Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World's Most Secretive Industry

by Matthew Campbell

The central feature of the Lloyd’s building is the Underwriting Room, a vast trading floor at the base of an atrium that rises fourteen stories. The Room, as everyone calls it, takes up most of the ground level, and during the trading day is full of insurers sitting in little wooden booths, waiting for business to find them. The broker working for the owner of the Brillante would have sat down next to the Talbot syndicate representative and provided a piece of paper, or “slip,” detailing the coverage he wanted, along with a file, perhaps sixty pages deep, that contained information about the vessel and its planned voyages. After some discussion of the merits of the contract and its likely risks—an exchange taking normally around twenty minutes and certainly no more than thirty—the satisfied Talbot man would have stamped the slip, initialed it with a fountain pen, and written out the percentage of the liability that his employer was willing to take. The broker would have continued in this manner until he’d filled the slip with “underwriters,” so called because they write their names one under the other. And thus, on the floor of Lloyd’s of London, an insurance contract is born.