We asked the leaders of the world’s mutual shipping insurers to dig deep — into their boardrooms, archives and even dusty basements — to uncover objects that mark key defining moments in the 170-year history of protection and indemnity clubs.
The result is a fascinating collection that spans the origins of the P&I system to a ship’s bell salvaged from the seabed just 19 years ago — a reminder of how the industry continues to evolve.
Along the way, the clubs unearthed rare documents, striking photographs, tales of shipping caught up in geopolitical upheaval, fragments of wrecks, and even a few magnificent moustaches from Victorian England.
Founding moment: The birth of the shipowners’ mutual protection society, 1 May 1855
The first P&I club was born out of the pressures of Britain’s industrial revolution. As factories churned out goods in ever-greater volumes during the 19th century, trade increased, global trade expanded, ships grew larger — and so did the risks and liabilities for shipowners.
“As the new factories were mass producing new machinery, the legislature and the courts were mass producing new laws,” wrote former Ince lawyer Steven Hazelwood in Britannia P&I club’s official history.
One such law, the Campbell’s Act of 1846, made shipowners liable for the deaths of crew and others on board.
At the time, British ships were full of migrants bound for Australia and the Americas. But there was no insurance to cover the growing legal and human risks.
Shipowners responded by creating a new form of mutual cover — modelled on the existing mutual hull clubs but retooled for new laws, and bigger and different liabilities. It was the start of what we now know as the P&I system.
John Riley was a pioneer of the system.
He was one of 14 children from Yorkshire set for a life in agriculture, but the family farm was inherited by his older brothers.
He planned to stay with his sister in London while seeking a suitable farm to buy, but instead joined forces with his brother-in-law, Peter Tindall.
Tindall was from a family of shipowners and brokers, and together the two men started the first protection club, with five shipowners.
The Shipowners’ Mutual Protection Society was the forerunner of Britannia P&I.
The articles of agreement set out Riley’s powers to run the club and his fees. His name is the final signature on the document. The club began operations on 1 May 1855.
Source: Britannia
First call: Shipowners’ society receives its first mutual contribution, 1 March 1866
It is all very well setting up a club, but members have to pay their bills.
That became clear with the demise of a wooden and steel sailing ship, the Mindoro, after an undistinguished life of just seven days.
The Mindoro set sail on its maiden voyage from London for Vancouver on 20 November 1864.
A week later, off the coast of south-east England, it collided with the “very large” Khersonese, a former steamer converted into a sailing ship, bound for Calcutta.
The Mindoro sank, and the Admiralty court blamed the Mindoro entirely, according to the document below.
It led to the first call for funds by the Shipowners’ Mutual Protection Society.
Newspaper reports from the time said that both ships and cargoes were insured “for a very heavy amount”.
The notice was “for £3,500 on account of damages and costs payable by Mr William Adamson, of Sunderland, as owner of the barque Mindoro, 435 tons, for the total loss of her cargo and damage done by her to the ship Khersonese by collision off Dungeness”.
Adamson went to court to limit his liability to £8 per registered ton.
“There will be a further small call hereafter,” the notice warns, signed by Peter Tindall.
Source: Britannia
Pooling begins: The first agreement to share risk among clubs, 10 April 1889
For the past 20 years, a copy of the 1910 Standard Agreement — one of the cornerstones of modern shipping insurance — has hung in the American Club’s New York boardroom.
The 1899 agreement was struck between Britannia P&I and five other clubs, in which they agreed to share costs of more than £10,000 to guarantee their financial stability in the face of a major claim involving ever-larger ships.
They were known as the London Group, the forerunner of the modern-day International Group of P&I Clubs, which has 12 members and covers about 85% of global oceangoing tonnage.
The limit has gone up somewhat in 126 years, to $10m, and the names have changed — the originators were all English-based: the Britannia, London, Newcastle, Standard, Sunderland and UK clubs.
The only US-based P&I club, the American Club, was not set up for another 18 years after the agreement was signed.
The document is on a wall at Battery Park Plaza in New York’s financial district — saved, fittingly, during an office clear-out.
Harry Yerkes, the long-time New York correspondent for broker Miller, was preparing to retire and shut down his office when he stumbled upon it.
