COLUMN: LUKE HONEY
Our columnist on "re insurance marks
Insurance is a necessary evil. Every year, I religiously go through my various insurance policies and struggle to get my head around the tedium of the neverending small print. Far more interesting is the surprising history of the insurance industry. It’s been around for longer than you might imagine.
Before the Great Fire of London in 1666, there were no !re brigades. If your hovel caught !re, that was more or less it, apart from a helpful neighbour and a bucket of river water; or in the case of huge con"agrations, the use of gunpowder to demolish buildings and create !re breaks.
With a third of the City of London destroyed and 100,000 people homeless, things had to change. So in 1680, a !nancial speculator called Dr Nicholas Barbon established the Fire O#ce – the very !rst !re insurance company; represented by the splendid emblem of a ‘Phenix in the Flame’, that exotic bird of Greek mythology that rose from the ashes. There followed a succession of similar insurance companies: The Friendly Society (1683), the Amicable Contributors for Insuring for Loss by Fire (later known as the Hand-inHand) (1696), the Sun Fire
O#ce (1710), Royal Exchange Assurance (1720), and the Phoenix Assurance Company (1782). The Museum of London estimates that, as early as 1690, one in every 10 London householders insured their properties against !re. An extraordinary statistic.
The new insurance companies soon discovered it was cheaper to extinguish a !re themselves than to rebuild, so the private !re brigade was born. Firemen were recruited from the Thames watermen: granting exemption from the naval press gangs, then roaming the river wharves, taverns and boatyards.
But if your house caught !re, how to prove you had insurance? That’s where !re marks come in. Displaying a cast lead ‘!re-plate’ – or later, following an increase in the price of lead, an embossed brass, tinned sheet-iron, or copperplate version – in a prominent position on the front wall of your house showed you had paid-up insurance.
The 18th century was a ruthless if colourful age. Private !re brigades were perfectly capable of driving o$ and leaving a house to burn if the householder didn’t have insurance
cover. That said,
it’s now thought that the various insurance companies cooperated with each other to some extent: !res might be put out on behalf of a rival company and billed later. By the later years of the 18th century, !re marks had become li%le more than advertising logos, and by the early 19th century had fallen into decline.
Today, !re marks are popular with collectors and local historians. Although now a rare sight, if you’re lucky, you might spot one on the wall of an old co%age. The Sun Fire O#ce’s mark is one of the most appealing and features a blazing sun with facial features, not unlike Apollo. The Hand-in-Hand’s mark shows a clasping handshake beneath a royal crown. Early marks also display the insurance policy number.
They were metal for a reason. In an age with no formal !xed addresses, an unscrupulous neighbour might step forward and try to make a fraudulent claim. On the other hand, a metal mark could survive a !re and be presented to the insurance o#ce as proof of a house owner’s policy.
Original antique !re marks come up at auction from time to time, o&en grouped into a$ordable job lots. An 18th-century Sun Fire O#ce mark (sold together with a Hand-in-Hand mark) made £210 at JS Fine Art in 2020, while a 19th-century lead mark featuring York Minister fetched £110 in the same year. A group of six marks (including a gilt Phoenix) made £230 at Halls in 2016. Watch out for modern lead reproductions and cast-iron replicas (o&en painted) on eBay.