Throwback Thursday: CII CEO praised
Insurance Post’s Throwback Thursday steps back in time to June 1971 to remind you what was going on this week in insurance history when the Chartered Insurance Institute's CEO retired prompting reflections on his legacy.
3 June 1971: CII CEO retires
Ronald Smurthwaite, director of CIB, paid tribute to Hugh Cockerell, CEO of the CII, who had recently retired.
Smurthwaite, who had worked for Cockerell as assistant secretary and careers officer from 1958 to 1963, wrote about how he arrived for his interview as secretary in 1946 wearing his Royal Navy lieutenant uniform.
“With, in addition, both the Fellowship of the Institute he was to control and the Bar examinations to his credit, no one could have been better equipped to become chief executive of an educational body which now has more than 50,000 members,” wrote Smurthwaite.
“At the CII he remained, somehow, always above internal competitive warfare. What he said to close colleagues in private could almost always have been said in public.”
“Few men in this century have so far made a greater practical contribution to the elevation of insurance education throughout the world.”
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