User:Spoll79/Griffiths & Armour

'Griffiths & Armour Insurance Brokers

Insurance Broker and professional indemnity specialists Griffiths & Armour was formed over 70 years ago. It still trades as a partnership, advising other professional firms on the full spectrum of insurance requirements. Independently-owned, the firm remains free of the shorter-term financial constraints which hamper many competitors.

The Group head office is 19 Water Street, Liverpool, with further offices in London, Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin and Guernsey.

How it all began....

To succeed in an insurance company in the 1930's Liverpool required long service and total willingness to conform. Kenneth Griffiths and George Armour were both in their twenties and wanted to do things their way. They resigned their steady, secure jobs and, with a single clerical assistant, put up their plate as Consulting Insurance Brokers.

They had spotted a gap in the market for impartial client-focused advice on insurance. They saw their role as being to analyse the risks their clients ran and to match those risks with the right insurance. If need be they devised new forms of cover, and appropriate policy wording. The insurance had to fit the client, not the client fot the insurance.

In 1930s Liverpool the market was still marine-insurance dominated. Griffiths & Armour therefore deliberately focused on non-marine risks.

The two partners brought intelligence, flair, enterprise and professional qualifications, but above all push, cheek and self-confidence. As young men with no family committments, they could take a risk. Many in the city today will remember Kenneth Griffiths who died in 1999, and recognise precisely the qualities he must have posessed in his youth.

The firm took its first office in the Temple in Dale Street right under the noses of their former employers. Kenneth Griffiths' father's firm already had offices in the same building and the address looked impressie on the firm's letterhead. The reality was different. The premises were run-down, and were to become positively squalid in the post war years when modern offices in blitz-torn Liverpool were like gold dust.

The Temple was a rabbit warren. The partners got around the image problem the premises might have caused by visiting clients at their own premises or meeting them for coffee in the lounge of the Exchange Hotel. It was not until 1967 that the firm was able to aquire more modern offices by acting immediately on the rumour of an impending take-over in the insurance market and securing the promise of offices which would be released as a result.

Since 1987 the firm has occupied freehold premises in Water Street.

George Armour was the son of Rev H S Green of Sandbach, and nephew and adopted son of Theodore Armour, a noted Rodney Street orthopaedic surgeon. Kenneith Griffiths was a scholar of Merchant Taylors' School and son of Ernest Griffiths a consulting engineer noted for his design of the complex building services in hospitals.

In the years Griffiths & Armour was founded George Armour was elected to the city council as Conservative councillor for Sefton. Within six years he became Chairman of the Passenger Transport Committee; it was under his guidance that the major change from trams to buses took place. He became a JP, an alderman, and was Deputy Leader of the Conservative Group on the council at the time of his death in 1957.

Meanwhile Kenneth Griffiths, generally known as KG, became well-known as a member and later trustee of the Philomathic Society - a local debating society where the city's barristers sharpened their skills - and of other clubs and societies. He rose to senior rank in the Masonic order. Nationally, he raosed the firm's profile within the insurance world through his vigorous involvement in the affairs of the Chartered Insurance Institute. Even in its early years his reputation gained the firm a level of recognition quite out of proportion to its size.

The partners persuaded a number of well-known names in inter-war Liverpool to entrust their insurance to the new firm: names such as Philip Son & Nephew who not only sold books but also produced the school atlas many of us learnt geography from, Chadburns, then famous manufacturer of marine telegraph equipment and expanding into other engineering activities, and Collinsons Cut Soles, now lost to the inroads of synthetic materials into the market for leather soles.

A third partner, James Allen, eventually joined the firm. James Allen was in his early forties and brought with him some important civil engineering contractor clients. This enabled the form to survive the war years when new business activity ceased.

The last days of the war saw Griffiths & Armour win an appointment which was to shape the whole future of the firm. It was obvious that following the devastation of the war years that there would have to be a major effort to rebuild what German bombs had destroyed. The design professions were gearing themselves up for that effort and the question of professional liability came up. KG's family connection with consulting engineering led to an interview with the secretary and committee of 'ACE', the Association of Consulting Engineers, in competition with London brokers. Griffiths & Armour's ideas prevailed. But in those days the risk was light - as it remained for another 20 years - and the income from professional indemnity insurance was minimal. The firm remained, as it had always been, a general insurance broker serving a range of industrial, commercial and construction clients.

The initial importance of the connection with ACE was not on the liability side but its introduction to a range of small but rapidly growing, firms which needed good pension funds. The partners built up a substantial block pension business based on the then innovative deposit administration modelwhich linked the investment return on a pension fund to the insurers' own investment performance - in effect an early prototype of the unit-linking still popular in many investment products.

Sadly, George Armour died, whilst still in his forties, in 1957. KG was approaching his fifties and James Allen was already over 60. Having always been characters they had allowed their idiosyncrasies full rein. KG was a night owl. He appeared in the office around mid-day, left for lunch and a game of bridge in the Constitutional Club and returned to begin his real working day at around tea-time. His staff were expected to stay on in the office until he chose to go home. He then read 'the pinks', flimsey pink-paper carbon copies of every letter that had left the office that day. His scruitiny certainly

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