He passed it on to Joe Hughes, then chief executive of Shipowner Claims Bureau, the manager of the American Club, who promptly had it framed and mounted on the wall.
Hughes only realised its value when the European Union launched a two-year antitrust investigation into the clubs and wanted to know when the original pooling agreement had been signed.
But nobody had a copy of the original agreement. The International Group, then headed up by Andrew Bardot, followed up rumours that Hughes had one.
Intrigued that the only known copy of the agreement was located far outside of London, Hughes made further copies and sent them to all the other group club chief executives.
The whereabouts of the original is unclear.
Source: American Club
A day out: Shipowners take their annual meeting to Tunbridge Wells, 18 April 1899
Eight days after the historic pooling agreement, the staff from a club not part of the deal took their hats and bow ties and headed for Tunbridge Wells, in south-east England.
The formal photo was typical of the time — the male-only trippers do not wear the expressions of people having a terrific time — but at least most were looking at the camera.
The exception was a man in the middle of the photo, hands on his knees, caught in profile, looking at something more interesting, stage left.
Captain A Holman was a member of a family with a distinguished track record in shipping finance and law that continues today.
The family lived in the English town of Topsham, Devon, for many generations from the mid-17th century.
That same year, the Tindall-Riley operation was established, John Holman and his sons, Thomas and John, set up the Shipowners’ Protection Association, comprising only shipowners from England’s West Country.
The club moved from Topsham to London in 1873.
A decade later, a member of the Holman clan, Frank, set up as a solicitor in London and began to expand a law business that grew to become Holman, Fenwick & Willan, the global firm now known as HFW, with offices from Sao Paulo in Brazil to Shenzhen in China.
The association founded by the Holmans was the forerunner of both the West of England and Shipowners’ clubs, two current members of the International Group, which only went their separate ways in the 1980s.
The photograph from the picnic is now hanging on the wall of the West’s Hong Kong office.
Source: West of England club
Strength in numbers: A bold display of shipowner power, 1902
By the turn of the century, the Newcastle-based North P&I club was one of the biggest players with a formidable leadership group, exemplified by Stanley Mitcalfe, an underwriter by training and fierce defender of shipowners.
He was described as possessing “skin about as tough as the beef supplied to Tyneside sailors”, according to one account reported in North’s official history.
But when overwork and ill-health forced his departure, Mitcalfe was succeeded by his nephew, J Stanley Todd, whose photograph features at the bottom of the gallery of directors and managers of the club from 1900 to 1902.
He joined the club aged 16 and was involved in forming the Shipping Federation. The shipowner body was set up in response to the 1889 London dock strike, held to improve pay.
Todd knew the lawyer for the newly founded seamen’s union. During a ferry across the Tyne, he learned from his friend how the union planned to campaign for every seafarer to be signed up to the union.
North took the lead in organising other employers to set up the federation, a forerunner of the Chamber of Shipping. For many years, it acted as a strike-breaker, supplying non-union seafarers to members’ ships.
“Every year, North had a full report from the Federation about its activities against the union, and it was only after the First World War that this hostility lessened,” North’s official history, Celebrating Over 160 Years of North, said.
The Lingard case: A landmark moment in P&I history, 1907
It took more than 50 years for the current market leader in marine insurance to ease out of the starting gates following the launch of what became the Britannia Club in 1855.
Gard was not the first mutual insurer in Norway — Skuld was set up a decade earlier.
But the owners of sailing vessels feared that joining Skuld, which covered newfangled steam-powered ships, would saddle them with greater claims and costs.
So they wanted a club with a sail-only policy. The result was Gard.
The invitation letter said: “The undersigned sailing shipowners believe that one should, like the steamship owners, through cooperation, protect ourselves against the same risks and liabilities as Skuld covers, and to that end, establish a mutual association.”
One of those first ships in the club was the Lingard, a three-masted ship built in 1893 in Arendal, the traditional shipbuilding centre of Norway and home of Gard.
The ship was named after the village of Lyngor, home of its first owner, BA Olsen.
The ship was sold to owners in Australia, renamed the Wathara and used for exporting wheat before eventually returning to Europe.
It was hauling wood from Sweden to London when it collided with a Swedish tugboat, which sank with its crew.
The Lingard suffered major damage and never returned to active service.
