Insure this! A 17th century coffee table from Lloyd’s of London

National Insurance Academy gives pride of place to relic around which marine insurance industry came up


Express News Service
Pune, April 18: Pune’s history just got richer. Thanks to the arrival of a horseshoe-shaped coffee table called the Lloyd’s Box from Lloyd’s of London, the oldest insurance marketplace in the world, at the National Insurance Academy.

The consignment weighing 4,300 kg, shipped at a cost of Rs 6-7 lakh, arrived at the NIA campus last week and has filled up most of the Greenleaf room, named after former AT&T chairman who introduced the concept of servant-leadership management principle. It was around one of these tables — there were two originally — at Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse that the insurance market started in 1688 in London.

While Lloyd was only the proprietor of the coffeehouse, it was flocked by seafarers, and the story goes that he supplied them with reliable shipping news. The shipping industry community frequented the place to discuss insurance deals among themselves.

The tradition of doing business around the coffee table stuck and it officially became the Lloyd’s Box when the new building — Lloyd’s Building in London — came up. The managing agent would sit at the centre of the box and represent the member of the Lloyd’s syndicate in the trading ring. The racks and drawers (rectangular boxes) were used to store the policy documents, which will be shipped to the institute later, according to NIA director K C Mishra.

Currently there are 62 such syndicates with 62 modern boxes, some of them IT-enabled.

While one of the tables is buried under the landmark Lloyd’s building in London, the second box passed through several hands, reaching the world’s top brokerage house Marsh & McLennan via the company they acquired from Bowring, one of the UK’s largest insurance broking houses.

Mishra showed an interest in buying the antique table, which was inherited by Marsh, at a broking seminar in 2002. One of his students Sanjay Kedia, CEO of Marsh in India, helped fulfil his wish to get a piece of history to NIA. As it turns out, the historical table, 40 per cent of it broken, travelled quite a distance before reaching Pune.

‘‘Marsh first sent it to Australia for restoration two years ago and had to intervene to send it to NIA because we are not a museum and an antique can only be sent to one,’’ points out Mishra, who can’t really put a figure to the value of the piece. ‘‘I don’t know how much it should be valued at.’’ But since it’s such a historical piece, experts say it should run into millions of dollars.

Once the Box landed in Mumbai, Mishra ran into the Customs department too. ‘‘But I explained to them that it was meant only as an exhibit at NIA, not for commercial purposes. They took a lenient view and the institute is richer for it.’’