Aviva companies have been providing insurance from offices on Surrey Street in Norwich for 200 years. I’m marking this bicentenary anniversary with a blog to share information on our buildings and reflect on the changes in office life since 1819.
You might think that the story of our links to one street in one city is only of limited local interest but reminiscences of our staff on Surrey Street include something for everyone including tales of firemen, a double murder, and two bowler hats.
Our roots on Surrey Street were laid on 2nd January 1819 when John Cocksedge Bignold signed an agreement with John Patteson to purchase his mansion house on the street on behalf of the directors of the Norwich Union Fire and Norwich Union Life Societies. The two insurance companies, founded by Thomas Bignold in 1797 and 1808 respectively, were at that time based in offices at Haymarket on the corner of Brigg Street, probably roughly where Top Shop sits today.
The new premises, at what is now №9 Surrey Street, were also to become the family home of Thomas’s son, Samuel, and were acquired for £6,500. The property covered more than two acres and stretched from its Surrey Street frontage back to Bull Lane, which ran parallel to what is now Queens Road, close to the old city walls.
Included in the sale were stables, a coach house, a kitchen garden, and a pleasure ground (basically an ornamental lawn). The house had been built by John Patteson, a wealthy wool merchant and weaver between 1765 and 1770. John’s nephew and heir, also John, who sold the property to Norwich Union, had added a new wing on the south side of the building in around 1790 designed by his friend the architect John Soane. The plan below shows the extent of the property in 1883 when ownership was transferred from Norwich Union Life Society to Norwich Union Fire Society.
The only information we have on what life was like for the first clerks working in the old Patteson mansion comes from a set of staff rules written by Samuel Bignold in November 1819. It states that the office hours were 9–1.30 and 2.30 till 6, “during which period every clerk must be at business”. The clerks were fined 2d (old pence) for every 5 minutes they were late and had to get permission from the office manager, Robert Miller, if they needed to leave the mansion during business hours. No one, apart from William Driver and the junior clerk, could tend the fire and clerks were only allowed to stand in front of it one at a time to warm themselves.
We know the names of seven other members of staff, besides Mr Miller and Mr Driver, who were working for the two insurance societies when they moved to Surrey Street: Joseph Corsbie, William Sowels, John Clark, William Walker, and Lewis Wilson were employed on the fire business while Thomas Starling and Charles Brundell were employed as life clerks.
Meanwhile, on the upper floors of the house, Samuel Bignold was entertaining some of the notable local and national personalities of the day including the artist John Sell Cotman, HRH Duke of Cambridge (son of George III) and the Duke of Wellington, hero of the Battle of Waterloo and later Prime Minister. Wellington’s son, the Marquess of Douro, was also a regular visitor to Surrey Street and was staying with Samuel in 1837 when William IV died and Queen Victoria ascended to the throne. We have in the archive a letter he received from his father informing him that the king was dead and that he had been to swear allegiance to the new queen.
The earliest reminiscences of working life, in what eventually became known as Bignold House, belong to George Oliver Clark who joined the office as a junior in 1848 when he was 15. At this date the clerks were apprenticed by deed and George would have had to sign an indenture promising: “to observe and obey the lawful commands, to keep secret the business and concerns of his employer, behave himself dutifully towards him and civilly and respectfully towards his family.” This is what the office looked like the year after George joined.
George was on his way to work in the Surrey Street only a few months into his indenture when he heard about the murder of the Norwich Union Life President, Isaac Jermy, at Stanfield Hall. According to his reminiscences in the staff magazine, George was the first person to tell Samuel Bignold the news and was immediately sent out into the city to gather more information. The board minutes for later that week record Jermy’s death “at the hands of an assassin”, and in April 1849 George and the other clerks were given the morning off to watch the public hanging of James Blomfield Rush who had been found guilty of murdering Jermy and his son, and of seriously injuring the younger Mrs. Jermy and a servant, Elizabeth Chestney.
In a series of articles for the staff magazine George, photographed below in the 1890s, described what the office on Surrey Street had been like even before he started working there, as he had seen it on visits to his uncle James.
