I work in insurance: Anna Stone, Aviva

What is your role?

I look after the history of the company. This means that I collect material that reflects what the company is doing now, and look after and give access to all the material that has already been collected to show what we have been doing over the last 320 years.

What does an average day look like?

There is no such thing as an average day. I can go from tracing the disposal of parts of the business in the 1970s to looking through policy registers from 1696. This week I’ve catalogued a collection of proposals for everything from neon sign insurance to horse endowments and done a bit of digging into insurance of trick cyclists in the early 1900s.

How is your job linked to insurance?

I’m in a unique position to be able to look back over three centuries and see how insurance adapted to meet new needs. The history of insurance is a reflection of changes in society as insurers constantly react to changes in how people live and work and even what they do in their leisure time.

What have some of the highlights been?

I produced an interactive heritage wall in our head office, which tells the stories of more than 370 companies that have come together to form Aviva, getting to research all their histories and find famous people they insured or their links to events, like the San Francisco earthquake or the Great Train Robbery, was great. I am really proud of the work I was able to do to on members of staff who were killed in the two World Wars so we could produce a book of remembrance for the anniversary of the start of the First World War.

What are the challenges you’ve faced in this role?

One of the challenges is dating items in the collection. If I had a time machine I would go back and make people put the date on everything. The most frustrating challenges are probably when records haven’t survived for certain companies, so you don’t know what they were doing at any particular time. I’m desperately searching for the records of Equity and Law for Friends Life. The archive dates back to 1844 but no one seems to know what happened after 1994. If anyone reading this does know, I would love to hear.

What response do you get when you say you work in insurance?

Most people look at me sympathetically as if they can’t imagine anything as dull as the history of insurance. They soon change their minds when I tell them about the kinds of things the archive covers and the stories I get to investigate like our insurance of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Titanic.