The plaintiff sued to recover a deposit which he had paid in 1845, at the height of the great Victorian railway boom, for shares in a proposed railway company. The scheme was afterwards abandoned and the company never incorporated. Whether he was entitled to his money back depended partly upon the terms of the prospectus and some letters and partly upon what had been said at a meeting of the promoters and subscribers when it first appeared that the formation of the company was likely to be delayed. The court directed the jury that: ‘the nature of the contract into which the parties had entered was rather a question of fact than of law, because it did not consist of one distinct contract between the parties, but of a series of acts and things done, from which the jury were to determine what was the real intention and meaning of the parties when they entered into the mutual relation in which they stood.’
Held: . The main point in the case was: ‘whether it was a question of law for the judge, – whether he ought to have taken upon himself to say what the contract was; or, on the other hand, whether that was a question for the jury. Now there was a good deal of evidence, independent of these letters and of other documents. There was the conduct of the parties, which was relied upon, and which appeared from the statements of the witnesses in the progress of the trial. We therefore think that, looking at all the circumstances of the case, the Lord Chief Baron could hardly have put the case in better terms to the jury. . . . If the contract had depended solely upon the written documents, the [contrary] argument might have prevailed; but as it does not, we think the question was properly submitted to the jury.’
Patteson J
(1849) 4 Ex 681
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Montgomery v Johnson Underwood Ltd CA 9-Mar-2001
A worker who had strictly been employed by an agency but on a long term placement at a customer, claimed to have been unfairly dismissed by the customer when that placement ended.
Held: To see whether she was an employee the tribunal should . .
Cited – Carmichael and Another v National Power Plc HL 24-Jun-1999
Tour guides were engaged to act ‘on a casual as required basis’. The guides later claimed to be employees and therefore entitled by statute to a written statement of their terms of employment. Their case was that an exchange of correspondence . .
Cited – Carmichael and Another v National Power Plc HL 24-Jun-1999
Tour guides were engaged to act ‘on a casual as required basis’. The guides later claimed to be employees and therefore entitled by statute to a written statement of their terms of employment. Their case was that an exchange of correspondence . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Contract
Updated: 18 December 2021; Ref: scu.194301
