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April 10, 2026
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"The Labour Party, we all know, have fallen head over heels in love with science. The very mention of automation or computers brings a gleam into their eyes and a glow to their cheeks. They promise to favour automative re-equipment and computerisation. The irony is that these same people are dedicated to destroying the largest and most wonderful computer the world has ever known. This is the computer into which are fed the whole time millions of facts not only from all over this country but from all round the globe. The answers tumble out of it in an unending stream: it tells us all the time what it is most advantageous to import or export; it tells us what the relative benefits are of the imported article and the "home-produced substitute"; it tell us what can be produced "economically and competitively" and in what quantity and where. This wonderful silent mechanismâdare I say, this "automative" mechanism?âof the market the Labour Party want to smash, in order to install in its placeâwhat? The pathetic figure of a President of the Board of Trade going through the old Trade Returns with his officials and trying to reproduceâno, to improve uponâthe result of millions of acts of judgment made continuously throughout the economy by those who, in total, have available far more data than the Board of Trade ever dreamt of."
"It is no accident that the Labour Party of 1964 should share this craving for autarchy, for economic self-sufficiency, with the pre-war Fascist rĂŠgimes and the present-day Communist states. They are all at heart totalitarian."
"Wages, profits, prices are determined, always have been determined, and always will be determined until we go Communist, by the marketâby supply and demand working through the market. While we tie ourselves into knots trying to invent non-market criteria for our commissions to use, the market is there, noiselessly, efficiently, irresistibly doing the job for us all the time. Irresistiblyâyes, and there's the rub. For there is one thing outside the market in a modern economy, and that is money itself. Governments can and do satisfy the demand for money, raise and lower the supply of money. In short, governments have the power to control money, which is so largely their own creation. If governments allow monetary demand to increase faster than productivity, the market will not stop the process, because it cannot stop it. The market will simply go on determining wages, profits and prices in ever higher monetary termsâuntil something busts."
"The duty of every management is to conduct its business, including the price policy of the business, in the way which in the opinion of the management is likely to maximise the return on the capital invested in the business. A management which does not do this betrays more than the shareholders in the business; it betrays the employees and the nation as a whole. The national interest lies in all the nation's resources being put to the most advantageous use possible. Anywhere outside a Communist stateâand perhaps the time is coming when even that qualification will be superfluousâthis is done by seeking to secure the largest possible return on capital. To maximise profits is for management not an optional exercise or a work of supererogation; it is management's basic duty. If private enterprise in a capitalist society is not trying to do that, there is no point in private enterpriseânor, for that matter, in a capitalist society."
"The people who founded the Working Men's College understood all this very well. The working men for whom this institution was created had a thirst for education in a way we can scarcely imagine today. It was not to pass examinations and qualify for better wages nor to raise themselves into a higher social classâthough these are respectable ambitions and no doubt many of those early students felt themâbut to get at knowledge for its own sake because without it their existence would be less worth to them, that the working classes demanded education and got it. This was part of the good life, and they were not to be denied it. To read and write, to borrow books and debate, to study the sciences and learn a foreign tongueâall these were so many steps not of economic advancement but of human dignity."
""All men", said Aristotle, "by nature desire to know." The pursuit of truth, the effort to comprehend, arrange, interpret some aspect or other of the universe we perceive, is an activity of humanity which justifies, rewards and motivates itself. The study of something for its own sake, for the sake of knowing, understanding, grasping it and for nothing else, is an essential characteristic of education, lower or higher, though more obviously of higher education. The content of education must therefore be that which men would wish to know for its own sake."
"We exist to say to the nation that its future, economically and socially, will best be what the people themselves make it; that the possibilities which lie open to their ingenuity, effort and initiative are wider far than any government could conceive, still less bring to pass; and that the duty of government is to help, but never constrain, the free development of the nation's resources and talents. We offer neither servitude, nor the safety, ease and irresponsibility of servitude. We offer freedom, and the risks, the dangers, the uncertainties, the untidinesses, but also the responsibilities and the opportunities which are inseparable from it."
