During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, mutual associations predominated in insuring the large fleet of ships that carried coal from Britain's northeast to London and other ports. The number of associations grew rapidly from the late 1770s, initially on the Tyne, then spreading to other ports on the east coast. They largely saw off the challenge from joint-stock companies created after the liberalisation of the marine insurance market in 1824. Low administrative and legal costs and the ability to mobilise local knowledge to minimise risks allowed the associations to offset the disadvantage of insuring vessels in the same trade facing similar adversities. This article discusses how mutual associations were organised and operated, traces their development on the Tyne and the competition they encountered there from Lloyd's of London and joint-stock insurance companies, and examines the incidence of mutual associations elsewhere in Britain.

The tendency of insurance providers to refrain from offering long-term guarantees on investment or mortality risk has shifted attention to mutual risk pooling schemes like (modern) tontines, pooled annuities or group self annuitization schemes. While the literature has focused on mortality risk pooling schemes, this paper builds on the advantage of pooling mortality and morbidity risks, and their inherent natural hedge. We introduce a modern “life-care tontine”, which in addition to retirement income targets the needs of long-term care (LTC) coverage for an ageing population. In contrast to a classical life-care annuity, both mortality and LTC risks are shared within the policyholder pool by mortality and morbidity credits, respectively. Technically, we rely on a backward iteration to deduce the smoothed cashflows pattern and the separation of cash-flows in a fixed withdrawal and a surplus from the two types of risks. We illustrate our results using real life data, demonstrating the adequacy of the proposed tontine scheme.