Royal London: The First 150 Years

On 2 February 1861 two young men met in London, tradition has it in a coffee shop in City Road. Joseph Degge, born in Staffordshire, the son of a farm labourer, was 24 and had worked in Liverpool in the pub trade and as a clerk. Henry Ridge, a Londoner, was two years younger and a carpenter. His father was a cheesemonger. Both men were married, Degge had a young daughter, and they were now working for an organisation, founded a decade earlier, that provided insurance against funeral expenses. By the end of the meeting, Degge and Ridge had decided to set up a business in competition with their employer, to be called the Royal London Life Insurance and Benefit Society.

Murray Ross was legal director and company secretary of Royal London until his retirement in 2007. He qualified as a solicitor in 1971 and before joining Royal London in 1994 had worked for a US multinational and an asset management and banking group, and been a partner of a London law firm. He wrote the early editions of what has become a standard work on the leasing of commercial property. He now lives in Edinburgh and enjoys the city's festivals, watching sport and time spent with his granddaughters.

On his retirement from Royal London in 2007, Murray Ross was asked to write a history of the last 50 years of the company to be ready for the 150th anniversary in 2011. What began as an interesting little project soon escalated into a way of life when it was decided that there was no satisfactory way of dealing with the first 100 years and his brief was expanded back to 1861.

Murray Ross has skilfully marshalled the wealth of material available to him, and eloquently traced the history of Royal London from its quiet beginnings to its current position as the largest mutual life and pensions company in the United Kingdom.

'This book is an extraordinarily well researched and well written exploration of the development of an institution that represents an important thread running through the commercial and social life of the last century and a half. '
– Tim Melville-Ross, Chairman, Royal London Group