"Society is much more than a collection of individuals acting together, even through the complex and subtle mechanisms of the free economy, for material advantage. It has an existence of its own; it thinks and feels; it looks inwards, as a community to its own members; it looks outwards as a nation, into a world populated by other societies, like or unlike itself. The Tory Party, with its deep sense of history, has always concerned itself especially with these two aspects of society, and I believe that the British people would instinctively and rightly reject a philosophy which offered them just an economic machine, however efficient and successful."
"The Tory principle is the opposite: to trust the people. This has been expressed in practical terms in our actions in the last twelve years. We dismantled and abolished the economic controls, licensing, rationing and powers of direction inherited from the war and post-war Socialism; we restored a market for savings and abandoned the rigging of artificial rates of interest, which had been a fruitful cause of inflation; we imposed on the nationalised industries, apart from those restored to the free economy, the discipline of making comparable profits with what similar investments elsewhere would produce, and we undertook a major surgical operation on the railways to enable them also to earn profits; in our trade policy we sought the widest and most competitive markets for our exports... in taxation policy we have aimed at leaving to the individual earner and the individual firm the free disposal of as large a proportion as possible of their income or profits; finally there is our determined and increasingly successful effort to keep for our money that stability of value which enables people to take their own decisions about spending and saving in terms which have a meaning."
"The collective wisdom and the collective will of the nation resides not in any little Whitehall clique but in the whole mass of the peopleâin the producers, listening to the voice of the customer at home and abroad; in the savers and investors, using their eyes and their brains to lay out their resources to best advantage; in the consumers themselves, expressing through all the complex nervous system of the market their wishes, their needs, their expectations. In short, the true national economic plan is being made all the time by the very people and institutions which the intellectual arrogance of the Socialist affects to despise. "Under Tory free enterprise" says Labour's policy, "no limit is set to the amount of our national resources and intellectual talent consumed by the popular newspaper, the glossy magazine, the cinema, commercial television and the advertising industry." What a world of contempt for the ordinary man and woman breathes in that haughty sentence!"
"A great part of the efforts of a civilised community are devoted to purposes which are not economic at all, but humane and human, altruistic if you please. Look at our vast expenditure...upon the National Health Service. I would scorn to justify itâeven if the assertion were trueâon the basis that somehow it promoted economic and productive efficiency. It is completely, triumphantly, justified on the simple ground that a civilised, compassionate nation can do no other. It, and all the other social services, is the corporate recognition by the community of its common obligation to its individual members."
"We believe that a society where men are free to take economic decisions for themselvesâto decide how they will apply their incomes, their savings, their effortsâis the only kind of society where men will remain free in other respects, free in speech, thought and action. It is no accident that wherever the state has taken economic decision away from the citizen, it has deprived him of his other liberties as well. It is not that there was some peculiarity in the character of the Russians or the other Communist nations which predisposed them to servitude. It is that state Socialism is incompatible with individual liberty of thought, speech and action. You may choose one or the other: you cannot have them both."
"We are a capitalist party. We believe in capitalism. When we look at the astonishing material achievements of the West, at our own high and rising physical standard of living, we see these things as the result, not of compulsion or government action or the superior wisdom of a few, but of that system of competition and free enterprise, rewarding success and penalising failure, which enables every individual to participate by his private decisions in shaping the future of his society. Because we believe this, we honour profit competitively earned; we respect the ownership of property, great or small; we accept the differences of wealth and income without which competition and free enterprise are impossible. If there is one single explanation of the contrast which exists today between the countries we call "underdeveloped" and the advanced societies of the West, that explanation is that these societies have enjoyed for generations the benefits of capitalist free enterprise, whereas the "underdeveloped" countries have not."
"I consider there is no surer touchstone of the civilisation of a community than the manner in which it cares for its mentally afflicted members; and among that group those whose mental affliction is of a kind which peculiarly excites fear and aversion are the most acid test of all. It is incumbent on the Minister of Health to see to it that this country has no reason to be ashamed of its performance in that test."
