the Endurance went silent, Lloyd’s would know first. That the loss book would be opened. That a search would begin.

He kept 27 men alive – through the ice, through the penguin suppers, through the upturned lifeboats – because they knew someone was coming.

And someone was coming: Because he was insured by our market.

Every single one of them came home.

That slip was signed in a room that Kevin McCloud presented on Channel 4 last Tuesday. He talked about the pipes. He didn’t mention the most important thing that happens in that room is a pen on a piece of paper, and a yes where there might have been a no.

Twenty eight people came home because of one of those yesses.

That’s what we build tools for.

Have a good week.

Rob

P.S. The 27 men crazy enough to join Shackleton on his journey? Clearly they’d be fans of nonsense, so if I’d have written it back in 1914, and if someone had gotten around to inventing the internet, they wouldn’t have had to just play chess. They could have read the full archive at All posts – Underwritten Weekly