Meet the woman who was in on the ground floor with Fred Reiss during the infancy of the captive management industry. She was there as the terminology was being shaped for the industry, terminology that is now heard every day in the insurance business.

A director of 12 captive insurance subsidiaries, vice president of 25 captives, an officer of nine others and general manager of two, Mrs. Anna Summers is also senior vice president and director of International Risk Management (Bermuda) Ltd. She's also the corporate secretary of the overall group, which has offices all over the world and about 300 captives. The company provides a list of other consulting services, too, from offices in the US and Europe.

She is vice president of Hopewell International Insurance Ltd., a reinsurance pool for captive insurance companies. And that's not bad for a woman who first walked through the door at the Belvedere Building office of IRM as a secretary some 31 years ago. And it's not bad for a high school graduate who had no formal education in insurance and no college experience.

She needs no prompting to tell you that at 56, she is just where she wants to be. It is where she has come from that may surprise you.

She was born in India to a family that had been there for generations, since the last century, but was forced out after Partition in 1947, when she was 12 years old.

Mrs. Summers' family was part of the invasion of Europeans after British control of India was established in 1858. India was divided into two nations in 1947, when it gained its independence from Britain. It led to the formation of Pakistan, although not without significant bloodshed.

Her father, of Italian descent, was a Colonel in the Rajputana Rifles, but after India's independence and the split between India and Pakistan, Europeans had to leave. Five years later, coming out of high school, she worked on a Middlesex US airforce base in Ruislip, for the University of Maryland, foregoing an opportunity to attend university, for which she admits regrets.

The base was the headquarters of the Third Air Force, for whom she worked for a short time after being employed by the university.

She began working in London, in a public relations firm that specialised in political work.

"We did a lot of political work, such as when the Queen was visiting a steel mill we represented. We did all the public relations and arranged to get the Queen to make the visit. Then there was political work, with getting things through the House of Commons. One of our clients was ATV, the Granada people, and they wanted to get the line definitions changed on televisions. There were various Members of Parliament who sat on our board. It was quite interesting work.'' The company office was just around the corner from Berkeley Square and the Bermuda Department of Tourism office. She was one of many people who wandered past the window one day after weeks of English rain, probably one of many who saw a new poster of Coral Beach Club going up.

She only needed a brochure to be convinced to write to Bermuda. Mr. George Wardman Sr. was coincidentally looking for help.

She arrived in Bermuda 34 years ago, prompted partly by a 10 bet with a colleague that she could put dreary English weather behind her in less than a month...a bet she won.

She was working in the hospitality industry for $30 a month and room and board. She worked at Coral Beach and often at Horizons.

"They moved me around, but I did a lot of work at Horizons. You had to be jack of all trades and do everything. We used to have people coming in on the late night flights coming in at one or two o'clock in the morning. I'd be the only person waiting to greet them. And two o'clock in the morning you could see me lugging bags down the hill to the cottages for the guests.'' After marrying policeman Mr. John Mulholland, she worked for the chairman of Mack Trucks, when that company located here for a short period.

She fell into the insurance industry totally by accident. It was her neighbour who got her a job as secretary to Fred Reiss in August of 1964. She remembered: "There were just five of us in the office. We now have offices all over the world. At our high point here, we had about 75 people a few years ago. We are down to about 50-odd, now.

"The captive concept Fred started was quite simple. He had a small office in Youngstown, Ohio, but decided that the best place to be was offshore. He started out with about three clients. I started with him five months later.'' IRM was the first independent captive manager, pioneering many systems and techniques which are standard throughout the industry today. She was a part of that process. Within the first few years, the then Mrs. Mulholland moved from the secretarial area to the administration of captive accounts.

In 1972, she was appointed company secretary. As an account representative, she headed the reinsurance and underwriting department. IRM's client base expanded from three captives in the early 1960's, to 80 captives by the mid-eighties. She was involved in the management of all Bermuda domiciled client companies.

In 1976, she was assistant vice president, and vice president by 1980. In 1988, following the acquisition of 70 percent of the company by Swiss Re, she joined the board of directors of the newly formed International Risk Management (Bermuda) Ltd.

The company changed from just captive management to also risk management consulting, and engineering loss prevention and loss control.

"It was all so exciting to be there in the early days, when this all started out. It has changed a lot. But in those days we were on the cutting edge. I was working with Fred and the general manager, Phillippe Coquillon, a dyed-in-the-wool insurance man.'' She remembers the large brokers trying, in vain, to stop the growth of IRM.

"You see Fred owned the company. We were the only independent management company from 25 years. Everyone else was owned by a broker, and in the early years, I remember very well, the brokers tried to kill us. They did everything they could possibly do to crush this little, rising concept. They said it would never work. The big guys fought the concept and fought Fred, but he persevered. Of course, eventually they realised there was money to be made and they jumped on the bandwagon, opening their own management companies to manage captives.'' She has quietly watched the success of a number of people in the industry, people like Mr. Brian Hall, a director of Johnson & Higgins and Mr. Robin Spencer-Arscott, head of Aon Risk Services (Bermuda) Ltd.

Mr. Hall, the chairman of the Government's Insurance Advisory Committee, was once an accountant at IRM, getting a prodding from Mrs. Summers and others to strike out on his own.

Mrs. Summers shares concerns about the cost of doing business in Bermuda and said that the new corporate services tax announced in the Budget would get passed on to international companies, sooner or later.

She sees it as a further erosion of the benefits of being in Bermuda, although she still sings the Island's praises.

A Bermudian since 1974, she has Italian, Scottish and Irish blood. It is still India she speaks of longingly. She says that many Bermuda flowers remind her of her native land.

She looks forward to retiring within the next several years. It will give her more time to garden, her favourite hobby.

"You reach a time in your life when you are no longer young. I guess I'm middle-aged now. You wonder what's ahead. I don't want to be the kind of person who is going to walk into the job until they drop dead. I want to have some time to relax and do something I haven't had a chance to do.'' She hasn't had a chance to go back to India, and that may be on the top of her list.

TOP OF THE INSURANCE TREE -- Mrs. Anna Summers.