"Then, about the same time, there was the detonation of Sartor Resartus... It was not only the revelation of Carlyle; it was headlong precipitation into the ocean of German reading and German thinking, where I was destined to voyage long after romantic and uncritical enthusiasm had perished for ever with the rise of Nazism... The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with booksâconfess it I mustâhave been with German books... there was Schopenhauer, carried up and down daily for months on the Sydney trams. There was Lessing, HĂślderlin even; above all, and above all, there was Goethe. Was, and still is; for a spare 10s. note is as likely to this day to be exchanged for a volume of Goethe as for anything else that sits on a book-seller's shelves."
"[T]he memory of big experiences in the world of books is flavoured with the tang of the physical setting in which they happened. I shall never be able to dissociate Ecce Homo from the old flying-boat route to the Antipodes... Or again, the long avenues of thought that have led from Frazer's Golden Bough seem to start physically in front of the dining-room fireplace of the home where as a boy of 15 I sat hour after hour absorbing first the one-volume abridgement and then the three-volume edition. I cannot imagine how different my mental and religious life would have been if the impact of J. G. Frazer had come at another time or not at all."
"In my early twenties I read all Nietzscheânot just the main works but the minor works as well, all of them, and every scrap of published correspondence. Nietzsche alone of men out of books has a share in the loyalty and affectionate gratitude which otherwise belongs only to living teachers."
"If the activities of the health services are thus neither justifiable by economic calculation, nor assessable in comparative statistical terms, these are characteristics which they share with all the highest activities of man."
"For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history... Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations, appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned. The deepest instinct of the Englishmanâhow the word âinstinctâ keeps forcing itself in again and again!âis for continuity; he never acts more freely nor innovates more boldly than when he most is conscious of conserving or even of reacting. From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation, its laws, its literature, its freedom, its self-discipline... And this continuous and continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles and shamrocks, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, for all the titles grafted upon it here and elsewhere, âher other realms and territoriesâ, Headships of Commonwealths, and what not. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history."
"One thing above all they assuredly would not forget; Lancastrian or Yorkist, squire or lord, priest or layman; they would point to the kingship of England, and its emblems everywhere visible. The immemorial arms, gules, three leopards or, though quartered late with France, azure, three fleurs de lis argent; and older still, the crown itself and that sceptred awe, in which Saint Edward the Englishman still seemed to sit in his own chair to claim the allegiance of all the English. Symbol, yet source of power; person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly England's. The unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries."
"Thus our generation is one which comes home again from years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English, generations before the âexpansion of Englandâ, who felt no country but this to be their own... Backward travels our gaze, beyond the grenadiers and the philosophers of the eighteenth century, beyond the pikemen and the preachers of the seventeenth, back through the brash adventurous days of the first Elizabeth and the hard materialism of the Tudors, and there at last we find them, or seem to find them, in many a village church, beneath the tall tracery of a perpendicular East window and the coffered ceiling of the chantry chapel. From brass and stone, from line and effigy, their eyes look out at us, and we gaze into them, as if we would win some answer from their inscrutable silence. âTell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we in our time may know how to hold it fast.â What would they say? They would speak to us in our own English tongue, the tongue made for telling truth in, tuned already to songs that haunt the hearer like the sadness of spring. They would tell us of that marvellous land, so sweetly mixed of opposites in climate that all the seasons of the year appear there in their greatest perfection... They would tell us too of a palace near the great city which the Romans built at a ford of the River Thames...to which men resorted out of all England to speak on behalf of their fellows, a thing called âParliamentâ, and from that hall went out their fellows with fur-trimmed gowns and strange caps on their heads, to judge the same judgments, and dispense the same justice, to all the people of England."
"That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the Imperial fleet from the waters of Spitheadâin the eye of history, no doubt as inevitably as âNineveh and Tyreâ, as Rome and Spain. And yet England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country. So we today at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself."
