Phoenix Fire Office (6 results)

Condition: Good. Receipt on Phoenix Fire-Office Insurance letterhead. Folded page (laid rag) filled out and signed in black ink. 20 x 25.5 cm. Good with loss and tear.Provenance: Purkiss and Imray families, London 19th century. Both families operated in the intense, competitive, and expanding print market of 19th century London, catering to different, yet essential, markets. In the 19th century, the Purkiss and Imray families were prominent in London, particularly within the fields of nautical publishing and intellectual property. Collection of deeds, documents business correspondence, photographs, relating to the Purkiss (of Glass House Yard, Aldersgate), Imray (Mulgrave Villa, Sutton & elsewhere) & associated families, mostly relating to property transactions in London (Fountain Place, City Road), wills etc., manuscripts, many deeds on vellum, letters on paper, folds, v.s., v.d., 1793-1914.…

No Binding. Condition: Very Good. Double page plan, 350 mm by 495 mm, from the Supplement to the Weekly Dispatch of Sunday June 30th 1861. Scale about 40 feet to an inch. James Braidwood, the superintendent of the London Fire Brigade, was killed during the fire when a warehouse collapsed on top of him as he was distributing brandy rations to the firemen. There was a huge public attendance at his funeral. Centre fold as issued, VG.…

Advert, 215 x 130 mm. This version of the advert, engraved by Bisset, differs from the original 1770 issue, the edges trimmed, a church with a steeple removed from the image and a phoenix replaces the globe on the top of the column.

Large trade card, 190 x 235 mm. There are at least two different version of this engraving. A later version was published by Bisset's Magnificent Guide, or Grand Copperplate Directory. - see elsewhere in this list.

Two volumes, measuring approximately 22 by 27.5cm, bound in green vellum covered boards, lettered and decorated in gilt, with marbled endpapers front and rear. 180 and 196 pages respectively, plus occasional tipped-in manuscript inserts for the "Charges Account", which detail sundry expenses, e.g. the charwomen's wages, beer & coffee houses, both with an unused blank to the front, and the later book with 3 unused blanks to the rear. Containing fair or final quarterly accounts, written in a highly legible hand in black and red ink, for the first 38 years of the Phoenix Company's existence, covering their years of early growth; expansion into foreign markets such as Hamberg, America and the West Indies; the long period of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, during which many new competitors arose in the British insurance market, and the crucial post-Waterloo economic depression period. Both bindings appear contemporaneous with the dates of the accounts, the gilt title to the upper-cover of the earlier volume provides a very good clue as to a precise date, giving the company name cautiously as the: "Phoenix Company or New Fire Office". The Phoenix began as the latter in 1782 and became the Phoenix Company around 1785, suggesting that the first two years of Company accounts were initially kept in a slightly more casual fashion, until they grew confident that the venture was going to be successful. The New Fire Office was founded by a group of disgruntled Georgian London sugar refiners, in response to the high premiums charged by the established insurance companies. Sugar refining or baking was considered hazardous and therefore too risky for some insurers, and the high premiums added to the other financial risks endured by sugar refiners, chiefly the unpredictable supply of the raw product from the West Indies. The founders were unusual in commencing such a venture, in that they were a collective of wealthy merchants, rather than the very rich plutocrats or established City financiers, who might be expected to take such a risk and be considered immediately credible to outsiders. The 1720 Bubble Act, which followed the economic disaster of the South Sea Bubble, further complicated the venture as it meant that without a Royal Charter or Act of Parliament it was impossible to form a joint-stock company which gave the protection of limited liability to subscribers. The founders, led by Nathaniel Jarman, obtained the necessary licence from the Commissioners of Stamp Duty in July 1782, which notionally allowed the fledgling New Fire Office to issue fire insurance policies. However, they persisted in an attempt to obtain a Royal Charter with a petition to the King until February 1783 when it was firmly declined, before settling on a non-incorporated partnership governed by a legally binding Deed of Settlement and overseen by a group of Trustees. Replicating many of the aspects of an incorporated company but with the risk of unlimited liability, meaning that individuals could be pursued for the whole of collectively accrued debts if the venture should fail. These quarterly accounts would have been presented for scrutiny to the Trustees by the Company Secretary, to ensure that the venture remained on a sound financial footing and provide a basis for discussing future risks and expansion at their regular meetings. The first few accounts are unsurprisingly sparse, given that they pre-date the final agreement upon the company structure and little actual business had been done, but are fascinating for the names which crop up, e.g. the short-lived first company Secretary, John Warner Phipps, who was dismissed due to financial irregularities. Another name appearing throughout the first 20 years of the company's existence is Lady Irwin, i.e. Frances Gibson Shepheard Ingram (1734-1807), wealthy widow of the 9th Viscount of Irvine, from whom the Phoenix leased its first premises at 18 Lombard Street beginning in March 1782, until 1802 when they move. …

A small book, 14.5 by 22cm, containing roughly 346 pages of thin watermarked paper, in two sets of tabbed alphabetical sections, with some unused pages at the end of sections, but for the most part filled in black and red ink in a variety of elegant hands. Bound in full green calf lettered in gilt, with a functioning brass clasp to the fore-edge, the text block roughly trimmed top and bottom, with marbled endpapers front and rear. The leather is quite rubbed and marked, with some chips and small tears, the corners are bumped. The text block is toned, rubbed, grubby and marked, showing hard office use over many decades. The book was conserved in 1971, there are repairs to some pages along their inner edges, mostly towards the front, though half a century later the paper is beginning to split along the lines of the much stiffer repairs, it has probably been fully re-cased and there is cloth reinforcement sewn in at the gutters, with notes from the Victorian period mounted to the front pastedown, a bound in note from the archivist at the 1971 restoration and a tipped-in manuscript list of foreign agents of the Phoenix on a small sheet of paper, listing the names and locations of 29 Agents as far afield as Shanghai, Java and Trinidad, looking to date from the mid-nineteenth century. There is an ink stamp to the first blank indicating that it was part of the Sun Alliance Insurance Group's Phoenix Archive, and more recently from the archives of the RSA Insurance Group with their barcode strip to the front endpaper. The first tabbed section of 266 pages lists the Phoenix Agents by location, giving their Title, Place, Date of Appointment and Trade, the majority men but also some women, e.g. Miss Jane Cooke, a Grocer of Stamford, who was appointed in 1840. This section shows the gradual expansion of the Phoenix Fire Office from London outward, as they sought fresh risks to insure, seemingly the earliest recorded being Thomas Bowman, a Printer in Richmond, who was appointed in 1804, and the latest appointments noted being made in 1859. New appointments of Agents are sparse throughout the Napoleonic Wars, but gradually increase in number post-Waterloo from 1815. Many are neatly crossed through though still perfectly legible, and new appointments in the same location are listed beneath, the defunct Agent presumably having resigned, been sacked or died, there are also annotations to earlier entries regarding changes. The second section of approximately 80 pages lists the Agents alphabetically by name, with additional information given under the headings of: Place, By Whom Recommended, and the amount of the Security provided. Clive Trebilcock utilises the book as a key primary resource in 'Phoenix Assurance [] Volume I 1782-1870' (1985), analysing the spread of the Phoenix's activities, and the occupations and class backgrounds of the Agents selected to sell fire insurance policies. A remarkable and historically important survival from one of Britain's largest and most innovative insurance companies, particularly in the extent to which they aggressively built and developed a network of individual local agents who operated independently from the central office, providing insight into the social and commercial make-up of Britain and Ireland during the height of the industrial revolution, not to mention much useful genealogical information from the pre-census era. …