| Fire Insurance Marks
|
| Before 1800 the naming of streets in our cities and towns was rather
haphazard, and the houses and other buildings in these streets were neither
named nor numbered as they are today. Signs and emblems were used by
traders and inn-keepers to denote their occupation and to draw attention to
their premises, but private houses were not as easy to identify and it was
often difficult for persons who did not live in the immediate vicinity to
locate a particular house.
| |
When insuring a property against risk of fire,
it was neccessary that the company's officials and firemen should be able to
identify an insured property immediately, and so it became the practice for
each insurance company to adopt a distinctive emblem for its own use, which
was displayed on metal signs fixed to the wall of each property insured; this
emblem usually appeared at the head of the company's insurance policies and
other documents. Many of these wall marks were made of lead, cast in a mould
and the number of the policy covering the particular property was stamped on
a panel the design with number dies.
|
|
|
The marks of each company varied in
shape and size, and most were brightly coloured, usually affixed to
the front of the building insured, at such a height from the ground as to be
both easily visible and beyond the reach of pilferers. In the late
eighteenth century there was a sharp rise in the price of lead and the
companies began to use thin sheets of copper and other metals in the
manufacture of their marks, on which the design was pressed out. As
properties became easier to identify, the practice of impressing or
painting the policy number on marks gradually came to an end.
|
|
In the early days of fire insurance, companies made it a practice to remove
their marks from a property when the policy lapsed, and as a result the
marks of some companies, particularly those with early polic numbers on
them, are very scarce. Some small companies issued only a few of their marks
before going into liquidation or being taken over by one of their more
successful rivals. demolition of properties through the centuries and bomb
destruction during the Second World War also took their toll and have added
to the rarity of these old fire insurance marks.
|
| Reproduced, with permission, from the book
'The British Fire Mark 1680-1879' by Brian Wright.
|
|