"There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countrysideâthe asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault."
"I would say that it is a fearful doctrine, which must recoil upon the heads of those who pronounce it, to stand in judgment on a fellow human-being and to say, "Because he was such-and-such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow." ... Nor can we ourselves pick and choose where and in what parts of the world we shall use this or that kind of standard. We cannot say, "We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home." We have not that choice to make. We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere. All Government, all influence of man upon man, rests upon opinion. What we can do in Africa, where we still govern and where we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility."
"There is no possibility of arguing that the present composition of the House of Lords can be justified either by logic or by reference to any preconceived constitutional theory. It is the result of a long, even a tortuous, process of historical evolution. Its authority rests upon the acceptance of the result, handed down to our time, of that historical process. It is the authority of acceptance, the authority of what Burke called "prescription". The House of Lords shares that characteristic with many of our most cherished and important institutions. Trial by jury, for example, is not to be justified in logic; it does not rest upon statute; it came to us by a strange historical evolution out of the sworn witnesses of a neighbourhood. Neither logic nor statute nor theory is a basis of that other hereditary institution by which it comes about that a young woman holds sway over countless millions. The authority of this House itself does not, in the last resort, rest upon any logic in the principles upon which we are formed or elected: it rests upon the acceptance by the nation of an institution the history of which cannot be divorced or torn out of the context of the history of the nation itself."
"Perhaps the most insidious danger today is the notion, which many accept unreflectingly and others propagate sedulously, that a stable value of money is incompatible with economic progress or with a high level of employment. Theory and experience alike refute such a notion. I have already reminded you that throughout sixty years of Britain's golden age of expansion in every sphere, the value of money remained virtually constant. So far from it being true that inflation and a high level of employment hang together, the fact is that, for a nation in Britain's situation, dependent on world trade and commercial dealings with other countries for its livelihood, continued inflation is the greatest threat to full employment. It would be a tragedy if the Government or the nation allowed themselves to be diverted by these false fears from the single-minded pursuit of plain and elementary duty: the duty to secure and preserve the integrity and stability of the medium of exchange, on which depend all the economic dealings of man with man."
"I believe a second factor which has weighed heavily in this matter is the attitude, or supposed attitude, of the United States. I confess that I am not greatly moved by this. Whatever may be the attitude of the American Government and public to the United Kingdom as such, my view of American policy over the last decade has been that it has been steadily and relentlessly directed towards the weakening and the destruction of the links which bind the British Empire together. [Cyril Osborne: "No!"] We can watch the events as they unfold and place our own interpretation on them. My interpretation is that the United States has for this country, considered separately, a very considerable economic and strategic use but that she sees little or no strategic use or economic value in the British Empire or the British Commonwealth as it has existed and as it still exists. Against the background I ask the House to consider the evidence of advancing American imperialism in this area from which they are helping to eliminate us."
"We describe a Monarch by designating the territory of which he is Monarch. To say that he is Monarch of a certain territory and his other realms and territories is as good as to say that he is king of his kingdom. We have perpetrated a solecism in the title we are proposing to attach to our Sovereign and we have done so out of what might almost be called an abject desire to eliminate the expression "British." The same desire has been feltâthough not by any means throughout the British Commonwealthâto eliminate this word before the term "Commonwealth." ... Why is it, then, that we are so anxious, in the description of our own Monarch, in a title for use in this country, to eliminate any reference to the seat, the focus and the origin of this vast aggregation of territories? Why is it that this "teeming womb of royal Kings," as Shakespeare called it, wishes now to be anonymous?"
