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Building History from Fire Insurance Records: An autobiographical fragment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

M. W. Beresford
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Extract

With documentary sources, as with one's friends, it is never easy to recall exactly when mere acquaintance passed into familiarity. I am somewhat shaken to see from its footnotes that when I wrote my chapter for the Chapman symposium in 1969–70 that I made no use of fire insurance policies for the dating of house-building, relying mainly on conveyances, estate-plans, rate books, press advertisements and family papers; the same range of sources employed over a far wider geographical area in Christopher Chalklin's recent study. My love affair with insurance policies is therefore relatively recent, and that of an ageing researcher, not to be compared with the amatory techniques of others who were using them for industrial history well before 1971. I have been an old man in a hurry, a scanner rather than a scholar; and these practical notes from a scanner will be superseded if the S.S.R.C. project for an index to the main registers is ever realized.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 3 , May 1976 , pp. 7 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

Notes

1. All manuscript references, unless indicated, are to the Guildhall Library, London E.C.2.

2. Chapman, S. D., Ed., The History of Working-Class Housing (1971), 93–132.Google Scholar

3. Chalklin, C. W., The Provincial Towns of Georgian England (1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. A brief survey by J. H. Thomas was published in 1968 (History, liii, 381–4).

5. Calculations from the Guildhall Library catalogue, MSS. 7252–3 (Royal Exchange) and 11936–7 (Sun). Incidentally, the Hand-in-Hand policy registers, which are largely confined to London and the home counties, contain well over a million policies for their full extent (1695–1865), and these are indexed by name and (incompletely) by place (MSS. 8674–84).

6. Dickson, P. M. G., The Sun Insurance Office (1960).Google Scholar

7. Supple, Barry, The Royal Exchange Assurance (1970).Google Scholar

8. Notably, ‘Fixed Capital Formation in the British Cotton Industry’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxiii (1970), 235–66Google Scholar; ‘Industrial Capital before the Industrial Revolution’, in Harte, N. B. and Ponting, K. G. (eds), Textile History and Economic History (1973), 113–37Google Scholar, esp. table 5.4.

9. ‘Early Factory Development in the West Riding of Yorkshire’, in Harte and Ponting (eds), op. cit., 247–80, esp. App. 10.1.

10. One exception was the remote site of John Marshall's first water powered mill on Adel Beck.

11. ‘Twelve new tenements’ insured for £200, May 1797: policy no. 667012, registered in MS. 11937, vol. 19. The houses are illustrated in Chalklin, C. W. and Havinden, M. A. (eds). Rural Change and Urban Growth, 1500–1800 (1974)Google Scholar, pl. 16, p. 284.

12. MS. 11935, vol. 2, 21 Oct. 1737.

13. Kitchingman had been appointed agent a month before the Goulden policy: MS. 14386, 13 April 1797.

14. In the Old Series of Sun registers the policies from London Head Office were distinguished by the absence of an agent's name in the margin: as many as 50 successive pages are not uncommon.

15. MS. 11931, vol. 7, 30 May 1793.

16. MS. 11937, commencing with vol. 1, policy no. 618401.

17. The Town Department volumes continued as vols 396–733 of the Old Series (MS. 11936). Some volumes in this series earlier than May 1793 are wholly devoted to London policies (e.g. vols. 363, 368, 373 and 382).

18. MS. 7253, vol. 32A.

19. M. W. Beresford, ‘The Making of a Townscape’ in Chalklin and Havinden (eds), op. cit.

20. Public Record Office, Chatham MS. 30/8/187, f. 232.

21. MS. 11937, vol.7.

22. MS. 14386. See also MS. 14109 (1842–81).

23. MS. 11935. Agents' names can also be found in the cash books, MS. 12019, with payments for local fire losses. Students of losses should consult MS. 11932 and the Committee minute books, esp. MS. 11931.

24. MS. 12160.

25. From 1784 there is an overlap: see the Catalogue.

26. The country house, the farm house and the non-textile country industries would particularly repay study.

27. Chapman, op. cit., note 8 above: Type A, £1,000–2,000; Bl, £3,000; B2, £5,000; C, over £10,000.

28. In 1785 the largest house in Leeds was insured for £3,000, as much as a Bl Chapman mill; Thomas Lee's new house in Boar Lane had been insured for £2,000 in 1765. New houses in the West End after 1779 ranged from £200 upwards, the highest noted being £720 in 1792: MS. 11936, vol. 386, no. 399339.

29. 2s.per £100 was usual for houses: as late as 1807 as many as one quarter of new Leeds agency policies were for £100 or less.