Crown Agents celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2008. Here are some well-known and some less well-known facts about our work during all this time. If you have interesting facts of your own about what we've done or want to know more about our past and present, please email 175facts@crownagents.co.uk
Firsts
Crown Agents was established in 1833. However the first recorded use of the term 'Crown Agent' was to describe Richard Cumberland in 1758.
Until 1905 Crown Agents had worked only for governments. In that year the Straits Settlements Dock Board (forerunner of the Port of Singapore Authority) became the first public body to choose to use Crown Agents' financial, procurement and project management services.
In 1932 Crown Agents became agents for its first independent government when the new government of Iraq elected to continue using its services.
Crown Agents' first project in Liberia - setting up the W V S Tubman College of Science and Technology, in Harper - began in 1979. Named after the country's president famed for promoting foreign investment and local participation in government, and formerly housing one of the best libraries in Africa, the college is currently recovering from war damage.
Brunei had no public television at all until Crown Agents installed, in record time, studios and a transmission station. No other country had ever moved as quickly from having no service at all to receiving regular broadcasts in colour.
Our management of two road construction projects under World Bank funding in Yemen forty years ago was the first time a British company had operated in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen since its separation from South Yemen.
In partnership with procurement organisations from five other member states, Crown Agents formed one of the first formal European Economic Interest Groupings.
Training
Since the inception of the Crown Agents Foundation Scholarship scheme in 1999 more than 300 scholarships have been awarded.
Our first scheduled training course was held in 1969, in Britain. Now we hold courses throughout the world. Yet Britain remains popular. In an average year delegates from more than 70 countries come to Britain to attend courses at Crown Agents International Training Centre.
Consignments
Perhaps Crown Agents' most unusual single consignment was a huge shipment of domestic and farm animals to repopulate the stock of a territory despoiled by war.
Crown Agents has made many currency shipments by sea. One of these, on the SS Politician, sailing for the Atlantic from Liverpool, sank off the Hebrides, in Scotland, in 1941. Its crew were rescued by lifeboat, and its other cargo, whisky, was salvaged by islanders in a manner that inspired the book and film, Whisky Galore. The currency was lost.
Among the more extreme consignments on which we have arranged insurance was that of a bulldozer airlifted by the Royal New Zealand Air Force from Auckland and parachuted onto Pitcairn Island - a 200-mile journey. There is no airfield on Pitcairn Island due its small size and difficult terrain, and deliveries by boat are limited. The Pitcairn Islands, incidentally, granted restricted women's suffrage in 1838, long before its adoption in Britain.
On the other hand, in 1878 Crown Agents engaged its first 'lady clerk'- a pioneering move in the employment of women in offices.
Governance
Crown Agents was originally set up to counter corruption and inefficiency in the territories then administered by Britain. Now it is promoting transparency and probity across the entire globe.
Economic Crime Workshops were first conducted internationally, in association with Commonwealth Secretariat, in 1985.
Fighting poverty
The Crown Agents Foundation, which owns Crown Agents, has as one of its articles of association the alleviation of poverty. Crown Agents fights poverty by helping its client governments to grow more prosperous for the benefit of all their people.
Two thousand farmers in Malawi are benefiting from irrigation put in place through Japanese non-project grant aid. The irrigation scheme protects the first crop while farmers are growing a second one. Worldwide these grants, many administered by Crown Agents, together with the counter-value funds they generate are making an enormous difference to the commercial lives and prosperity of whole countries and tens of thousands of individuals.
Saving lives
Crown Agents' life-saving emergency supply service is legendary, no matter how big or small the requirement. On one famous occasion we delivered in next to no time a single extra-small pair of forceps to extract a peanut from a baby's throat.
Operating from its base at Metkovic, in southern Croatia, the convoy teams Crown Agents assembled on behalf of the British Overseas Development Administration carried more than 3,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid, including emergency drugs, medicines and surgical equipment, into Sarajevo and other locations in Bosnia every month.
Crown Agents chartered vessels to carry food and emergency medical supplies it had purchased to Russia as part of the European Union's humanitarian aid to the country during the winter of 1991/92.
We rehabilitated children's homes, and purchased and delivered emergency supplies of infant food and pharmaceuticals, to help orphans in Romania.
Crown Agents' humanitarian assistance is deployed to generate practical, sustainable help where it can give the most benefit to the greatest number of people. We matched the immediate cash support of Band Aid in 1985 with long-term development and rehabilitation projects in Ethiopia and Sudan.
Crown Agents helped to rehabilitate and reconstruct the second largest refugee camp in the West Bank, in Jenin, home to more than 14,000 Palestinians.
Fighting AIDS
Crown Agents works closely with social marketing organisations as well as donors to ensure that protection is popular as well as available as widely as possible. We are one of the world's biggest condom buyers, helping to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and other potentially fatal diseases. During the past sixteen years we have purchased more than two billion condoms.
Where HIV/AIDS has taken hold, we take steps to provide alleviation and remedy. During 2005 alone Crown Agents purchased more than $35million-worth of antiretroviral drugs and two million HIV tests.
Railways
Such has been Crown Agents' importance in the development of its client countries' railway systems that in 1863 its highest paid member of staff was the Principal Assistant for Railway Service.
As well as helping to build some of the world's major railway systems, Crown Agents assembled what was at the time one of the largest model railways in the world - for a signalling training school in Malaysia.
The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum houses many archival items donated by Crown Agents, including a collection of correspondence, reports and photographs on railways and harbours.
Energy
Our energy conservation department, set up more than twenty years ago, helped clients to identify and develop their resources to best effect, leading to projects in wind and wave energy systems.
Crown Agents' first became involved in nuclear power sixty years ago, when its engineers equipped themselves to offer advice and guidance to clients.
