A lease term ran for 21 years from 25 December 1934. A break clause gave either party the right to determine the lease at the expiration of the first seven years, by six calendar months’ notice. The landlord gave notice to the tenant’s solicitors in the following terms: ‘As I may have to be away for some time in the near future, I will be obliged if you would accept the six months’ notice to terminate your client’s lease which I am allowed to give on June 21, 1941. This would mean that he would have to give up the cottage on December 21, 1941.’ The notice should have expired on 25, not 21, December. At first instance, Asquith J. had held that the notice could be saved on the basis that it had been accepted as a good notice by the tenant’s solicitors.
Held: The notice was ineffective. Break notices ‘must on their face and on a fair and reasonable construction do what the lease provides that they are to do.’
Clauson LJ said: ‘I should have thought that, as a matter of construction, an argument other than that which leads to the result the Master of the Rolls has announced was quite untenable.’
and (Greene MR) ‘This appeal raises a short point in connection with a break clause in a lease wherein the plaintiff was the lessor and the defendant was the lessee. By his letter of January 15, 1940, the plaintiff, on the face of it, was purporting to determine the lease by notice on December 21, 1941. The whole thing was obviously a slip on his part, and there is a natural temptation to put a strained construction on language in aid of people who have been unfortunate enough to make slips. That, however, is a temptation which must be resisted, because documents are not to be strained and principles of construction are not to be outraged in order to do what may appear to be fair in an individual case.’ and ‘Notices of this kind are documents of a technical nature, technical because they are not consensual documents, but, if they are in proper form, they have of their own force without any assent by the recipient the effect of bringing the demise to an end. They must on their face and on a fair and reasonable construction do what the lease provides that they are to do. It is perfectly true that in construing such a document, as in construing all documents, the court in a case of ambiguity will lean in favour of reading the document in such a way as to give it validity, but I dissent entirely from the proposition that, where a document is clear and specific, but inaccurate on some matter, such as that of date, it is possible to ignore the inaccuracy and substitute the correct date or other particular because it appears that the error was inserted by a slip. By the clear wording of this notice the plaintiff purported to bring the lease to an end on December 21, 1941. In so doing he was attempting to do something which he had no power to do, and, however much the recipient might guess, or however certain he might be, that it was a mere slip, that would not cure the defect because the document was never capable on its face of producing the necessary legal consequence.’
Judges:
Lord Greene MR,Clauson LJ
Citations:
[1942] 2 KB 326
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Overruled – Mannai Investment Co Ltd v Eagle Star Assurance HL 21-May-1997
Minor Irregularity in Break Notice Not Fatal
Leases contained clauses allowing the tenant to break the lease by serving not less than six months notice to expire on the third anniversary of the commencement date of the term of the lease. The tenant gave notice to determine the leases on 12th . .
Distinguished – Carradine Properties Ltd v Aslam ChD 1976
Under a break clause in a lease, the relevant date upon which a notice given by either party under the clause might take effect was a date in September 1975, but the landlord’s notice in September 1974 specified a date in 1973. The date in 1973, had . .
Distinguished – Micrografix v Woking 8 Ltd ChD 1995
The tenants gave a notice determining the lease on 23 March 1995 when under the relevant clause they could only have done so on 23 June 1995. Jacob J. held that, as the landlords knew that the date of determination could only be 23 June 1995, they . .
Doubted – Garston v Scottish Widows’ Fund and Life Assurance Society ChD 1996
A lease allowed a break clause to be exercised on six month’s notice. The notice given was calculated by reference to the wrong date, the date of the lease, and not the term contained in it.
Held: The mistake was not sufficiently clear to . .
Cited – Oliver Ashworth (Holdings) Limited v Ballard (Kent) Limited CA 18-Mar-1999
In order for the landlord to claim double rent where a tenant held over unlawfully after the tenancy was determined, the landlord must not do anything to indicate that the lease might be continuing, for example by denying the validity of break . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Landlord and Tenant
Updated: 20 April 2022; Ref: scu.185078