Any risk of a beer? A dispatch from the last unreformed industry in London.
Two years ago, I went on a date with a man called Ben*, who worked in insurance, by mistake. His online dating profile had said he was an underwriter, and I was about to begin a graduate scheme as a subeditor. I put two and two together and got five: ‘under’ and ‘sub’ not being dissimilar; ditto ‘writer’ and ‘editor’. I naively assumed that Ben was in a similar role. It is only when he started yabbering away about risk estimation and broker relationships that I realised how wrong I had been. He gallantly insisted on paying for all of our cocktails, but there was no second date. Ben was, however, the only underwriter I had ever met, and hence when I came to write about the insurance business, I sent him another text. My hypothesis: that insurance is the last unreformed industry in London.
I wasn’t exactly expecting a reply to my out-of-the-blue request to catch up, except perhaps a ‘who?’ or a ‘please fuck off’, so I was pleasantly surprised when a message from Ben popped up on my phone. ‘I don’t work as one anymore, does that still make the cut?’ It did.
One of the largest sectors in the world, insurance’s epicentre is London, particularly in the Lloyd’s market, located on Lime Street in that magical Richard Rogers tower. The UK market isn’t limited to Lloyds, but it is the megalodon of risk analysis. The business at hand generally involves insuring large commercial risks for Fortune 500 companies and commercial airliners. To get an idea of the scale of things, it was through Lloyd’s that David Beckham’s legs and feet were famously insured for £100 million in 2006. An underwriter’s role is to assess applications and decide whether to insure a person (or just their legs) or a company. They work a lot with brokers – insurance agents who help their clients to find cover at the best price – and they drink with plenty of them too.
London’s working culture has changed immensely during my lifetime. The bankers have been relieved of their bacchanalian Christmas parties and limitless expense accounts. Media mavens no longer rack up four figures on a table for two on the company plastic. Publishing dons can only stretch to a bottle of prosecco if a book hits the Sunday Times bestseller list. But in the world of insurance, the working day is largely unchanged since Tony Blair first slid into Downing Street.
Unlike many of the victims of the cult of WFH, insurance workers still tend to carry out much of their business face-to-face. As one observer puts it: ‘The industry is run on alcohol. The best stand I ever saw at an insurance conference was one giving out free bacon butties on the morning of the final day.’
The industry is old-fashioned in more ways than one. It only allowed women to become underwriters in the 1970s and is still largely dominated by men. Plenty of them are gentlemanly, like Ben, willing to use their hard-earned insurance pounds to fund a woman’s negroni rampage on a first date in a classy Bermondsey bar. However, Barbara Schonhofer, an industry headhunter, told Bloomberg in 2019: ‘I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t been harassed in one form or another in the London market.’ Dame Inga Beale, the first female chief executive of Lloyd’s, banned lunchtime drinking among her staff in 2017. Her successor, John Neal, went a step further and outlawed anyone from entering the market under the influence of alcohol. One Under Lime, the bar below Lloyd’s, stopped selling alcohol until after 5pm as a response. Pubs in the nearby Leadenhall Market stayed rammed on weekday lunchtimes.
It’s a wet Monday night in February, and I am at The Lamb Tavern, right in the middle of Leadenhall Market. It is bouncing. Quarter-zip-clad and guffawing underwriters surround me. ‘If you do what I do, this is where you get most of your business done,’ one middle-aged man leaning languorously against a railing outside booms to his acquaintance as I slip by. Inside, I count roughly 40 people. Among us are three women. One is the bartender, one is me. I overhear snippets of conversation about ‘business transformation’ and ‘driving a hard bargain.’ At 6:30pm a glass is accidentally smashed, and the female bartender scurries around the feet of the large group of men, which contains the culprit, sweeping up the glass. As she does, they loudly discuss their preferred type of golf clubs.
I visit the next day too – a Tuesday lunchtime – and the pub is even busier than the night before. Suited men are downing bevvies with carefree abandon, and laughing together as a leather shoe shiner works away nearby. It is like a scene from a bygone age. I ask the bartender whether lots of people come here from work. ‘Yes,’ he answers, laughing. ‘They’re my main clientele.’
I turn to the new school. Sam*, 25, had been working for just under a year at a medium-sized Lloyd’s syndicate. He’s happy to chat. ‘Anecdotally, I say to people I got into insurance for the lunches,’ he says. ‘It’s good fun. And you need the relationships to do well.’
‘I probably drink at least once or twice a week with work, which is obviously a nice perk when it’s on the company card,’ Sam says. ‘We’ll often entertain the brokers to try and win favour. With a work lunch, it’s normally a one or two pint affair,’ he informs me, although ‘sometimes, if it’s a big, big lunch, we might bat on for longer.’ He doesn’t feel that it hinders his work later in the day. ‘It’s kind of part of it,’ he explains.
‘There’s a lot less drinking than there used to be,’ Sam adds. The big office night out is usually now just on a Thursday, and the company often pays for a group of its employees to go to bingo or a quiz night together. ‘It’s often a sore head on a Friday morning, but no one’s ever angry at you being hungover – as long as you come in on time.’ The old school hasn’t completely died out, however. One broker Sam knew, while on a business trip, bought a car he saw on the street just to pick up a client in, on the spur of the moment. He also bought a goat that was in the car when he collected the client. ‘He’s a bit of a nut job,’ Sam says, ‘but he’s had that client for about 20 years now.’
Another Gen Z-er in the insurance world who was happy to talk was Ryan*, who has worked as an underwriter for four and a half years. ‘Insurance has obviously got a reputation for a reason,’ he says. ‘It’s less so that it’s sort of an outright drinking culture – I’d happily go and spend time with my brokers who don’t drink… however, there are certainly a few guys I do business with who like a few beers.’
He adds: ‘I don’t go on a lot of very liquid lunches… It all depends on who you’re with. If you’ve just had a great meeting where you’ve done loads of business with each other, then you’ll have a fair few drinks and end up getting one of the last trains home.’ How many, I ask Ryan, is a fair few? He pauses. ‘Oh… this is going to paint me in a bad light,’ he laughs. ‘If we are talking about a session – and look, this wouldn’t be with brokers the whole time – I’d probably hang out with brokers and have about five or six pints, then if I’m out with my colleagues after that, we’ll stay for another five or six more.’
He adds: ‘You don’t ever really count, because you’re not drinking aggressively, you’re just drinking because they’re going down well and you’re having a good time.’ This can happen up to three times a week, though never on Friday night. ‘People have to spend the weekend sort of on fathering duties… so they wouldn’t want to be hungover on a Saturday.’ For many men in insurance, their wives, it seems, are more intimidating than their bosses.
‘There is nothing that is going to give you a better bond with someone than when you’re both steaming in the middle of the pub,’ he concludes. ‘If you’ve got a company who’s happy to put their card behind the bar, then the younger members of the team are going to go out and enjoy themselves… 18-year-olds in their first job can’t afford to pay £9 a pint.’
In these parlous times, it’s wonderful to see Leadenhall Market’s pubs in such safe, responsible hands. Sam and Ryan and the rest of the boys may not be staggering through the office or out buying goats, but they are still, firmly and definitively, on the beers.
*Names have been changed
