Why the Victorians kept their eyes peeled for orange

AS the saying goes, when there’s blame, there’s a claim.

But what may have been thought to be a modern claim culture has been revealed to be anything but, with a fascinating new glimpse into the archives of one of the country’s insurance giants.

Just as people in the 21st century are urged to claim for a “slip, trip or fall”, so were those in Victorian Yorkshire, according to the latest discoveries made by Aviva.

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The newly-unearthed archives reveal a catalogue of customers’ accident claims dating back to the 1860s – including the cases of people who failed to land on mattresses in gymnastics routines, poisoned their own hands unpacking boxes of drugs and withstood explosions of molten metal.

Aviva archivist Anna Stone has spent months poring over the documents for an exhibition at the company’s general insurance headquarters in Norwich.

She said: “It has certainly proved to be interesting reading material and I have to say I do have some personal favourites from across the country that stand out for their sheer peculiarity – like the vicar who fell while playing a game of leapfrog, or the gentleman who missed a dog while trying to kick it and struck a sofa instead, injuring his big toe.

“Sport injuries are also commonplace, with slips during fencing, blows from hockey sticks and golfers rupturing legs getting out of bunkers – not to mention the clerk who received £36 for an injury caused by a blow from a fellow bather’s heel sustained while diving.”

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The archives show human carelessness has stood the test of time, with numerous examples of slipping, tripping, falling and sliding.

A clerk from Beverley received £60 in 1892 after missing a mattress while jumping at a gym, and in 1878 an agent from Leeds received a payout of £44 after slipping on orange peel.

A steward from York who trod on a needle received £45 in 1870, and a Yorkshire merchant who was injured when his mule ran down a mountainside made a successful claim for £40.

The personal accident policies in the archives covered a wide range of professions and groups, from rail passengers and fox hunters to surgeons and solicitors.

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Personal accident insurance of the kind recorded in the archives arrived a few decades before the launch of car and burglary policies, but many years before the bespoke kind of home, car and travel insurance that companies such as Aviva offer today.

The company’s director of property claims, Rob Townend, said: “These amazing records just go to show that as far back as 1860, people still looked to insurance to help them in their hour of need – and, of course, that is still true today.

“Obviously insurance claims change as lifestyles change, but some incidents appear to be as common back then as they are today.

“Even in prim and proper Victorian times, people were still tripping up kerbs, falling on ice and slipping on cobbled streets, albeit back then discarded orange peel appeared to be the major culprit.

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“The supposedly more traditional slipping hazard, the banana skin, makes just one appearance in our archives, back in 1904.

“And of course clumsiness is a human trait rather than a historic one – we have found a boot-maker who injured himself slipping on soap and upsetting a saucepan, and a merchant who fell down the stairs after getting his foot caught in his pyjamas.

“On the positive side it certainly seems that the workplace is a lot safer now that it was back then.

“The archives show claims from a grocer who was hit on the head by a box of bacon, a pork butcher who caught his hand in the sausage-maker and the publican who injured himself ejecting a drunken man.”

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Ms Stone said her trawl through the archives had led to many fascinating discoveries.

She added: “As we’ve got the oldest accident insurance in the UK, we wanted to do a display for our entrance hall, so I looked through the archives.

“You never know what you’re going to come across.

“I found a selection from 1860 to 1913 and there’s both claims that can be described as exciting and unusual, and claims for accidents that would have happened every day.”

Ms Stone said many of the illustrated claim documents would have been used by Aviva salesman in the Victorian era.

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She said: “It’s fascinating, looking at different people and what they were doing.

“For example, you don’t think of a clergyman necessarily playing tennis and don’t consider him having a life outside of work.

“Slipping on orange peel isn’t one you might have thought of, but it crops up over and over again. I think people must have just thrown the peel over their shoulders and then other people would come along and trip over it – of course the streets wouldn’t have been as clean in those days.

“But what these archives do prove is that clumsiness is something that carries on over every age.”

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