The wreck was sold back to Norway, where it was used as a grain store in the first year of World War II before being cut up in Stavanger in 1949.
Parts of the ship are preserved in the Norwegian Maritime Museum, but its legacy continues at Gard.
Lingard is the name of Gard’s Bermuda-based insurance company.
The great-grandson of BA Olsen, one of the founders of Gard, still works at the insurer.
Leif Erik Abrahamsen is head of marine and energy claims. “I sometimes say I work in the family business,” he said.
Source: Gard
Rising risks: Protection against the biggest claims, 20 June 1951
Seven British-based P&I clubs, known as the London Group, signed up in 1951 to a contract that allowed them to jointly buy extra cover because of the alarming rise in costs.
The clubs were now liable for claims ranging from damage to cargo, pollution and loss of life, from collisions and wreck removal.
Along with the larger claims came greater volatility and concerns that clubs would struggle to cover the costs of the biggest claims.
The answer was to negotiate collectively with commercial insurers, who would cover the largest losses in return for an annual premium paid.
The 1951 agreement was only for claims for more than £260,000 ($333,000), according to the contract.
The reinsurance contract is still negotiated annually — now by the International Group of P&I Clubs — but the sums involved have inflated significantly.
Reinsurance cover for the clubs now covers losses that kick in at $100m up to $3.1bn.
Source: The London P&I Club.
Fair warning: Arbitration clause draws attention, 1 July 1957
Up until the 1950s, it was not uncommon for shipping disputes to be resolved over cocktails by two shipbrokers plucked from the floor of the Baltic Exchange.
But the number of cases referred to arbitration, rather than being fast-tracked through what was intended to be a business-friendly London commercial court set up in the late 19th century, was causing some concern at the headquarters of the leading legal mutual.
Rather than being a swifter, cheaper process, arbitrations could end up more expensive and cumbersome than was initially hoped, members of what is now the UK Defence Club were warned in a circular in 1957.
The Lord Chancellor, the head of the judiciary, had told maritime lawyers that it “may become impossible to justify the expense and inconvenience of keeping specially trained judges in London” if cases were diverted from the courts to arbitration.
The club’s managers warned: “It is felt that the dissolution of this court would be a serious loss to the commercial community.”
The demise of the commercial court never came to pass — neither has the significance of arbitration in maritime.
Three years after the circular, the London Maritime Arbitrators Association was set up to make the previously ad-hoc system more rigorous.
Nearly 70 years on, London remains the centre of arbitration, which resolves the vast majority of maritime disputes.
And complaints about costs continue — the UK-based club increased its premiums by 5% for 2025, in part because of increasing lawyers’ fees.
Defence Club chief executive Daniel Evans said: “What’s interesting about this circular is that after 68 years, some of the points raised in it are still relevant today.”
Source: Defence Club
Trapped in time: The yellow fleet and the long wait, 1967-1975
Two ship models in the offices of the Swedish Club in Gothenburg tell the remarkable story of the 14 ships stuck in the Suez Canal after the outbreak of the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel in 1967 and held there for eight years.
The Nippon and the Killara were among the vessels held in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal after Egypt blocked both ends of the canal with mines and scuttled ships to prevent its use by Israel.
Passenger ships caught in the crisis were allowed to pass.
The trapped merchant ships were not and became known as the “Yellow Fleet” from the sand that blew in and coated the vessels.
The ships were from both sides of the Iron Curtain, but the hardship suffered by the rotating crews on board created a thriving self-help community.
Some of them stayed there for nine months at a time.
The master of the Killara was said to have been one of the founders of a society known as the Great Bitter Lake Association, according to a book written about the saga by author Cath Senker.
The group held film nights, football matches and even their version of the Olympics in 1968, according to Liverpool’s Maritime Museum.
Killara stewardess Anna Berg, the only female crew member, and who was inevitably named the Lady of the Lake, presented the medals.
The ships were prized for their unique features.
The Swedish-owned Nippon had a gym with exercise bikes and rowing machines.
The Killara had a “mechanical cow” that turned milk powder into milk and butter, which was traded for bread.
The ships were finally released in 1975. Both of the Swedish vessels remained in service until the 1980s.