Our recent management of the construction of a spent nuclear fuel store in Murmansk was the largest completed project under the Global Partnership's programme and the first of its kind to comply fully with Russian and International Energy Authority Standards.
Our people and clients
During the past year Crown Agents has worked for clients in 147 countries. In 1833 it worked for just 13.
Crown Agents speaks more than seventy languages and three times as many dialects.
Postage stamps
In its first year of operation Crown Agents Stamp Bureau handled the production of 500 million stamps and the sale of 250 separate issues.
Crown Agents pioneered the philatelic watermark after its introduction in 1880 and its own 'Crown' mark has been used by 88 postal administrations (far more than have used any other single mark) including, in their time, Japan and Iraq.
Crown Agents held three priceless albums of stamps in their vaults (now in the British Library) containing a copy of every stamp issued for the British colonies since 1860, and also a collection of banknote specimens.
Crown Agents Stamp Bureau was sold in late 2007.
Banking and Finance
Crown Agents' Round Tables of the Small States Financial Forum, held annually just prior to each year's IMF/World Bank meetings, and in the same location, beginning in 1986, brought together in a uniquely informal environment finance ministers, central bank governors and senior finance officials from a large number of smaller states to discuss matters of mutual interest and concern.
Crown Agents was involved in the day to day supply and management of capital to its principals from 1860. Funds were raised on the London stock market and from a variety of other sources, including bank loans, overdrafts and loan conversions. Between 1860 and 1882 we floated 90 loans for crown colonies and self-governing colonies worth £31million. We also managed investments in the United Kingdom (by 1887 we managed 116 funds with a value of £4.16m) and organised the transfer of money to and from territories administered by Britain.
For more than 100 years Crown Agents has made payments to international students studying in the United Kingdom. We have helped over half a million students in this way to date.
Crown Agents Financial Services Limited was incorporated in 1987 and a year later its investment arm changed its name to Crown Agents Asset Management Limited. In 2005 the company became known as Crown Agents Investment Management Ltd.
Crown Agents Bank was granted authorised status as a bank in 1997, under the Banking Act 1987, by the Bank of England on the same date that Crown Agents transferred from the public to the private sector. Previously the bank had been subject to the 1979 Crown Agents Act.
Our clients' former employees retire to many parts of the world. Crown Agents handles pensions payments to more than 10, 000 pensioners in 50 countries.
Polar exploration
Crown Agents has maintained a long association with the southern polar region, designing and supplying prefabricated huts for the British Antarctic Survey and doing the same with postage stamps for the British Antarctic Territory. We provided 200 tons of supplies for the Royal Society International Geophysical Year Expedition to the South Antarctic to establish the Halley Bay research station.
RRS Discovery, the ship that carried Scott and Shackleton on their first, remarkably successful, journey to the Antarctic, was the last wooden three-masted ship to be built in Britain. She was laid up after World War I, but her fortunes were revived in 1923 when she was purchased by Crown Agents for further work in the Antarctic as a Royal Research Ship.
The postage stamps Crown Agents produced for the British Antarctic Territory are some of the most attractive, and popular, ever printed.
Books
Books published by Crown Agents during the past seventy years, many now out of print, are among those most keenly sought after by scholars and scientists. Flora of West Tropical Africa, for instance, remains a standard text for serious botanists. Its companion, Flora of Tropical East Africa, is equally famous, indispensable and now unfortunately hard to find.
Gertrude Bell, British writer, traveller, political analyst, administrator and archaeologist who, with T E Lawrence, was largely responsible for creating the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan and the modern state of Iraq, recorded these two events in letters to friends prior to her departure for Baghdad in 1925:
The Crown Agents have told me that that as an official they thought I should get a rebate on the tickets we bought...so I have told a charming gentleman...to make enquiries...
[Regarding her travel insurer] He was a man recommended by the Crown Agents so I suppose it's all right.
Crown Agents is frequently referenced in biographies and novels. One of its (fictional) convoy drivers plays a crucial and heroic role in Gerald Seymour's Heart of Danger. Its services to the British diplomatic corps are commemorated in Lawrence Durrell's (once-banned) The Black Book.
Supporting charities
CASCARE (Crown Agents Staff Charities Association for Recreation and Entertainment) organises events whose proceeds support international and local charities. During the past two years alone we have supported in this way more than 30 international charities, usually nominated and supported by our international office and project staff, and 33 UK charities, many of them close to our headquarters in Sutton and offices in Liverpool and Worthing and nominated by our UK-based colleagues.
Sport
Crown Agents regularly fields cricket and football teams against particular clients. We currently hold the Capel Cup, for cricketing prowess, fought over each year against Commonwealth Secretariat.
Other sporting events in our client countries raise money for local charities.
Our logo
Our present logo was first used in 1979, placing a stylized Crown against the characteristic slope of the letter A, for 'Agents'. In the same year our design-award-winning business stationery adopted a Goudy font, which we used for all our business stationery. Today we are still use Goudy, though in a sans serif form.
International offices
Crown Agents opened its first international representative office in Washington more than sixty years ago. Today, Washington is home to a fully-fledged satellite company, as are many of our clients' capitals. This year we are opening our newest office, in Sana'a, in Yemen.
Our second international office was opened in Japan, where our engineers based in Kobe inspected goods and equipment scheduled for many of our client countries.
Persistence
Nothing has ever stopped Crown Agents serving its clients. During the Second World War, staff regularly worked around the clock, "usually when ships had been destroyed, as the Colonies had to be supplied. Beds were set up in the basement" said one employee shortly afterwards, "and it was to our advantage as the food provided was really good".
Even today, on difficult consignments and in responding to urgent need, Crown Agents' people will work non-stop until the job is done.