According to George, James Clark, who was chief clerk, had sat at a raised desk at one end of a long room with between 16 and 20 single desks facing him. Around the walls were tall bookcases and above these were pigeon holes for correspondence from agents all around the country set up more than nine feet high and only possible to reach by ladder. By the time George joined in 1848 the chief clerk’s desk, then occupied by Mr Leman (below), had been lowered and the pigeon holes removed.
Instead, on the wall facing George in the office junior’s desk, hung decorative fire buckets and twelve fire axes above a large map of Norfolk. We have axes in the archive collection which may include the ones George looked up at in his idle moments more than 170 years ago.
In 1848 the company was still running its own fire brigade in Norwich and the engine and equipment were kept across the street in thatched buildings adjoining the stable yard of the Boar’s Head public house.
A sign on the door of the engine house read: “in case of fire, the keys are kept at the Blue Anchor”; this was a pub a little further up Surrey Street on the same side of the road. According to George Clark, when the alarm was raised the publican, Mr Turner, would: “don his fireman’s coat and hat and come trotting down the street with the keys. Having set the doors wide open he would draw out the cart containing the small engine, buckets, and everything necessary for tackling a small fire, and by the time he had buttoned up his coat and fastened his belt, the horses would begin to arrive. Then two or three of the brigade would come straggling in and proceed to the seat of the fire, leaving the other members of the brigade to follow on with the more powerful engines, ladder cart and so on.” The image below, of a Norwich Union fireman in uniform in 1865, gives an idea of how Mr Turner would have looked once he was properly dressed.
The fire brigade would gather for a drill (which it sounds as though they needed) on the first Tuesday of each month and would get the engine up to a head of steam. According to stories passed down by the staff, if there was no fire to attend they would use the engine to wash the front of Bignold House. The constant washing was blamed for having weakened the brickwork which had to be refaced in 1896. One of our earliest photographs of the building, below, dates from around this period.
George’s son, George Clark junior, began working for Norwich Union in 1871 and later recorded his own memories in the staff magazine. He recalled that his first duty was to collect the snuff boxes of the more senior clerks and take them to Kitton’s tobacco and snuff shop in the Old Haymarket to be filled with ‘plain scotch’. In those days entries in the policy ledgers were still written with quill pens and the clerks would use the feather ends of the quills to sweep out their snuff boxes and make sure they didn’t waste a pinch.
As a junior clerk in 1871, George was also sent out to collect lunch for the other members of staff, “I was sent on a foraging expedition to obtain snacks for the staff luncheon, boiled beef, sardines, Stannard’s bread, Guinness’ stout.” When he returned the clerks would clear the books from their sloping desks, open the tops and spread their lunches out inside to eat. By 1892, when Ernest Williams joined the staff in Bignold House, the lunch order was taken by the office caretaker, Mr Freeman, who would bring the required refreshments back in a large black Gladstone bag. The image below shows the high sloping desks at which the staff worked and where they ate their lunch.
The office was lit by gas burners and many years later Ernest still remembered the popping sounds as each man applied a lighted taper to the top of his gas chimney when he started work in the morning. According to George Clark junior, when the gas had been burning some hours the office became very stuffy and the air “almost poisonous”. He recalled someone daring to mention this to Sir Samuel Bignold at some point in the early 1870s: “turning to the clerks nearest him, he asked, ‘how long have you been breathing this bad air?’
‘Over fifty years, Sir Samuel’
‘And you?’
‘Thirty-seven years.’
‘And you?’
‘Five-and-twenty years.’
‘Ah,’ said Sir Samuel, ‘it seems to be a very slow poison’.”
By the time Sir Samuel Bignold died in 1875 there were 46 fire and life clerks working in Bignold House and in the Old Bank building adjoining, which had been fitted up as offices for the life company in 1838. After his death the office took over the whole of the old house; the drawing room became the board room, the library became the committee room and the dining room became the policy room. A speaking tube was fitted in 1877 and when Ernest Williams joined the office in 1892 the Life Secretary, Mr Deuchar, sat upstairs in the board room and would blow down the tube with a whistle to get the attention of the clerks in the room below.
