Clover, Clayton, and Co. v. Hughes [1910] UKHL 885
(Before the Lord Chancellor (Loreburn) , Lords Macnaghten , Atkinson , Collins , and Shaw .)47 SLR 885Clover, Clayton, and Company v. Hughes.Subject_ Master and Servant — Workmen's Compensation Act 1906 (6 Edw. VII, cap. 58), sec. 1 — Accident — Diseased State of Workman Leading to Death. Facts:A workman suffered from a severe aneurism of the heart, from which he might at any time have died even in bed. While he was at his work engaged in manual labour the aneurism burst and he died. The County Court Judge found that “the death was caused by a strain arising out of the ordinary work of the deceased operating upon a condition of body which was such as to render the strain fatal.” He therefore awarded compensation.Held ( diss . Lords Atkinson and Shaw) that there was evidence to support the finding, and that the injury had arisen out of and in the course of the employment.An award of compensation was made to Hughes under the Workmen's Compensation Act 1906, and affirmed by the Court of Appeal ( Cozens-Hardy, M.R., Farwell, and Kennedy, L.JJ .). The employers Clover, Clayton, & Company appealed. The facts are given in the judgment.Their Lordships gave considered judgment as follows:—
Lord Chancellor (Loreburn) —In this case a workman suffering from an aneurism in so advanced a state of disease that it might have burst at any time was tightening a nut with a spanner when the strain, quite ordinary in this quite ordinary work, ruptured the aneurism and he died. This is a mere summary of the facts. They and the learned County Court Judge's conclusions from them are stated fully in his instructive judgment. In what I am about to say I take the facts as he found them in extenso and rely upon them. He has held, and the Court of appeal have confirmed his decision, that in these circumstances the workman's dependants are entitled to compensation. I agree. These judgments make it unnecessary, from my point of view, that I should review the authorities, which I wish to follow loyally. But in a case of such great importance in the construction of this Act I wish to state my own view as to its meaning in the light of the weighty opinions which have been cited to us in argument. It seems to me important that we should regard not merely the question, “Was this an accident or not?” but also the entire sentence at the commencement of the Act of 1906, in which the liability of the employer to make compensation is set up. It runs as follows—“If in any employment personal injury by accident arising out of and in the course of the employment is caused to a workman, his employer shall, subject as hereinafter mentioned, be liable to pay compensation in accordance with the first schedule to this Act.” The injury must be caused by an accident, and the accident must arise out of the employment. We are not concerned here with the course of employment. What, then, is an “accident?” It has been defined in this House as “an unlooked for mishap, or an untoward event which is not expected or designed.” All the Lords who took part in the decision of Fenton v. Thorley , 41 S.L.R. 460, [1903] AC 443 , agreed in substance with this definition in Lord Macnaghten's speech. I take that as conclusive. Next, the accident must be one “arising out of” the employment. There must be some relation of cause and effect between the employment and the accident, as well as between the accident and the injury. I think that some of our difficulties in applying the Act are due to this. Courts of law have frequently been obliged to consider, especially in actions on policies of insurance, what is to be regarded as the cause of some particular event In one sense every event is preceded by many causes. There is the causa proxima , the causa causans , the causa sine qua non . I will not pursue scholastic theories of causation. The causa proxima is alone considered in actions on a policy as a general rule. I do not think that it is the proper rule for cases under the section now under discussion, for the reasons explained by Lord Lindley in Fenton v. Thorley ( cit .). It seems to me enough if it appears that the employment is one of the contributing causes without which the accident which actually happened would not have happenad;Page: 886 ↓
Lord Macnaghten — In this case your Lordships have heard a very able and ingenious argument upon the construction of section 1 of the Workmen's Compensation Act. I need hardly say that it is not from any want of respect to the learned counsel who advanced it that I pass that argument by. It has been disposed of already. It was advanced and rejected in the case of Fenton v. Thorley , ( cit .). There the Court of Appeal had held that if a man meets with a mishap in doing the very thing which he means to do, the occurrence cannot be called an accident. There must be, it was said, an accident and an injury. You are not to confuse the injury with the accident. Your Lordships' judgment, however, swept away these niceties of subtle disquisition and the endless perplexities of causation. It was held that “injury by accident” meant nothing more than “accidental injury”—or “accident” as the word is popularly used. It is not perhaps quite accurate to say thatPage: 887 ↓
Lord Atkinson —I regret that I am unable to concur with the judgments which have been delivered. I think that the meaning put upon the word “accident” in Fenton v. Thorleg ( cit .) must now be accepted in all cases turning on the construction of the phrase “injury by accident” used in the Workmen's Compensation Act 1906 as its true meaning, namely, “an unlooked for mishap, or an untoward event which is not expected or designed.” It must exclude disease. What is “unlooked for” or “unexpected” must in every case exist either in the external influences to which the sufferer is subjected, or in the effect upon him which those influencesPage: 888 ↓
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Lord Collins —I am of opinion that this appeal must be dismissed. I agree with the Court of Appeal that the case is concluded by the authority of Fenton v. Thorley ( cit .). In fact the argument for the appellants was substantially that which prevailed in the Court of Appeal in a series of cases which were overruled by that decision. One of those specially commented upon by Lord Macnaghten — Hensey v. White , [1900] 1 QB 481 —was in essentials identical with this case. The workman, who was in an unsound physical condition, ruptured himself in attempting to turn a wheel which proved too stiff for his physical powers. A post-mortem examination disclosed the fact that he had been suffering from chronic inflammation and congestion of the intestines, and to this, as the antecedent cause, one of the medical witnesses attributed the fatal result of the strain. The County Court judge had found as a fact that “the death was the result of chronic disease,” and held that something beyond the mere fact that a long-standing disease had suddenly assumed a fatal form in consequence of the deceased doing his usual hard work in the usual way, was necessary in order to constitute an accident within the meaning of the Act. The Court of Appeal had affirmed this view. Lord Macnaghten in overruling this and a group of other cases says—“If a man in lifting a weight or trying to move something not easily moved were to strain a muscle, or rick his back, or rupture himself, the mishap in ordinary parlance would be described as an accident. Anybody would say that the man had met with an accident in lifting a weight or trying to move something too heavy for him.” He then goes on to express his entire agreement with the decision in Stewart v. Wilsons and Clyde Coal Company ( 1902, 40 S.L.R. 80, 5 F. 120) and singles out for special approval a passage in the judgment of Lord M'Laren—“If a workman in the reasonable performance of his duties sustains a physical injury as the result of the work in which he is engaged … this is an accidental injury in the sense of thePage: 890 ↓
