It faced two options, taking Pelican on at its own game or buying the company. Clearly, buying an existing player carries some intrinsic risks. The leniency with which he treated those responsible for other Lloyd's scandals suggested that at some level he simply did not understand why people were so furious at the way Lloyd's was run.Green's personal tragedy was that, although a genial and essentially well-intentioned man, he brought dishonour on himself and on the institution which he tried so hard to rescue and modernise.Peter James Frederick Green, insurance underwriter: born 28 July 1924; chairman, Janson Green 1966-86, chairman, Janson Green Holdings 1986-89; chairman, Lloyd's 1980-83; Kt 1982; married 1950 Pamela Ryan (died 1985), 1986 Jennifer Whitehead; died 27 July 1996.. Some felt that the motive for the Imperial reinsurances was simply that Green loved to go deep-sea fishing.There was perhaps more to it than that. The old Lloyd's in which Green grew up was riddled with casual favouritism and with a certain contempt for all forms of regulation. Baby syndicates were regarded as an entirely legitimate device for creaming off the best business, leaving the trusting Names (whose cheques Green liked to tear up in such a theatrical way) stuck with the rougher edge of the underwriting experience.

Her husband died in the Fifties.Asaf Ali was also a prominent member of the Congress Party, then in the forefront of the freedom struggle and his fiery young bride took little time in joining Mahatma Gandhi's civil disobedience movement, leading to her imprisonment in 1932 and, again, in 1941.After Independence Ali was persuaded to become Delhi's first mayor in 1958 - the only female mayor the city has ever had - and was responsible for major civic reforms. A nonconformist from the beginning, she broke with accepted Hindu convention and, at the age of 19, married Asaf Ali, a well-known Muslim lawyer, some 20 years her senior. Her newspaper produced some of India's top journalists but ran into serious management and financial problems in the late Eighties, appearing only intermittently.Born Aruna Gangulee in 1909 at Kalka, a small town in the Himalayan foothills in the north, into a distinguished, upper-class Bengali family, she was educated at the Sacred Heart Convent in Lahore. But, after the first few years, Communism too held little attraction for her and Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalin at the Soviet Communist Congress in 1956 finally spurred her into leaving the Party.She remained a Communist sympathiser, launching the popular English- language Link magazine and Patriot newspaper in New Delhi in the Sixties to reflect the pro-Soviet viewpoint, highly articulate and influential on the government of the day.

Reserve the prize money for the Harijan [untouchables] cause.Soon after Independence in 1947, however, she took Gandhi's advice and entered active politics, joining the Congress Party briefly, before moving on to the resuscitated Socialist Party in 1948, which espoused a philosophy closer to her beliefs.But Ali was unable to equate the compulsions of power with her ideals of a classless and prosperous India and, disillusioned with the Socialists, joined the Communist Party of India in the mid-Fifties. Gandhi wrote:I have been filled with admiration for your courage and heroism You are reduced to a skeleton. Do come out and surrender yourself and win the prize offered for your arrest. Undeterred by the country-wide crackdown against pro-independence activists, Ali eluded the police and achieved the impossible by hoisting the Indian flag at a prominent spot in the western city of Bombay. This spot is now hallowed ground.Thereafter, the British government posted a reward for her capture, but she remained free, disobeying even the Mahatma's request to surrender on account of her frailty.

Aruna Asaf Ali, one of the grandes dames of India's freedom movement, was a restless revolutionary who ran an effective, militant underground network against British rule in the early Forties. Her frail beauty and charming exterior belied the inner strength with which she defied British rule and, after Independence, exhibited the same revolutionary zeal for the improvement of the lot of women, the poor and depressed, through the left-oriented newspaper she began in the Sixties. Ali shot to prominence in 1942 after the British arrested Mahatma Gandhi and other national leaders for adopting the Quit India resolution against imperial rule. Everyone knew there were hazardous bends, intersections and junctions It was primarily the duty of drivers to take due care.. There were no grounds on which it could be said that the public law duty should give rise to an obligation to compensate persons who had suffered loss because it was not performed.Drivers of vehicles must take the highway network as they found it. As they were not therefore under a public law duty to do the work, the first condition for the imposition of a duty of care was not satisfied.But even if it were, the second condition would not be satisfied.