DOCUMENTS going back more than 150 years have shown ‘compensation culture’ is nothing new - with some bizarre examples in Lancashire.

Papers unearthed by the insurance firm Aviva revealed an amazing catalogue of customers' accident claims dating back to the 1860s.

Victorian life was full of hazards, and much like today, where there was pain there was a claim.

A coachbuilder from Blackburn who fell over a football was paid £30.

A dyer from Accrington received £1,000 when he fell into a vat of boiling liquor.

And a grocer from Lancashire, who slipped while playing the children’s game blind man's buff, was paid £15 in 1878.

Anna Stone, archivist at Aviva, formerly Norwich Union, has spent months poring over the documents for an exhibition at the insurer's headquarters in Norwich.

She said: “I have to say I do have some personal favourites from across the country that stand out for their sheer peculiarity, like the vicar who fell while playing a game of leap frog, or the gentleman who missed a dog while trying to kick it and struck a sofa instead, injuring his big toe.”

The personal accident policies covered a wide range of professions and groups, from rail passengers and fox hunters to surgeons and solicitors.

The records also revealed that by 1958, wartime Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill was the longest-standing customer on the company's personal accident books.

But unlike many of his contemporaries, he never made a claim.

Rob Townend, director of property claims at Aviva, said: “Even in prim and proper Victorian times people were still tripping up kerbs, falling on ice and slipping on cobbled streets, albeit back then discarded orange peel appeared to be the major culprit.

“The supposedly more traditional slipping hazard, the banana skin, makes just one appearance in our archives, back in 1904.”