Lord Shaw —In Coe v. Fife Coal Company ( 1909 S.C. 393, 46 S.L.R. 328), to which I shall afterwards more particularly refer, Lord President Dunedin uses this language—“I confess that I have found the case to be one of great delicacy and difficulty, with which one is not unfamiliar in the law, where one seems almost driven by the course of decisions, each of which gradually goes a little further than the one which preceded it, until at last you reach a point which, when the first decision was given, was probably not contemplated.” These words, in which I entirely concur, aptly express my own situation in this case. When one has so to interpret an Act of Parliament as to put an interpretation upon interpretations of it, there is much danger of being landed very far away from the meaning of the statute itself; that danger in the present case is very real, and it is not lessened by the wish to accept and the necessity of accepting with complete loyalty the decisions of your Lordships' House. The evidence as to the unfortunate man's condition is thus stated by the County Court judge—“On a post-mortem examination it was found that there had existed a very large aneurism of the aorta, and death was attributed to rupture of the aorta. The aneurism was in such an advanced condition that it might have burst while the man was asleep, and very slight exertion or strain would have been sufficient to bring about a rupture.” The man was engaged in tightening a nut with a spanner. As to “strain” in doing so, the judge says—“It was at all events not more than ordinary in such work, but the evidence satisfies me that such strain was sufficient to bring about the rupture of the aneurism, having regard to the man's condition at the time, and I find as a fact that the rupture was so brought about. In this case the death was caused by a strain arising out of the ordinary work of the deceased operating upon a condition of body which was such as to render the strain fatal.” Apart from the facts so stated, the formal finding that the deceased died from injury caused by accident arising out of and in the course of his employment is clearly dependent upon the law, and it is pronounced by the learned Judge as he very properly states, “having regard to the general trend of the cases.” This, and this alone, which has been treated as a determinate conclusion in fact, and in fact alone, I must respectfully decline to accept. Apart from these cases, and on these facts, I am of opinion that this workman did not die owing to injury by accident, but died of heart disease. There was nothing unusual or abnormal in the work, no strain “more than ordinary” was imposed or involved, no occurrence took place to intercept or even disturb the work or the workman; all that can be said is, that being at work and diseased, he died. His death was caused, in my view, not by any injury by accident, but simply by the disease under which he unhappily suffered. That is my opinion on the facts apart from the decisions, and having considered the latter with much anxiety and respect, and recognising to the full the delicacy of some of the distinctions drawn, I am confirmed in the opinion that neither in language nor intention does the Workmen's Compensation Act 1906 apply to this case. Your Lordships' House has, after considering the various decisions in lower courts, made three important pronouncements on this branch of the law. Remembering that the present case is one of the employee carrying about with him, so to speak, a fatal disease, I turn to see how far such a case is governed by these authorities. In Fenton v. Thorley ( cit .) “a workman, employed to turn the wheel of a machine, ruptured himself,” and it was held that compensation under the Act was due. So far as the condition of the workman was concerned, nothing more different from the facts in this case could be stated, because, as Lord Macnaghten points out, “Fenton was a man of ordinary health and strength.” But the unexpected, totally unexpected, had happened, and Lord Macnaghten came to the conclusion that “the expression ‘accident’ is used in the popular and ordinary sense of the word, as denoting an unlooked for mishap or an untoward event which is not expected and designed.” By anticipation Lord Macnaghten had warned commentators against making too wide a use of even this definition, and, in my opinion, he touched circumstances like the present closely when he said “the words by accident’ are, I think, introduced parenthetically, as it were, to qualify the word ‘injury,’ confining it to a certain class of injuries, and excluding other injuries, as, for instance, injuries by disease or injuries self-inflicted by design.” The other learned Lords all proceed on the same view, and Lord Robertson expressly says that the workman was a person of ordinary strength, while Lord Lindley also holds that there was an accident in the external sense that “the machine was accidentally put out of order,” had been stopped by an “accident,” &c., and he adds, “it is not necessary to consider whether the Act applies to cases in which the cause of the injury is not known, or in which the only unforeseen occurrence is the injury itself.” It is sufficient to say of that case that the issue of disease, as alternative to accident, was not being dealt with or decided there. But if isolated passages are permissible, these would seem to show very clearly that a case of disease, like the present, was expressly treated as differentiated from that of Fenton and excluded from the Act. I observe that in Fenton v. Thorley , and also in Ismay, Imrie, & Company v. Williamson ( 46 S.L.R. 699, [1908] AC 437 ) a citation was made, as it has been made to-day, of a sentence from the judgment of LordPage: 891 ↓
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Appeal dismissed.Counsel for Appellants— Simon, K.C. — Cuthbert— Smith. Agents— Barlow, Barlow, & Lyde, Solicitors.Counsel for Respondent— Powell, K.C.— Stewart-Brown. Agents— Helder, Roberts, Walton, & Giles, Solicitors.