This article discusses possible targets for reform of the Marine Insurance Act 1906, namely s 53 and the responsibility of the broker for payment of premium; the tension between the basis for the old fiction that the broker is deemed to have paid the insurer and the formulation of the statutory provision, Chapman v. Kadirga; the effect of the default clause in the context of the fiction, Prentis Donegan v. Leeds and Heath Lambert v. Sociedad de Corretaje de Seguros; the effect of the fiction upon the date when the broker’s right to an indemnity from his principal arose; and the questionable need for the provision to remain in the future, as well as its non-application to non-marine insurance.

It is, for me, a somewhat daunting privilege to have been asked to deliver the 24th Donald O’May lecture in the centenary year of the Marine Insurance Act. Charles Debattista generously said: “You can talk about anything you like … .” But I recognized, as did Donald O’May, when invited to give the Fourth Annual Lecture, that this was a dangerous offer. Unlike Donald, I did not take Charles at his word. Indeed, I knew that he didn’t really mean it, when he added by way of apparent afterthought (but, in reality, by way of diktat) “ … but it might be nice if you were to say something about the Act”. Since my judicial relationship with the 1906 Act has been limited to a brief encounter with ss 27 and 28, this was a somewhat forbidding prospect.