Source: Swedish Club
Currency shift: Seeking sunnier climes after sterling’s crash, 1975
The six-day Arab-Israeli war that spawned the Yellow Fleet also contributed to the desperate plight of the UK economy, which ended with the devaluation of sterling in November 1967.
This posed a problem for the English-based clubs, which operated globally.
Several clubs set up offshore companies in response to the devaluation, including Steamship, which established its Bermuda-based unit in 1975.
The tonnage was shifted from the English book to Bermuda, and the club began using dollars as its primary currency.
That major move was symbolised by the Sea Venture, the name of the club’s newsletter to members first published in 1978.
The newsletter was named after a ship that was wrecked off the coast of Bermuda in 1609 while sailing from England for the colony of Jamestown, which was established by the English Virginia Co two years earlier.
The ship is incorporated in Bermuda’s flag, and survivors’ stories of the wreck may have inspired William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, written the following year.
About 150 survivors made it to safety on Bermuda, where they used wreckage from the ship to build two smaller ships that eventually took them to Virginia.
Three seafarers stayed behind in Bermuda. They were joined several years later by 60 English colonists, preparing the ground for more than 400 years of British control of the island.
Source: Steamship Mutual
Wreckage remembered: A tanker’s propeller tells a pollution story, 5 January 1993
A scrap of propeller metal recovered from the wreck of an oil tanker is one of the few relics from one of the most significant oil pollution incidents off the UK coast.
The 90,000-dwt Braer (built 1975), carrying 85,000 tonnes of Norwegian light crude, was driven onto rocks off Shetland by hurricane-force gusts after suffering engine failure on 5 January 1993.
All cargo and bunkers were lost.
Violent storms caused the ship to break up, but also accelerated the dispersal of the oil.
The harsh weather limited the environmental impact, despite a major hit to the local salmon farming industry.
Total payments were made of nearly £52m, with the majority going to fishing interests.
At one point in the salvage effort, divers were sent down to the ship to discover if any oil remained inside the ship.
The wreck did not contain any oil, and there was little left to retrieve, but they returned with a fragment of propeller.
The plan had been to put anything found on the wreck on display at the Oslo head office of Skuld, the P&I provider for the Braer.
But the fragment was not considered to be worthy of display and sat on the desk of general counsel Jonathan Hare until he retired.
Hare, who was part of a Skuld team that left for the Shetlands on the day of the grounding, wrote that the metal “probably had no significance to anyone but me”.
“The natural forces which were unleashed forced the disabled ship on the rocks and then tore it apart,” he wrote.
“These same forces also took care of the clean-up by dispersing the oil naturally, with almost no human intervention required.”
He said the response was also a game changer for the industry, with early payments for those most affected and by making P&I clubs more visible and accountable following major incidents.
“Sending club personnel on site, establishing a local claims office, speaking to those affected and communicating with the media … were viewed negatively by some of the conservative elements in the P&I world, but supported by the more progressive clubs,” he said.
A world first: The inaugural Stopia claim, 11 August 2006
A bell sitting in the boardroom of the Shipowners’ Club was retrieved from the wreck of a small tanker that went down in 2006 off the coast of the Philippines in heavy weather.
The loss of the 2,130-dwt laden Solar 1 (built 1998) was the first casualty that was subject to a new agreement that raised the compensation bill for the owners and P&I providers of small tankers.
At the time, the wreck was the biggest claim in the club’s history and was said to have reached $25m.
Under a previous liability regime, the club’s costs would have been limited to about $6.5m, but the Small Tanker Oil Pollution Indemnification Agreement (Stopia) — which came into force the same year as the wreck — voluntarily raised that to about $29m.
The measure applied at the time to about 6,000 smaller tankers and was aimed at addressing what was seen as an imbalance in covering the costs of major oil spills that was weighted in favour of shipping interests, rather than the cargo owners.
The ship spilled its cargo of 2,081 tonnes of industrial fuel oil when it sank some 10 nautical miles (18.5 km) with the loss of two of its crew.
During an operation to remove the remaining oil, it became clear that virtually all of the oil spilled when the ship foundered.
The Shipowners’ Club and the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds set up a claims office in the Philippines that closed only four years later.
Payments were made following nearly 27,000 claims, mainly in the fishing sector and for the clean-up costs.