"The continuance of India within the British Empire is essential to the Empire's existence and is consequently a paramount interest both of the United Kingdom and of the Dominions...for strategic purposes there is no half-way house between an India fully within the Empire and an India totally outside it...Should it once be admitted or proved that Indians cannot govern themselves except by leaving the Empire – in other words, that the necessary goal of political development for the most important section of His Majesty's non-European subjects is independence and not Dominion status – then the logically inevitable outcome will be the eventual and probably the rapid loss to the Empire of all its other non-European parts. It would extinguish the hope of a lasting union between "white" and "coloured" which the conception of a common subjectship to the King-Emperor affords and to which the development of the Empire hitherto has given the prospect of leading...In discussion of the wealth of India it is usual to forget the principal item, which is four hundred millions of human beings, for the most part belonging to races neither unintelligent nor slothful...[British policy should be to] create the preconditions of democracy and self-government by as soon as possible making India socially and economically a modern state."
"You have never expressed any decided political opinions, and indeed I do not know if or how far you assent to the proposition that almost unlimited sacrifices of individual life and happiness are worth while to preserve the unique structure of power of which the keystone (the only conceivable and indispensable keystone) is the English Crown. I for my part find it the nearest thing in the world to an absolute (as opposed to a relative) value: it is like the outer circle that bound my universe, so that I cannot conceive anything beyond it."
"The thought struck me for the first time today that our duty to our country may not terminate with the peace â apart, I mean, from the duty of begetting children to bear arms for the King in the next generation. To be more explicit, I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were; and if the present hostilities do not actually merge into a war with our terrible enemy, America, it will remain for those of us who have the necessary knowledge and insight to do what we can where we can to help Britain be victorious again in her next crisis."
"It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors."
"I do here in the most solemn and bitter manner curse the Prime Minister of England for having cumulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy which our accurst "love of peace" can lower us are unfathomable."
"The world has recently been treated for nearly a decade to the unusual spectacle of a great empire deliberately taking every possible step to secure its own destruction, because its citizens were so obsessed by prejudice, or incapable of thinking for themselves, as never to perform the few logical steps necessary for proving that they would shortly be involved in a guerre Ă outrance, which could be neither averted nor escaped."
"[In Italy, when every sentence is liable to be scanned for traces of anti-Fascist sentiment] it is obviously safer to begin by choosing a more congenial subject than a free Athens or a free Rome. In Germany the effect of National-Socialism has been the opposite. Racial doctrines and political antipathy to the whole Roman Empire and its cognate ideas have had the result of discouraging study of the Italic peoples and of Rome, the mistress of the world. On the other hand, a peculiar kinship has been detected between the ancient Greeks and modern Germans. Not only the Greek civilization in general, but Thucydides in particular, has proved exceptionally congenial. The intensely political outlook of Thucydides may be made serviceable to a doctrine which asserts the absolute dominion of the State over every phase of individual existence; and, as the more striking figures of Caesar and Augustus had already been captured as prototypes by Mussolini, Hitler might well be made to look very like Pericles—or Pericles, rather, to look like Hitler."
"The customer pays his money and gets a ticket. He cannot refuse it. He cannot get the money back. He may protest to the machine, even swear at it. But it will remain unmoved."
"Lord Denning was probably the greatest English judge of modern times. He combined a love of liberty with a passion for justice. His life and work will provide inspiration for generations to come."
"[Denning is] certainly the most interesting and possibly the most important English judge of the twentieth century."
"Our common law owes its strength to the creative genius of judges who, by obeying their own doctrines and principles, have generally proved more competent to untie the knots of human conflict than has Parliament. The greatest recent example of this creative genius â Lord Denning â did not read law at university, and displays in his judgments the broad education and culture which, by helping him to enter imaginatively into the conflict before him, have given substance and direction to his strikingly novel interpretations of the law."
"A St George of the law courts."
"Lord Denning was the best known and best loved judge of this, or perhaps any, generation. He was a legend in his own lifetime."
