George Whitelock's Response to Mellor - Part V

To read from the beginning, please see blog entry dated June 9, 2009.
To read Part II, please see blog entry dated June 11, 2009.
To read Part III, please see blog entry dated June 21, 2009.
To read Part IV, please see blog entry dated July 15, 2009.

This article may be read in its entirety at George Whitelock, Damages For Death By Negligence At Sea – The Titanic, 49 American Law Review, 75 (1915).

(continued from part IV)

But it may be here pertinently observed that while the issue of fact has not yet been determined in the Courts of America, a jury in England has already awarded damages for the death of four of he steerage passengers of the Titanic, having found negligence of the Company. The verdicts were rendered in the cases of Ryan et al. v. Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, brought under the provisions of the English Death Statute, called Lord Campbell’s Act. On review before the Court of Appeal upon application for a new trial, a re-hearing was refused and the appeals were dismissed on February 9, 1914. Lord Justice Vaughan Williams, speaking for the Appellate Court, said: “There was one question common to all these cases – namely, whether the loss of the Titanic was due to negligent navigation; and the jury found that it was.” Considering the question of negligence in fact, his Lordship further said that “there was no doubt that the Captain of the Titanic had diverted his course and adopted anther way of precaution to avoid ice of which he was warned by marconigrams from the Caronia and Baltic, but his Lordship thought it impossible to say that there was no evidence upon which the findings of negligence could be based, and added: “I think that the danger in this case was neither unforeseen or unforeseeable. There was warning, to my mind, of dangerous ice ahead, and the jury might reasonably come to the conclusion that in the circumstances a prudent master ought thereupon to have slowed down, or even to have stopped, and if the master failed to perform this duty he cannot say, ‘I am excused because the state of things which the ship afterwards encountered was unforeseen or unforeseeable,’ as the accident might not have happened if he had slowed down.”

And Lord Justice Kennedy, who also delivered judgment, arrived at the same conclusion that the appeals should be dismissed.

(To be continued in Part VI of George Whitelock’s Response to Mellor.)