Edward Lloyd
I was a guest on a podcast recently, where I was asked to talk about Edward Lloyd, owner of one of the world’s most famous coffee houses in the late 17th to early 18th century, and unbeknownst to him, a founder of a global marketplace that almost underwrites the world.
Rather than celebrate the Coffee House itself, which much has been written (including by myself), the question asked was, who was he, what kind of person was he? Who was this man? I had never considered this before, and it is a difficult question to answer. As he was not a rich, powerful, titled, or “great” person, we know very little about him.
The Nuts and Bolts
For someone like Edward Lloyd, who is known today for the coffee house but, on the whole, not a “great” person, we don’t have personal information about him. There is the technical information, from sources such as parish registers, that can piece together people’s lives. Such evidence gives us the nuts and bolts: when they were baptised, married (to whom), when they remarried, how many children they had baptised, how many survived childhood, and when they died. It is like a dry family tree, with names, dates and lines between them.
For me, this doesn’t get under the skin of people’s lives, and I can’t help but spread the conceptual net, taking in their world. Saying that, the nuts and bolts are a good place to start. Lloyd was born around 1648, but by the early 1680s, he was certainly living in the southeast part of the City of London. In some publications, Edward Lloyd is said to have come from Canterbury, but I have also heard that he came from Cornwall or South Wales.
Edward Lloyd and his wife, Abigail, had previously lived in the parish of All Hallows Barking. By September 1682, they were living in Tower Street ward. His ancestors are noted in the parish registers of All Hallows Church, Barking. His father, Edward, was buried on 21st September, 1680, and a daughter, Mary, and a son, Hugh, are recorded as being baptised in 1680 and 1681, respectively.
Going back to the Edward Lloyd Conceptual Map, one thing we can do is to look at the world around him, what was going on, what he was doing with that, building up links between them.
Setting the scene
Edward Lloyd was living and working in the City of London from about the 1680s, so what was happening in London and across the world at this time? 17th Century London was certainly a place of growth. Amsterdam was the northern centre of trade and commerce. By the middle of the 17th century, London was surpassing Amsterdam in power and international trade. England had been colonising North America since the late 16th century, and the first permanent English colony was Jamestown, established in 1607. Expansion in North America led to conflict with the other colonialists, the Dutch. In 1664, the English seized New Amsterdam and renamed it New York, ending Dutch rule in the area and creating strong trading links for England and London.
The impact was a growing physical trade, with more ships, merchants, ship crews, ship owners, insurers, and warehouses in and around the City of London. There was money to be made, and the population boomed as people from the surrounding countryside and across Europe came to make it.
The coffee house
We don’t know when Edward Lloyd first set up his coffee House. The earliest known mention of it, is a Notice in the ‘London Gazette’, 18–21 Feb. 1688–9, No. 2429, relating to a theft of sundry items on the 10th February from one Edward Bransby in Derby: ‘… whoever gives Notice of them at Mr. Edward Loyd’s Coffee House in Tower Street … shall have a Guinea Reward.’ This gives us a date, a location, and also an idea about how coffee houses operated. They didn’t just sell coffee as in our coffee shops, but were places of meeting and activity.
To have opened a coffee house, we can only presume that Lloyd would have had connections and knowledge of both coffee houses and the commercial marine trade. Perhaps he had worked on board a ship, within the marine industry, or in a coffee house, or both.
The location must have influenced Lloyd’s business, his specialism, and his entrepreneurial spirit. Tower Street was a nexus between three areas. It was right next to the docks and wharves in the Pool of London, which was a hive of activity with a multitude of merchant ships from all over the world. London was booming, so imagine the area full of sailors, captains, shipowners, suppliers, victuallers, and so on. Going eastwards from Tower Street was Wapping, where many sailors lived and workshops were found with trades supplying the marine industry. In the opposite direction, westwards, lay the City’s financial district, where investors and financiers sought to profit from the boom in international trade.
This atmosphere would have been difficult to avoid. Lloyd’s first coffee shop became a place for all these people to congregate. Captains fresh off the ships, meeting the ship owners, or merchants, commercial backers and the merchant-insurers. On top of that, this would be an ideal place to find the most up-to-date shipping news from around the world.
Word of mouth would have been the most powerful means of news coverage. But it also has the potential to start gossip and rumours. One would want to hear it as soon as possible from the most reliable source, which would be found on the docks, from the captains and sailors, fresh off the boats and making their way to the coffee houses to meet their owners and merchants.
One of the defining features of the Lloyd’s Coffee House by 1700 was the provision of reliable shipping news; the most up-to-date information on all things marine. Maybe Lloyd learnt from Tower Street, the commercial value of reliable information and where to hear it first.
Lombard Street
Edward Lloyd followed the money. In 1694, although working in an excellent area for the physical maritime trade in goods, coming in and going out of England, he moved to Lombard Street, a stone’s throw from the Royal Exchange, surrounded by other coffee houses and a centre for commerce. He obviously felt there was more to be gained from being close to where the money was, rather than the trade. It was a brave move, as the area around Lombard Street, up to Cornhill and around the Royal Exchange was packed full of coffee houses. Even though coffee houses attracted certain types of business, competition would be strong.
If you were a “stock-jobber,” i.e., someone who traded in stocks and shares, you would go to Jonathan’s Coffee House. Traders dealing with North America were found in the coffee houses adjacent to the Royal Exchange, such as the Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York Coffee Houses. Tea merchants patronised Garraway’s. Garraway’s was the first coffee shop to sell tea.
