Insurers like to say they are only as good as their claims record. Few claims files carry more weight than this one.
A ledger recording Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company’s share of the hull cover on RMS Titanic goes under the hammer on 21 November at Henry Aldridge & Son in Devizes, Wiltshire. The pre-sale estimate is £30,000 to £50,000, or about A$57,000 to A$95,000 at current exchange rates. The auction house, which holds the record for every major Titanic item sold at auction, believes it is the only copy still in existence.
The binder was signed on 27 March 1912. Nineteen days later, Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank on her maiden voyage to New York, killing more than 1,500 people.
Atlantic Mutual took a US$100,000 line, which is roughly US$3.5 million in today’s money. That was part of a total-loss placement of about US$5 million, shared among a consortium of around 77 insurers, and Atlantic Mutual is believed to have been one of the biggest participants. The insured was the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, the corporate owner behind the White Star Line.
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The policy ran for 12 months from 30 March 1912. A handwritten endorsement extended cover to the delivery passage from Belfast to Southampton, including any sea trials along the way. The document therefore records the ship’s insured status before any paying passenger came aboard. Andrew Aldridge, the auction house’s managing director, has reportedly described the clause as “slightly prophetic”.
According to Lloyd’s history of the Titanic, broker Willis Faber & Co, a forerunner of today’s WTW, went to the Lloyd’s underwriting room on 9 January 1912 to place Titanic and her sister ship Olympic for White Star. Lloyd’s records the Titanic’s insured value as £1 million. At the exchange rate of the time, that is broadly the same as the US$5 million figure in American records.
Underwriters were keen to get on the slip, with one exception. British Dominions Marine Insurance refused to sign because it judged the vessel sat too low in the water.
Australia’s marine market was operating under familiar rules by then. The Marine Insurance Act 1909, which still governs hull and cargo cover in this country, had been on the books for three years when Titanic sailed.
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The numbers explain why Lloyd’s still ranks the sinking with its most significant historical losses, next to 9/11 and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Lloyd’s says total insured marine losses for all of 1912 came to £6.75 million, and that figure includes Titanic, so a single ship made up about one-seventh of the year’s marine losses. On the morning the news broke, reinsurance rates on the vessel reached 60% as reports went from damaged to sinking.
White Star was still paid in full within 30 days. Today’s large marine losses can take months of salvage, adjusting and coverage argument to settle, so that turnaround still stands out. The aftermath was not entirely clean, though. Insurance Business has previously reported research suggesting a senior Titanic officer played down the iceberg collision, possibly to head off negligence claims.
Atlantic Mutual’s later history makes the document more poignant. The New York carrier was founded in 1838 and by the mid-1800s was North America’s largest marine and general insurer. More than a century later, it was a major insurer of property damaged or destroyed on September 11, and that exposure is widely thought to have contributed to its decline. Its licences were revoked and it entered liquidation in 2011, after 173 years of trading. Papers from its historical archive, including Titanic material, were later exhibited in New York, where a dealer bought them.
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The estimate looks modest next to what Titanic collectors have paid recently. Over the past two years, the same Devizes saleroom has sold three gold pocket watches for more than £1 million each. The record is £1.78 million, paid for the watch Isidor Straus was wearing. Captain Arthur Rostron’s watch, presented to him for rescuing survivors aboard the Carpathia, sold for £1.56 million. In April this year a survivor’s lifejacket made £670,000.
Insurance documents attract a narrower group of buyers. The auction house says the market is driven by passengers’ and crew members’ stories, and a hull binder, however significant to underwriters, does not have a person at its centre. Andrew Aldridge has said provenance is everything with these objects. That is especially relevant to this sale.
The auctioneer says it can find no record of an original Titanic policy being sold before. However, a Titanic historian’s account of an earlier Henry Aldridge auction, apparently held in 2013, describes the original Atlantic Mutual hull ledger selling there for £14,000. Separately, US trade press reported that year that a ledger page from Atlantic Mutual’s Titanic policy, number 391550, sold at Doyle New York for US$25,000 to an anonymous buyer.
It is not yet clear whether any of these is the item now on offer, a separate page or another record of the same risk. Serious bidders will want that answered before the hammer falls on 21 November.
Either way, the lot records a policy that responded to a total loss exactly as intended, and the claim was paid within a month.
For more on hull, cargo and the legal framework for marine cover in Australia, see Insurance Business’s marine insurance guide and the latest marine news.
