In Re Cawston’s Conveyance and the School Sites Act 1841: CA 1940

The 1841 Act was intended to encourage land owners to make land available for educational purposes: ‘One can see that the provision with regard to reverter would have been and no doubt was considered by the Legislature to be a very useful encouragement to charitably minded persons, particularly if they were the owners of an estate or life tenants of a settled estate, to make grants for purposes such as these, because such persons might very well be satisfied to have the village school built upon the family estate, but would strongly object to the site on which such a school had been built being diverted later on to other purposes; therefore, as I have said, that proviso as to reverter must have been a very valuable encouragement, because landowners by reason of it were thus enabled to ensure that the site should be used in perpetuity for school purposes, or, if it ceased to be used for school purposes, that they would get it back. The common sense of that is obvious.’

Judges:

Sir Wilfrid Greene MR

Citations:

[1940] Ch 27

Statutes:

School Sites Act 1841

Jurisdiction:

England and Wales

Cited by:

CitedRector of Wrington and The Bath and Wells Diocesan Board of Finance v Jenkinson and Others ChD 26-Feb-2002
Land having been conveyed under the Act, and it no longer being needed as a school, it had to be decided to whom the land reverted.
Held: The tracing of beneficiaries had to be in the basis under section 2, that the land had never been so . .
CitedFraser and Another v Canterbury Diocesan Board of Finance and others HL 27-Oct-2005
Land had been acquired by a deed under the 1841 Act, but had in 1995 ceased to be used as a school ‘for the education of children and adults of the labouring manufacturing and other poorer classes . . And for no other purpose ‘. Under the Act, the . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.

Land

Updated: 17 July 2022; Ref: scu.179832