You would go to a Coffee House to meet people, conduct business, find people, catch up on news and gossip, and be seen. Along with the usual social and networking, there would be sales and auctions, all things that would bring people into the venues.
Inside, they would have long tables in the centre where men would sit with colleagues, drink the coffee and smoke tobacco. There may be a few separate tables for intimate deals, away from observers. They were outside the market floor rules and regulations of the Royal Exchange, so they lent themselves to free-market, fluid commerce and transactions.
Lloyd probably leaned on what he knew, his experience in the marine. By the time Lloyd had established the Lombard Street Coffee House, had he already built up a reputation and specialism for marine trade and insurance, or had it naturally followed him from Tower Street? Either way, he wasn’t filling a gap when it came to all things marine. Around the corner in Birchen Lane was Haines and the Marine, Coffee Houses, both specialising in all things “marine”, so Lloyd would have had to keep ahead of them.
The practice of marine insurance was quite fluid. There were no standalone marine insurers, unlike the fire insurance sector, which was developing at this stage. The insurers were merchant insurers and investors seeking relatively quick profits, as financial returns could be high. In practice, anyone could make a bit of money by investing in insurance contracts, and they could be a part of a financier’s portfolio. At Lloyd’s, the brokers would share the risk of an insurance contract with several underwriters on a slip. The slip was essentially a slip of paper, where the insured was written at the top, eg the ship, cargo, where bound for, when due back, and underneath that, the insurers would sign their names and how much they would lay down as insurance. They were the underwriters – they quite literally wrote their name under the line.
Success is quite often self-perpetuating. The more insurance was conducted at Lloyd’s Coffee House, the more insurers, brokers, and investors would go there to find business. The premises on Lombard Street, at the corner of Abchurch Lane, are where Lloyd’s Coffee House became the recognised centre of shipbroking and the marine insurance business.
The Entrepreneur
Operating in a crowded marketplace, he needed to make his Coffee House the go-to place for marine and marine insurance. He did that by making his coffee house a comfortable place to work and by having the right people and businesses operating there. What did he do to stand out and attract the right customers? There were many activities, such as auctions and sales, but these were found in most coffee houses. I think the main tool he used was information. He would always ensure he had the most up-to-date information on world and shipping news through gazettes and broadsheets. That was not unusual for a coffee house, but he went a bit further. The latest news would be read aloud from a pulpit within the coffee house. He would have agents in the docks, not just in London but also in Southampton, Exeter, and Bristol. They would report back to Lloyd’s with fresh news, which would then be read aloud from the pulpit.
Lloyd reserved an area for captains and retired captains. Presumably, they had free entry and coffee; it was usually a penny to enter, and further expense for coffee and tobacco. For the captains, I am sure it would have been a dry, pleasant, warm place to be, but also a place to earn a bit of money by acting as consultants to underwriters and even to claims (early loss adjusting). For Lloyd, his coffee house would be the place to get all this information to make business decisions.
Lloyd was also famous for publishing weekly news-sheets specifically on shipping. They were single-sheet publications, titled Ships Arrived at, and Departed from several Ports of England, as I have Account of them in London … [and] An Account of what English Shipping and Foreign Ships for England, I hear of in Foreign Ports. There was also Lloyd’s News, a shipping and commercial chronicle. The papers were short-lived, lasting 5 years or so, but they influenced later papers, including the famous Lloyd’s List, which dates from after Edward Lloyd’s death.
The legacy
Edward Lloyd died in 1713, but Lloyd’s Coffee House continued throughout the 18th century. His youngest child, Handy, managed the business after her father’s death up until the 1730s, when it was taken over by other practitioners. One thing that stands out is that Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House retained its name for the rest of the 18th century. When, in the 1760s, the professional insurers left the Coffee House, they took Lloyd’s name with them, establishing New Lloyd’s and then Lloyd’s of London. The Coffee House had become so successful that its brand was inseparable from marine insurance.
How did that coffee house turn into the world’s largest insurance marketplace, and, probably more remarkably, how did the brand of ‘Lloyd’ survive? Now it is an international insurance and financial “power-house” in the City of London. Inside the present building is a cathedral-like structure that is completely overwhelming upon entering the floor. It has its origins in a small coffee house in Tower Street, near the Tower of London, established in the 1680s.
I was asked at the end of the podcast, off-air, “if Edward came back today, and saw what his coffee house had become?” He was a successful entrepreneur who knew his audience and what they needed. But what would he make of this Lloyd’s of London today, and once comprehending it, knowing that it is named after him and his success?
I don’t think I can answer that even with a few weeks of reflection. If Lloyd came back as that early 18th century person, could he comprehend the modern City and Lloyd’s of London? Suppose he were alive today, as a 21st century person. In that case, I think he would still be an entrepreneur, and Lloyd’s of London would fill him with excitement and possibilities. One thing, though, he wouldn’t be running a coffee shop.
Also see
Humanising Insurance Podcast
The podcast: Daniel Grimwood-Bird and Howard Benge, bring to life a name that’s central to the insurance industry. Listen in to discover:
– What could Edward Lloyd have been doing before being the owner of a coffee house?
– Why did insurance gravitate to his coffee house rather than the others available?
– How did the ‘Lloyd’ name survive 300 years and become synonymous with insurance?
Apple Podcasts – https://lnkd.in/eG9bHndB
Spotify – https://lnkd.in/emBtxJk5
An Historier's Miscellany 