"At one time there was a black-out of any development of administrative law. The curtains were drawn across to prevent the light coming in. The remedy of certiorari was hedged about with all sorts of technical limitations. It did not give a remedy when inferior tribunals went wrong, but only when they went outside their jurisdiction altogether. The black-out started in 1841 with Reg. v. Bolton (1841) 1 Q.B. 66 and became darkest in 1922, Rex v. Nat Bell Liquors Ltd. [1922] 2 A.C. 128. It was not relieved until 1952, Rex v. Northumberland Compensation Appeal Tribunal, Ex parte Shaw [1952] 1 K.B. 338. Whilst the darkness still prevailed, we let in some light by means of a declaration. The most notable cases were Barnard v. National Dock Labour Board [1953] 2 Q.B. 18 and Anisminic Ltd. v. Foreign Compensation Commission [1969] 2 A.C. 147. I sat in the preliminary hearings of both of them. We allowed each of those cases to go forward. It was because otherwise persons would be without a remedy for an injustice: see Barnard v. National Dock Labour Board [1953] 2 Q.B. 18, 43 and the Anisminic case [1969] 2 A.C. 147, 231B-C In effect it was only by leave that the action for a declaration was allowed to proceed."
"In 1977 the black-out was lifted. It was done by R.S.C., Ord. 53. The curtains were drawn back. The light was let in. Our administrative law became well-organised and comprehensive. It enabled the High Court to review the decisions of all inferior courts and tribunals and to quash them when they went wrong. And what is more, it enabled the High Court to award damages and grant declarations. No longer is it necessary to bring an ordinary action to obtain damages or declarations. It can all be done by judicial review. This new remedy (by judicial review) has made the old remedy (by action at law) superfluous."
"The statute in section 3(1) contains a definition of a âracial groupâ. It means a âgroup of persons defined by reference to colour, race, nationality or ethnic or national origins.â That definition is very carefully framed. Most interesting is that it does not include religion or politics or culture. You can discriminate for or against Roman Catholics as much as you like without being in breach of the law. You can discriminate for or against Communists as much as you please, without being in breach of the law. You can discriminate for or against the âhippiesâ as much as you like, without being in breach of the law. But you must not discriminate against a man because of his colour or of his race or of his nationality, or of âhis ethnic or national origins.â ⌠You must remember that it is perfectly lawful to discriminate against groups of people to whom you object - so long as they are not a racial group. You can discriminate against the Moonies or the Skinheads or any other group which you dislike or to which you take objection. No matter whether your objection to them is reasonable or unreasonable, you can discriminate against them - without being in breach of the law.â}}"
"This is a case of a barmaid who was badly bitten by a big dog."
"In summertime village cricket is a delight to everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in the County of Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is kept short. It has a good clubhouse for the players and seats for the onlookers. The village team plays there on Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings they practice while the light lasts. Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play anymore. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket. This newcomer has built, or has had built for him, a house on the edge of the cricket ground which four years ago was a field where cattle grazed. The animals did not mind the cricket, but now this adjoining field has been turned into a housing estate. The newcomer bought one of the houses on the edge of the cricket field. No doubt the open space was a selling point. Now he complains that when a batsman hits a six the ball has been known to land in his garden or on or near his house. His wife has got so upset about it that they always go out at weekends. They do not go into the garden when cricket is being played. They say that this is intolerable. So they asked the judge to stop the cricket being played. And the judge, much against his will, has felt that he must order the cricket to be stopped: with the consequence, I suppose, that the Lintz Cricket Club will disappear. The cricket ground will be turned to some other use. I expect for houses or a factory. The young men will turn to other things instead of cricket. The whole village will be much poorer. And all this because of a newcomer who has just bought a house there next to the cricket ground."
