I opened the house a couple of years ago but apart from then I haven’t seen anyone here all the time I’ve been

General — July 27, 2010 at 7:37

I opened the house a couple of years ago, but apart from then, I haven’t seen anyone here all the time I’ve been here.”When Mike Savage gave me directions to the Bunhills’ house, he referred to Mr Bunhill in a sympathetic tone that suggested some bond between them, some sense of their being companions in suffering. But Mr Bunhill claims hardly to know Savage – merely snorting something about his having borrowed a door-knob and failed to return it. Such things matter for people of means.I had arrived to see Mr Bunhill without an appointment and found him sitting behind his desk in a natty blue blazer, his hair slicked back, smoking a cigarette. I had been expecting an ebullient character, but that didn’t come across. He seemed more like a caged animal, a man who had spent far too much time cooped up with accountants Also, of course, my presence in his office was irksome.

He didn’t, he said, want certain people to know that he was a Lloyd’s Name. Along with some of the other Lloyd’s Names, who declined to see me for legal reasons, he is desperately trying to reduce his losses. Negotiations were delicate, he said, but if they came off, it would be a significant settlement – suggesting perhaps that other Names might benefit from his trailblazing efforts But he could not pretend to feel for them. “The other Lloyd’s members are like lemmings, always looking to see what others are going to do.” As for the market itself, he added, warming to his theme: “All Lloyd’s Names are crap as far as Lloyd’s is concerned. We’re all going down the funnel at the same time.”He had calmed down by the time he ushered me out with a “Bless you lad, good-bye.” But he would still like his door-knob back.MULTIPLY such scenes 24,000 times, and you begin to get a picture of what the Lloyd’s disaster has done to Britain. Over the last three years for which claims have been made (1989, 1990 and 1991), Lloyd’s Names have built up a liability estimated at around £8bn. Roughly 4,000 of them were “working” Names, insurance professionals who decided to back their judgement with money of their own The remaining 20,000 losers were outsiders.

A few of these were famous – Sir Freddie Laker, former tennis player Buster Mottram, Tory MP Paul Marland – and some of the “non-working” investors could certainly afford to lose the odd million. But most of those who have lost do not seem to have seen becoming a Name as being a particularly large or reckless gamble. They might just as well have been putting their money in bonds or unit trusts. Many were only putting their relatively modest wealth with Lloyd’s because of an effective recruitment drive in the Eighties which saw 22,000 new Names between 1982 and 1990 (and the minimum wealth requirement for Names reduced from assets of £250,000 to assets of £37,500).How it all went wrong is still a matter of controversy – and litigation – but the bare bones are relatively clear. A succession of unexpected “super-claims” – Piper Alpha, Hurricane Hugo, Exxon Valdez, asbestosis – found a number of key underwriting syndicates disastrously exposed.

In most cases, it was the non-working Names who bore the brunt. Big or small, well-known or unknown, they all became victims of a market that in some cases appears to have been hijacked by a small number of occasionally negligent and often not very bright individuals whose interests were divorced from those of the Names they represented.To the outsider, it is all relatively clear, but to the Names themselves it has been bewildering, and in Chobham, at least, no one seems to have a clear idea of how they should now react.Francis Higgins, a retired finance director, is keeping faith with Lloyd’s and remaining a Name, despite having lost £50,000 every year since he joined in 1988. So is one of his neighbours, a retired solicitor, who vividly recalled for me the sinking feeling he experienced in 1990 when, looking out of a bedroom window in his Georgian house and counting the trees in the garden, he began to calculate his losses for the first time. But most of the other Chobham Names have now left Lloyd’s, wary of agents handing them a glass of sherry at the back of an AGM and talking about more prosperous times. Michael Brooke, an entrepreneur specialising in computers who holds annual bridge parties in aid of the NSPCC, left in 1989 after 17 years. He would have left earlier if his syndicate managers hadn’t tried to talk him out of it, making him miss the deadline, and trapping him for the first of the bad years.

None the less, with claimed losses of only £25,000, Mr Brooke is the least affected non-working Name in Chobham. (There is one Chobhamite who was a working Name, but he pulled out in 1988 and thus avoided all the losses. Needless to say, his good fortune does not seem to have endeared him to Chobham’s other Names.)Elsewhere in the village, there is a sense of helpless despair. There have not been any suicides as yet, although Michael Brooke blames Lloyd’s for the early death of a friend outside the village. However, such future tragedies cannot be discounted for as long as so many villagers continue to dread the arrival of the postman bearing the next white Lloyd’s envelope.Some think the only escape is to spend any money they have left as quickly as possible, so that there is nothing more for Lloyd’s to take.