This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
1993 Bishopsgate bombing article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
1993 Bishopsgate bombing has been listed as one of the Warfare good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the "
Did you know?" column on
December 3, 2007. The text of the entry was: Did you know ...that the
Bishopsgate bombing, mounted at a cost of £3,000 by the
Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1993, caused over £350M in damages and almost led to the financial collapse of
Lloyd's of London? | ||||||||||
Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the " On this day..." column on April 24, 2010, April 24, 2013, April 24, 2017, April 24, 2023, and April 24, 2024. |
Hello there, its a very good article with some very nice points and clear presentation. There are a couple of very small tweaks I think the article needs before promotion, but nothing which should take too long.
Otherwise a fine article interestingly presented. Once the above are addressed I'd be happy to make this a GA. Good Work-- Jackyd101 ( talk) 17:27, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
The article as written includes this statement: The subsequent payouts by insurance companies resulted in them suffering heavy losses causing a crisis in the industry, including the near-collapse of Lloyd's of London..
In 1993, Lloyd's actually made a nett profit of £225m.
If anyone wants to follow the trail:
It's idle journalism and although the citation is correct the source is not and should be removed.-- Major Bonkers (talk) 13:11, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm afraid the mistake is yours. If you read the link that you posted carefully, you will see that although it was published in 1993 (I assume that the reference to '1983' on the web-page is a typo) it refers to the 1990 year of account. This is because Lloyd's accounts three years in arrears (triennial accounting). Thus you have to be careful to distinguish between the 'pure year' or 'underwriting year of account' and the 'calendar year'. This is all explained, after a fashion here.
To give you some idea of a major loss, Piper Alpha, five years before this bomb, is generally reckoned to have cost Lloyd's, alone, directly £1.4bn. Two events occurred to increase the impact of this loss: (1) a negligent accounting system, accentuated by fraud, which led to that loss having to be reserved for upto 10 times its expected loss, and (2) failure of reinsurance. Other large losses over the 20h. century included the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Hurricane Betsy, asbestos litigation, and Hurricane Andrew in 1992. At the beginning of this century, we had 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (the results of which Lloyd's will declare next year). These are the major losses which affect Lloyd's and London insurers and, frankly, a £350m. loss was then and would be today a pretty piddling loss. Yes, it would be annoying, yes it would cost money (until rates were raised to repay the loss), but actually that's what insurers are there for. As a rule of thumb, inflation over the period means that in real terms the present value of the Bishopsgate bomb loss would be around £700m. - or approximately a 1/3d. of the cost of this summer's floods. If the IRA had wanted to increase the size of loss, they should have set it off during the week, with no warning, to kill a whole load of lawyers and merchant bankers. I imagine that would have doubled or tripled the size of the loss.-- Major Bonkers (talk) 18:36, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Both of you stop squabbling, you are both coming very close to breaching WP:CIVIL. Major Bonkers, WP:OR is quite clear that reliable sources are to be used unless another reliable source directly contradicts it, in which case the contradiction should be discussed (in a footnote if not in the article itself). No one here would, I am sure, suggest that the BBC is not a reliable source. Yes, there are clearly questions raised by the primary sources you have uncovered but they cannot be inserted into the article unless supported by reliable secondary sources which you have so far not provided. Should you provide these sources then your concerns can be represented in the article, but until you do then the talk page is the only page you can represent them. One Night in Hackney, do not be uncivil. Major Bonkers is free to raise problems like this on talk page without the risk of being verbally attacked as you have done above. Your response above was out of proportion and unpleasant. Both of you must calm down, step back and observe Wikipedia rules before continuing this debate. -- Jackyd101 ( talk) 20:34, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
The Greenslade reference is the only one that states that Henty ignored warnings (I have checked), so the edit of 19 January 2011 wasn't totally wrong. The text is “[NOTW editor Patsy Chapman] was devastated by the death of a photographer, Ed Henty, who was killed in April 1993 by an IRA bomb planted at Bishopsgate in the City of London. He was a freelance on assignmnent for the NoW and video film showed that he had ignored police warnings to enter a cordoned off area. Despite that, Chapman took his death personally.” Bowyer Bell doesn’t mention Henty at all so I’ve moved that one away from him. Ewx ( talk) 09:21, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!
