“Underwriters have from an early stage been extremely suspicious of the cause of the casualty,” Zavos wrote. But despite those misgivings, they “would have wished to avoid making this allegation, if it was not necessary to do so, e.g. if the quantum of the claim was such that ‘the game was not worth the candle’”—an obscure expression, coined before the advent of electricity, about avoiding card games with stakes lower than the expense of illuminating them. There it was, Veale remarked to himself: a clear statement of the priorities at Lloyd’s.
