ABSTRACT
When I started, the broker was very much the ‘post office’, literally taking the enquiry from the would-be charterer and asking the airline for a quote and passing the quote back to the client and retaining a commission for his pains. In those days the centre of the broking world was the Baltic Exchange; beyond that in cities like Hamburg and Rotterdam there were other brokers. There was a reason – a large part of the work of a broker was the movement of urgent ships spares for a vessel that had broken down. Of course, there were also passenger requests – some for ships crews and others for what was still a travel industry, although still in its infancy.