-- JeffGBot ( talk) 02:00, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
Surely 1,200 kg is around one ton, not one kiloton? I am sure similar-sized explosions have occurred in Britain numerous times, in WWII and otherwise. I'll delete this section unless anyone objects. Dave w74 ( talk) 02:18, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
P/S: I found a quite reliable source which confirms Oppenheimer mistake, but at the same time ratifies the "small tactical weapon effect" See Jane's intelligence digest: the global early-warning service.-- Darius ( talk) 02:29, 2 January 2012 (UTC)
The comparison to a tactical nuclear weapon is wrong. It only came about because of the confusion between 1,200kg and 1 kiloton. A 1,200kg bomb is an order of magnitude smaller than the smallest nuclear weapon ever produced, and ten thousand times smaller than a more typical tactical nuke. The fact this error has been repeated by Jane's is immaterial, it's still plainly wrong and very misleading. A more honest comparison would be with a WW2 block buster conventional bomb Tom k&e ( talk) 17:00, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 2 external links on 1993 Bishopsgate bombing. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 12:01, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
Looking at the statement it seems to be about talks that took place earlier in the month, and doesn't refer directly or indirectly to events in London. Contemporary news reports don't seem to link the two - for example this report in the (Irish) Sunday Tribune puts it in the context of an interview given by a British politician the previous week, but doesn't mention the bombing at all. I was able to find one report that vaguely suggested the statement was issued a little earlier than the bombing ( Scotland on Sunday: "...struck as it was revealed that..."), but haven't been able to confirm this either way. Regardless, I think it seems fairly clear this statement wasn't intended to be taken as a response to the bombing, and nor was it interpreted as one at the time. I'll remove it from the article. Andrew Gray ( talk) 13:05, 24 April 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
1993 Bishopsgate bombing article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
1993 Bishopsgate bombing has been listed as one of the Warfare good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the "
Did you know?" column on
December 3, 2007. The text of the entry was: Did you know ...that the
Bishopsgate bombing, mounted at a cost of £3,000 by the
Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1993, caused over £350M in damages and almost led to the financial collapse of
Lloyd's of London? | ||||||||||
Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the " On this day..." column on April 24, 2010, April 24, 2013, April 24, 2017, April 24, 2023, and April 24, 2024. |
Hello there, its a very good article with some very nice points and clear presentation. There are a couple of very small tweaks I think the article needs before promotion, but nothing which should take too long.
Otherwise a fine article interestingly presented. Once the above are addressed I'd be happy to make this a GA. Good Work-- Jackyd101 ( talk) 17:27, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
The article as written includes this statement: The subsequent payouts by insurance companies resulted in them suffering heavy losses causing a crisis in the industry, including the near-collapse of Lloyd's of London..
In 1993, Lloyd's actually made a nett profit of £225m.
If anyone wants to follow the trail:
It's idle journalism and although the citation is correct the source is not and should be removed.-- Major Bonkers (talk) 13:11, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm afraid the mistake is yours. If you read the link that you posted carefully, you will see that although it was published in 1993 (I assume that the reference to '1983' on the web-page is a typo) it refers to the 1990 year of account. This is because Lloyd's accounts three years in arrears (triennial accounting). Thus you have to be careful to distinguish between the 'pure year' or 'underwriting year of account' and the 'calendar year'. This is all explained, after a fashion here.
