Lloyd's of London: The Original Put Writers

Several years ago I picked up a 1973 copy of Antony Brown's Lloyd's of London.  The following is an excerpt from pages 51-52.  I take no credit.

The Titanic.

'Presently we moved on from the subject of the syndicate, and I asked him [H.G. Chester] about the San Francisco earthquake, which was one of Lloyd's greatest catastrophes in this century.  He hadn't lost much by it himself, he said, being in the marine market. What he did remember was the Titanic.  In the outer office he still had the entry relating to her in the Loss Book, if I'd like to see it.

He pressed the buzzer and one of the secretaries came in.  'Which year was the Titanic?' he asked thoughtfully.  '1912?  April 14, wasn't it?'

He flicked the pages till he came to April 14. There were five sets of figures in the Loss column, written with a scratch pen in handwriting that had gone a gingery colour with time. 'That's my handwriting, sixty years ago. £542 on jewellery (sic),' he read. '£5,000 on the hull to the brokers. Two additional lines to other brokers. We must have lost rather more than £8,000.' 

Could he remember what it had been like in the Room when the news about the Titanic had come through?  He thought for a moment, then admitted a trifle grudgingly that on that particular morning the market had been in a bit of a panic. 'After she was first notified as having hit the iceberg, the overdue brokers started rushing round.' Normally, he explained, the overdue brokers dealt in sailing ships that were held in the doldrums - if a ship became overdue, then the underwriters who had insured her would try to lay off a possible loss by reinsurance.

'Once the Titanic was known to have hit the iceberg, of course the rate was very high.  There was one man who wrote a lot of reinsurance on her all the same - that was Sir Percy MacKinnon, who afterwards became Chairman of Lloyd's.  I remember his father Benjamin,' added Mr. Chester as an afterthought. 'He used to sit on the box wearing a top-hat.  Anyway, Sir Percy MacKinnon believed the Titanic wouldn't sink, she was such a marvellous (sic) ship and there'd been so much publicity about her.  So he wrote the reinsurance on her,' he repeated reflectively. 'He must have lost a lot of money.'