A gift had been made to a named charity. No purposes were mentioned.
Held: The gift had not lapsed as a result of the Charity Commissioners amalgamating the charity with other charities, to be administered by a newly constituted body of trustees, and significantly expanding its purposes. The original class of persons intended to be benefited by the charity, poor widows, continued to be benefited by the charity in its amalgamated form. The charity never ceased to exist. There was therefore no lapse.
Farwell LJ said: ‘In all these cases one has to consider not so much the means to the end as the charitable end which is in view, and so long as that charitable end is well established the means are only machinery, and no alteration of the machinery can destroy the charitable trust for the benefit of which the machinery is provided.’
Kennedy LJ said: ‘but the question which I have felt some doubt about is, if the continuance – that word has been used throughout – of a charity is requisite, what is the essential thing to constitute the continuance of that charity as the subject of a charitable gift in a will? . . no case has been shewn to me in which an endowed charity has been treated as having, so to speak, lost its life by reason of the exercise of the perfectly competent authority under parliamentary sanction of the Charity Commissioners, or the equally competent authority of this Court, under which its funds have come to be applied somewhat differently to the way in which they were applied under the original foundation . . It seems to be the law, that an endowed charity, to whatever purpose its funds are devoted, if and so long as they are devoted to some charitable purpose under some duly authorized scheme, remains still existent so as to draw to it a sum of money given by a will for, presumably, the same purpose as the original charity.’
Judges:
Cozens-Hardy MR, Farwell and Kennedy LJJ
Citations:
[1912] 2 Ch 488
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Charity
Updated: 21 August 2022; Ref: scu.556257