Many of the staff reminiscences refer to the old house as crowded and draughty but the gardens were remembered very fondly as a place of recreation where, in the summer months, the clerks would eat their lunch by the fountain.
Ernest Williams recalled once being challenged to jump off the stone steps that led up to the garden and hang from the door lintel. The attempt was not successful, and he concluded that he only saved his skull from serious damage because he happened to be wearing his bowler hat.
This image of Ernest, from a group photograph taken in around 1900, gives no hint of his daredevil lunchtime activities.
Most of the staff photographs we have from this early period were taken in the garden. They show members of staff putting on outdoor plays, like this performance of Withered Leaves from 1897.
Below, members of the staff tennis club can be seen practising on the office court in preparation for local competitions like the Norfolk Lawn Tennis Challenge Cup, in the 1890s.
The garden was also the backdrop for formal departmental group photographs like this one of the Guarantee Department, taken in around 1893.
Geoffrey Hart, who joined the Guarantee Department shortly after the above photograph was taken, later wrote about the more artistic side of life in Bignold House, including the first performance of the staff orchestra in 1897. The Norwich Union staff was very musical, several members having been choristers at the Cathedral, and 16 musicians, with four vocalists, set themselves up in the committee room to play to an audience looking in through the open double doors of the adjoining board room.
The photograph below shows the view from the board room towards the committee room as it was in 1954 but probably very little changed from the time of the 1897 concert.
While this shows a slightly enlarged staff orchestra in 1902 with conductor, Walter Gemmer, seated in the front.
Walter’s own memories of working in Bignold House include wives waiting on the office steps on pay day, which came around 8 times a year, to collect their husbands’ wages. He also wrote about the excitement caused when a clerk in the ‘vellum books’ department became so unruly that George Oliver Clark, who had risen from office junior to chief clerk, ordered him out of the office and kicked his bowler hat out after him.
Over the years, as the business expanded, more and more of the garden was lost to office space. Firstly, a two-level extension was built towards the west to house the Policy Department and then, in 1895, a large room was built on southern side of the lawn for the Foreign Department. The photograph below shows members of the department, some sporting wonderful moustaches, in 1897.
In 1904, when the life society clerks moved into their new offices across the road in Surrey House, the fire staff took over the Old Bank building and remodelled part of the interior of the old house. A new public reception area was created with a large open plan office space behind.
You can see the new public entrance, to the left of the old house, in this photograph from around 1910.
In 1927 another huge extension was built in the garden to house members of the Accident Department staff who had been operating from premises on St Giles, Norwich, since 1909 when Norwich Union had acquired the business of the Norwich and London Accident Insurance Association. The photograph below shows clearly the size of the new addition to Norwich Union’s office space on Surrey Street.
It was one of the office extensions in the garden of Bignold House that was badly damaged by a high explosive bomb when Norwich was targeted in the Baedeker raids of April 1942. A fragment of the bomb, below, is still in the archive collection.
It is hard to tell from the photographs of the devastation that appeared in the staff magazine, exactly what was hit, but we do know that 150 members of staff had to be found temporary desks in other buildings on the Surrey Street site.
The extension was eventually rebuilt and by 1962, when the photograph below was taken from the top of the company’s new building, office space had taken over nearly every inch of the original site.
Before we leave the north-east side of Surrey Street I must just mention one other Aviva office which operated there. In 1925, Number 11 Surrey Street, next door to Bignold House, was purchased by General Accident. The mansion, known as Stanley House and later as King’s House was purchased from the estate of Lucy Bignold who had lived there since the death of her father, Samuel, in 1875. It is now the home of the Norwich Free School. Like the Norwich Union clerks before them, General Accident’s Norwich branch staff enjoyed the Surrey Street garden; according to the staff magazine in 1933: “The garden behind the office is especially beautiful and the whole is redolent of the more spacious and leisurely days of a century or more ago.”
You can just make out the two insurance office mansions side by side in the photograph below from 1946 which also includes a back view of Surrey House and the site of our current offices which will feature in my next blog.
