Underwritten Weekly

On Thursday night,  stranded on a platform at Stratford International with no trains running and no particular sense of when that might change, I found myself standing next to a man reading Richard Branson’s autobiography.

I have read it. It is, as you might expect, a book in which Richard Branson features quite heavily and comes out rather well. There is a story in it that reminded me of my precise predicament: stranded at an airport in the Caribbean in 1979 with a cancelled flight and a woman he wanted to impress, Branson chartered a plane, wrote “Virgin Atlantic, $39” on a blackboard, and went around the other stranded passengers selling seats. An airline was born because a man refused to accept circumstances.

I did something smaller, and with no ambition other than to get home to my bed, I hired a minibus, went up and down the platform until I’d filled it with people who wanted to get to Deal, and got home three hours late.

I am not Richard Branson. This is already clear from the minibus.

But I did spend that journey thinking about what it means to look at a situation that has gone badly wrong and decide, before anyone has asked you to, that your job is to fix it.

The Lloyd’s market understood this instinct long before Richard Branson or I did. The night of 31 January 1953.

A deep depression moved south across the North Sea. Behind it came the wind. And behind the wind came the water. Huge areas of the East coast of England, along with swathes of the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and France were affected.

By the time it was over, Canvey Island in Essex – a low-lying flat of reclaimed marshland that had no particular defences and about 13,000 people on it – had gone under almost completely. Residents spent the night on rooftops and upper landings listening to the water rising. In the morning, rescue boats went street by street through a town that had become an estuary. Across the coast, 24,000 homes had been damaged or destroyed. Tens of thousands of acres of farmland were salted and ruined. Ships were found in fields. Streets ceased to be streets.

It was a catastrophe. This is Sunday Nonsense, and even nonsense should occasionally know when to take its hat off before carrying on being ridiculous.

So let us talk about what happened next.

Governments, to put it gently, were not at their most prepared. In their defence, the unimaginable, by definition, rarely has the decency to book a meeting room, circulate papers in advance, and wait patiently while everyone agrees the terms of reference.

But while government was figuring out how to react, the Lloyd’s market was already doing something much more impressive. It was starting to put the world back together. It was sending loss adjusters to Canvey Island and Lincolnshire and the Suffolk coast. It was opening files. It was writing cheques.

While researching this piece I came across a story that exemplifies our market, and how we help people to recover: someone in Canvey, in the days after the water receded, found themselves in their ruined home explaining to an insurance adjuster that their new bed – a Myers bed, bought for a new house, a hopeful purchase – was not, as the adjuster had suggested, perfectly fine. They lifted the mattress. Underneath it was a small dead fish. The adjuster reconsidered.

That is the bit people outside insurance often miss. A claim payment is not an accounting event. It is a bed. It is a table. It is stock back on a shelf. It is a boat back in the water. It is a shop opening again on a Tuesday morning with the owner pretending not to cry behind the counter.

That is heroic.

Sympathy is kind. Indemnity rebuilds.

There were, because this is insurance, wording arguments. Storm. Tempest. Flood. The North Sea has sadly never shown any real interest in contract wordings. But the market had to care, because those words decided what had been promised, and therefore what could be paid. Storm and tempest are not lovely old bits of insurance language designed to make us sound like we conduct business by candlelight in waistcoats, like we ought. They are the difference between condolences and a cheque. Between acknowledgement and restoration.

The definitions argued over in those files still run through policy wordings today. The 1953 flood didn’t just get indemnified by our market. It helped build the vocabulary of what indemnification means.

Which is a lot to have come out of one terrible night on Canvey Island.

Living just thirty metres from the cliff’s edge, I have just realised I have spent a significant portion of my Sunday making the case for my insurance company putting the hydraulics under my renewal price.

Have a good week.

Rob

P.S. If my house does eventually appear on a future bordereau as “contents, now located in France”, I would appreciate the claim being handled with sensitivity.