The Air Registration Board: The Origin and Functions of the New Board in Relation to Civil Aviation

THE connexion is not at first sight apparent between a small, dark, saw‐dusty, no doubt dirty and inconvenient coffee‐house in the City of London, in the days of William and Mary, and a great modern office building, airy, spacious, centrally heated, electrically lighted, fitted with the most up‐to‐date labour‐saving equipment. There is, nevertheless, a quite definite connection. It was in such a little coffee‐house, then lately removed from Tower Street to Lombard Street, that Lloyd's Register of Shipping, in its first very primitive form as Edward Lloyd's newsletter, had its birth about the end of the seventeenth century. It is in such a great building, on the first floor of Brettenham House on the north side of Waterloo Bridge, that there has been cradled in our own days another lusty infant whose destiny it will probably be to render to aircraft the same service which Lloyd's Register has been rendering to shipping for two centuries or more.