"To some this may appear to be a small matter, but to Mr. Harry Hook, it is very important. He is a street trader in the Barnsley Market. He has been trading there for some six years without any complaint being made against him; but, nevertheless, he has now been banned from trading in the market for life. All because of a trifling incident. On Wednesday, October 16, 1974, the market was closed at 5:30. So were all the lavatories, or 'toilets' as they are now called. They were locked up. Three quarters of an hour later, at 6:20, Harry Hook had an urgent call of nature. He wanted to relieve himself. He went into a side street near the market and there made water, or 'urinated' as it is now said. No one was about except one or two employees of the council, who were cleaning up. They rebuked him. He said: 'I can do it here if I like'. They reported him to a security officer who came up. The security officer reprimanded Harry Hook. We are not told the words used by the security officer. I expect they were in language which street traders understand. Harry Hook made an appropriate reply. Again, we are not told the actual words, but it is not difficult to guess. I expect it was an emphatic version of 'You be off'. At any rate, the security officer described them as words of abuse. Touchstone would say that the security officer gave the 'reproof valiant' and Harry Hook gave the 'counter-check quarrelsome'; As You Like It, Act V, Scene IV. On Thursday morning the security officer reported the incident. The market manager thought it was a serious matter. So he saw Mr. Hook the next day, Friday, October 18. Mr. Hook admitted it and said he was sorry for what had happened. The market manager was not satisfied to leave it there. He reported the incident to the chairman of the amenity services committee of the Council. He says that the chairman agreed that 'staff should be protected from such abuse'. That very day the market manager wrote a letter to Mr. Hook, banning him from trading in the market."
"Broadchalke is one of the most pleasing villages in England. Old Herbert Bundy, the defendant, was a farmer there. His home was at Yew Tree Farm. It went back for 300 years. His family had been there for generations. It was his only asset. But he did a very foolish thing. He mortgaged it to the bank. Up to the very hilt. Not to borrow money for himself, but for the sake of his son. Now the bank have come down on him. They have foreclosed. They want to get him out of Yew Tree Farm and to sell it. They have brought this action against him for possession. Going out means ruin for him. He was granted legal aid. His lawyers put in a defence. They said that, when he executed the charge to the bank he did not know what he was doing: or at any rate that the circumstances were such that he ought not to be bound by it. At the trial his plight was plain. The judge was sorry for him. He said he was a "poor old gentleman." He was so obviously incapacitated that the judge admitted his proof in evidence. He had a heart attack in the witness-box. Yet the judge felt he could do nothing for him. There is nothing, he said, "which takes this out of the vast range of commercial transactions." He ordered Herbert Bundy to give up possession of Yew Tree Farm to the bank. Now there is an appeal to this court. The ground is that the circumstances were so exceptional that Herbert Bundy should not be held bound."
"In 1966 there was a Scripture Rally in Trafalgar Square. A widower, Mr. Honick, went to it. He was about 63. A widow, Mrs. Rawnsley, also went. She was about 60. He went up to her and introduced himself. He was not much to look at. "He looked like a tramp," she said. "He has been picking up fag ends." They got on well enough, however, to exchange addresses. His was 36 Queen's Road, Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire. Hers was 74 Downton Avenue, Streatham Hill, London, S.W.2. Next day he went to her house with a gift for her. It was a rose wrapped in a newspaper. Afterwards their friendship grew apace. She was sorry for him, she said. She smartened him up with better clothes. She had him to meals. She went to his house: he went to hers. They wrote to one another in terms of endearment. We were not shown the letters, but counsel described them as love letters."
"This is the first case in which in this court we have had to consider the Treaty of Rome. It comes about because of a tin can. If you should go for a picnic or camping, you will be likely nowadays to take with you something to boil water. One of the most useful is a tin can containing butane gas in liquid form. It is a small round tin, 3½ inches high and 3½ inches in diameter, with a domed top. The tin is completely airtight. When you want to use it, you fit it into a holder, pierce the top, and light the flame. It is a very ordinary sort of tin, but the first one of its shape was made by a French company called Application des Gaz S.A. I will call the company the "French Gaz" company, and the tin the "Gaz" tin. There is no copyright in the tin. But there is, or may be, copyright in a drawing of it which was made beforehand. The drawing was made by M. Robert Faure, a French citizen. He made it 18 years ago. France is, of course, a member of the Copyright Convention. French citizens are entitled to the protection of our copyright law, just as our own citizens."