The Triple Goddess Read Online Free

the seafaring types who adopted it that Edward Lloyd found himself as proprietor of a premises considerably more important than the non-alcoholic watering hole he had envisaged: one that was as metonymic as Smithfield was for meat, Billingsgate for fish, Covent Garden for flowers, Spitalfields for fruit and vegetables, and Hatton Garden for jewellery.
    On the ground and first floor of New Lloyd’s, the upper level of which was open to view from below like a racecourse around an encircling balcony rail, were the two kidney-shaped trading floors of “The Room”. The Marine, Aviation, and Motor syndicates were downstairs and the Non-Marine syndicates upstairs. The Room was “open-plan” (there was little planning involved, it was just a matter of squeezing as much in as possible as the market continued to grow) with no internal walls. Each underwriting syndicate’s wooden “box”—the boxes were the equivalent of the stalls and vendor stations in any other market—were where the risk-accepting or -declining underwriters and their assistants received the placing brokers who brought them their offerings on long concertina-folding documents known as “slips”.
    Because it was required that all Lloyd’s business be transacted on the trading floors, underwriters only retired to their offices on the upper levels of the building to reckon up their accounts, and either rejoice at the luck that often passed for sound judgement in their business, or lick their wounds, preparatory to either celebrating the luck or anointing the wounds in the City’s pubs and wine bars.
    The rectangular boxes were custom-built hardwood units with solid bases and high-backed settles on either side facing each other. The whole of the centre of the desk area was occupied by a wooden tower, open at the base for passing things from side to side, with tiered shelves above for reference books; pigeon holes and nooks for the paraphernalia of underwriting and the premium and loss advice cards that were delivered by the waiters; and little brass-handled drawers or shuttles in which were filed the three-by-five-inch index cards on which the details of each risk were recorded by the entry boys (some of whom were sixty years old and had been sitting buttock to buttock with the same colleagues all their careers).
    Below the desk platform and underneath the seat lids were cupboards and hidden compartments like the hidey-holes that children leave in building blocks; no space was wasted. Behind the seat were bin receptacles for the files that were dropped off by the claim brokers for review by the claims underwriters.
    The boxes were very varied in design and construction. They ranged from sophisticated structures resembling Skylab, built to accommodate half a dozen underwriters, plus their assistants and entry boys, to simple two-seaters equivalent to the “horseboxes” at public schools where boys did their evening prep. The biggest boxes were constructed in irregular shapes, and strewn around the floors like discarded building blocks. They had central carousels for the information cards, which could be spun around to save one the trouble of getting up and past those next to one. The smallest were occupied by only the underwriter and his deputy. On the record cards underwriters handwrote key details of the “material underwriting information” that brokers supplied for every risk that the syndicate wrote, renewed or turned down.
    The underwriting slips themselves contained only the bare-bones contractual details of a risk—the rest, which was taken on trust, was communicated verbally supported by “exhibits” typed on white cardboard. Underwriters made up their minds as to whether to participate on a risk or not based on the oral testimony of the broker and what was on the slip. That the full contract wording of terms, conditions and clauses was rarely processed until the contract was long expired, did not matter: the founding principle of Lloyd’s