Annals, Anecdotes and Legends: A Chronicle of Life Assurance

by of the Bank of England John Francis

[22] This man appears to have been an innocent tool in the hands of his acute brother-in-law.

[23] This was first pointed out by the Quarterly Review.

[24] The following form extracts from the above articles of Mr. Mackenzie:—“Some time ago there was sent to this office a series of advertisements in favour of the Independent and West Middlesex Insurance Company, which were entered and paid for in the regular course of business. We are cautious about quack medical advertisements, none of them that we are aware has ever been admitted into our columns; but it never entered into our heads for one moment, that an insurance company professing to be incorporated by special acts of parliament, was in truth a quack company, got up for the premeditated purpose of imposing on the public in matters of fire and life. Hence the advertisements of this company glided through our columns from time to time to time.... But we were astonished lately to learn that this was a spurious insurance company hatched in London two years ago.” “Under these circumstances, our duty, we humbly conceive, is at once plain and decisive, and therefore we proceed to discharge it for the sake of the public, whose faithful and unflinching servants we at all times profess to be. In a word, we raise our voice and warn the public against this Independent West Middlesex Insurance Company. It is a false and fictitious company.” “In their polices of insurance they take care to provide that ‘the capital stock and funds of the said company shall alone be answerable to the demands thereupon under this policy.’ Why, what is the value of their capital stock and funds, if as we say the parties themselves forming the said company are utterly worthless, being in fact no better than a parcel of tricksters in London, disowned, or repudiated, or condemned by every respectable person to whom reference is made? There can scarcely, we think, be anything so base or so nefarious as taking premiums from unsuspecting people, and making them believe they are secured against the contingencies of life, or the risk of fire, and yet mocking them in their calamities when the bubble bursts.”

[25] The cholera first visited England about the beginning of August 1348. From the seaport towns on the coasts of Dorsetshire, Devonshire, and Somersetshire, it ran to Bristol, and the men of Gloucester established a quarantine between the two places. But this “familiar fury” mocked then as now at the quarantine, and walking in darkness appeared in Gloucestershire to the horror of its inhabitants. From thence it passed by way of Oxford to London, finally spreading all over England, “scattering everywhere such ruin and desolation that of all sorts hardly the tenth person was left alive.”

In the church and churchyard of Yarmouth, 7052 were buried in one year. Within six months, in the city of Norwich more than 57,000 died. In London, death was so outrageously cruel that every day saw twenty, sometimes forty, and sometimes sixty or more dead bodies flung into one pit. The churchyards became crowded. Fields and additional places of burial were set apart, and these soon failed to suffice; the number of the dead increasing so rapidly that “they were fain to make deep ditches and pits very broad, wherein they laid a range of carcasses and a range of earth upon them, and then another range of dead bodies,” and in this manner the people, except those of the better sort, were placed in their long home. The cattle died in hedges and ditches by thousands for want of men to attend them. All suits and pleadings in the King’s Bench and other places ceased. The sessions of parliament were stopped. England and France forgot for a time that they were “natural enemies.” County, city, and town witnessed solemn prayers and public processions for days together, and God was implored in highway and in byway to “sheath his angry sword and preserve the residue from the devouring pestilence.” When this pestilence which yet yearly threatens our coast had passed away, it was found that its prey had been chiefly old men, women, and children of the “common sort of people,” and that but few of the nobility of the land had been seized by it. Property was for a long period depreciated: that which was previously sold for forty shillings, only fetched a mark; and the Scots in scorn invented a new oath, swearing in contempt “by the foul deaths of the English.”

[26] Letter to the Right Hon. Joseph W. Henley, M.P.—By Robert Christie.

[27] The Equitable even was regarded with a very suspicious eye by the Court of Chancery soon after its commencement, and the names of bankers and merchants as directors, great in their day and generation, did not prevent the proprietors of the Royal Exchange, the Amicable, and the London Assurance corporations from predicting its failure.

[28] The public is greatly indebted to Mr. Hartnoll, the avowed editor, and Mr. Pateman, the publisher of the Post Magazine, for their great exertions in the cause of Life Assurance.

[29] “Assurance Companies’ Accounts,” p. 43.

[30] “That the said Commissioners shall have full power to examine all books, at all seasonable times, of such bankers as issue notes, and to take copies or extracts from any such books or accounts.”—History of the Bank of England, its Times and Traditions.—By John Francis: 2 vols. 3rd edition. Longman, Brown, and Co.