To give you some idea of a major loss, Piper Alpha, five years before this bomb, is generally reckoned to have cost Lloyd's, alone, directly £1.4bn. Two events occurred to increase the impact of this loss: (1) a negligent accounting system, accentuated by fraud, which led to that loss having to be reserved for upto 10 times its expected loss, and (2) failure of reinsurance. Other large losses over the 20h. century included the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Hurricane Betsy, asbestos litigation, and Hurricane Andrew in 1992. At the beginning of this century, we had 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (the results of which Lloyd's will declare next year). These are the major losses which affect Lloyd's and London insurers and, frankly, a £350m. loss was then and would be today a pretty piddling loss. Yes, it would be annoying, yes it would cost money (until rates were raised to repay the loss), but actually that's what insurers are there for. As a rule of thumb, inflation over the period means that in real terms the present value of the Bishopsgate bomb loss would be around £700m. - or approximately a 1/3d. of the cost of this summer's floods. If the IRA had wanted to increase the size of loss, they should have set it off during the week, with no warning, to kill a whole load of lawyers and merchant bankers. I imagine that would have doubled or tripled the size of the loss.-- Major Bonkers (talk) 18:36, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Both of you stop squabbling, you are both coming very close to breaching WP:CIVIL. Major Bonkers, WP:OR is quite clear that reliable sources are to be used unless another reliable source directly contradicts it, in which case the contradiction should be discussed (in a footnote if not in the article itself). No one here would, I am sure, suggest that the BBC is not a reliable source. Yes, there are clearly questions raised by the primary sources you have uncovered but they cannot be inserted into the article unless supported by reliable secondary sources which you have so far not provided. Should you provide these sources then your concerns can be represented in the article, but until you do then the talk page is the only page you can represent them. One Night in Hackney, do not be uncivil. Major Bonkers is free to raise problems like this on talk page without the risk of being verbally attacked as you have done above. Your response above was out of proportion and unpleasant. Both of you must calm down, step back and observe Wikipedia rules before continuing this debate. -- Jackyd101 ( talk) 20:34, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
The Greenslade reference is the only one that states that Henty ignored warnings (I have checked), so the edit of 19 January 2011 wasn't totally wrong. The text is “[NOTW editor Patsy Chapman] was devastated by the death of a photographer, Ed Henty, who was killed in April 1993 by an IRA bomb planted at Bishopsgate in the City of London. He was a freelance on assignmnent for the NoW and video film showed that he had ignored police warnings to enter a cordoned off area. Despite that, Chapman took his death personally.” Bowyer Bell doesn’t mention Henty at all so I’ve moved that one away from him. Ewx ( talk) 09:21, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!
-- JeffGBot ( talk) 02:00, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
Surely 1,200 kg is around one ton, not one kiloton? I am sure similar-sized explosions have occurred in Britain numerous times, in WWII and otherwise. I'll delete this section unless anyone objects. Dave w74 ( talk) 02:18, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
P/S: I found a quite reliable source which confirms Oppenheimer mistake, but at the same time ratifies the "small tactical weapon effect" See Jane's intelligence digest: the global early-warning service.-- Darius ( talk) 02:29, 2 January 2012 (UTC)
The comparison to a tactical nuclear weapon is wrong. It only came about because of the confusion between 1,200kg and 1 kiloton. A 1,200kg bomb is an order of magnitude smaller than the smallest nuclear weapon ever produced, and ten thousand times smaller than a more typical tactical nuke. The fact this error has been repeated by Jane's is immaterial, it's still plainly wrong and very misleading. A more honest comparison would be with a WW2 block buster conventional bomb Tom k&e ( talk) 17:00, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 2 external links on 1993 Bishopsgate bombing. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 12:01, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
Looking at the statement it seems to be about talks that took place earlier in the month, and doesn't refer directly or indirectly to events in London. Contemporary news reports don't seem to link the two - for example this report in the (Irish) Sunday Tribune puts it in the context of an interview given by a British politician the previous week, but doesn't mention the bombing at all. I was able to find one report that vaguely suggested the statement was issued a little earlier than the bombing ( Scotland on Sunday: "...struck as it was revealed that..."), but haven't been able to confirm this either way. Regardless, I think it seems fairly clear this statement wasn't intended to be taken as a response to the bombing, and nor was it interpreted as one at the time. I'll remove it from the article. Andrew Gray ( talk) 13:05, 24 April 2024 (UTC)