Underwritten Weekly

Three minutes and twenty-three seconds.

That is how long the last minute of my washing machine cycle takes. I know this because on Saturday I sat on the kitchen floor with my phone out and timed it, which I appreciate tells you rather more about my weekend than it does about the washing machine.

I had suspected it for a while. You stand there with the basket. The display says one minute. You wait. It continues to say one minute. You begin to wonder whether time works differently at Bosch.

So I tested it. Three twenty-three.

There is a particular flavour of irritation in being told a number by a machine and then discovering the number was, at best, aspirational. The figure is right there on the display. It is stated with total confidence. It bears no relationship whatsoever to what is actually going to happen.

Usually this costs you two and a half minutes and a small amount of dignity.

Occasionally it costs a coastline.

On 18 March 1967, a tanker called the “Torrey Canyon” ran onto the Seven Stones reef off Land’s End.

She was carrying around 35 million gallons of Kuwaiti crude, bound for Milford Haven, and she was at the time the largest vessel that had ever been wrecked anywhere in the world.

She was there because of a deadline.

To get into Milford Haven, the ship had to catch a particular tide. Miss it, and she would be sitting off the Welsh coast for another six days. So the decision was taken to save some time by cutting inside the Isles of Scilly, through water the ship had no proper large-scale charts for.

A man in a hurry, taking the route that looked quicker.

She hit Pollard’s Rock at full speed.

The oil came ashore along the Cornish coast, and then across the Channel to Brittany, and the government of the day had to decide what to do about the several hundred thousand tonnes still sitting in the wreck.

They decided to set fire to it.

The plan was to bomb the ship until the oil ignited and then let it burn off. So the Royal Air Force flew out to Cornwall and bombed a shipwreck. Then, when that didn’t work, they dropped aviation fuel on it to keep the fire going. Then they bombed it again.

The difficulty, which I feel someone might have raised earlier in the meeting, is that the wreck was in the sea, and the sea has a long-established habit of putting things out. The tide came in. The fire went out. They came back and bombed it again.

This nonsense carried on for the better part of a week.

While all this was happening, somebody had to work out who was going to pay for it.

The tanker was Liberian-flagged, owned through a company in Bermuda, and chartered to BP. The owners denied liability from the outset. And the law, as it stood in 1967, capped a shipowner’s liability at a figure based on the tonnage of the ship – which in this case came to a small fraction of what the spill actually cost.

Nobody ever managed to put a figure on what it did to the fishing, or the birds, or the coast itself.

Britain and France sued for twenty-two million dollars. They settled, out of court, in November 1969 – more than two and a half years after the wreck – for seven point two million between them, which was less than Britain had already spent scrubbing its own beaches.

And here is the thing.

Nobody knew who was liable. Not for years. Was it the owner, or the charterer, or the master who made the call about the tide? There were proceedings on both sides of the Atlantic arguing about exactly that, and the honest position in 1967 was that the law had no satisfactory answer and was going to need a very long time to find one.

Meanwhile there were hundreds of miles of coastline covered in oil, and somebody had to pay for it now.

So the industry stopped waiting.

In 1968, while the lawyers were still going, the tanker owners began building something of their own. It became TOVALOP (Tanker Owners Voluntary Agreement concerning Liability for Oil Pollution) – a voluntary agreement under which tanker owners accepted liability for oil pollution clean-up costs up to agreed limits, without anybody having to prove negligence first. The P&I clubs extended their cover to stand behind those liabilities. It was in force by October 1969, a month before the Torrey Canyon settlement was even signed.

Nobody ordered them to do it. No court had ruled. No convention required it – the Civil Liability Convention didn’t arrive until 1969 and wouldn’t bite for years after that.

They did it because somebody had to pay for the beaches, and it plainly shouldn’t be Cornwall.

That is where the machinery we still rely on began. When a tanker goes aground today, somebody competent turns up and somebody solvent pays for it, and one reason is that an industry once looked at a legal system that couldn’t answer the question and decided not to wait for it.

It’s the nearest thing this market has to a commandment. The rules aren’t good enough.

So we write better ones.

It’s not scripture, but it’ll do.

Have a good week,

Rob

P.S. My washing machine’s last minute remains three minutes and twenty-three seconds. No voluntary industry agreement appears to be forthcoming. I have quietly accepted it as the cost of clean clothes.