United Kingdom House of Lords Decisions

Lord Chancellor (Loreburn)—The only question raised on this appeal is whether the damages awarded to the appellants are rightly measured. It was a case of collision, in which the steamship “Marpessa” ran down the said pump dredger “G. B. Crow,” and disabled her for nine days. This dredger is used by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board in the necessary work of dredging the bar outside Liverpool. She earns nothing in money and costs a good deal, but she does indispensable service in clearing away the sand. Negligence on the part of the steamship “Marpessa being admitted, the case came before the registrar to ascertain damages. No dispute was raised by defendants as to any of the items claimed except one—viz., the claim for demurrage for nine days at £104 per day, afterwards reduced to £102. The registrar found that £35 per day sufficed, and his report was confirmed by the President and also by the Court of Appeal. I need hardly say that your Lordships are not likely to interfere unless it is made clear that a wrong principle was adopted for the ascertainment of these damages. Now, until the case of “ The Greta Holme,” [1897] AC 596, the view appears to have prevailed that no damages beyond the actual loss in repairs, loss of wages, and so forth, could be recovered where an injured vessel made no money for its owners and merely rendered services in dredging. That case corrected the error, and decided that in such case general damages might be recovered as well as the cost of procuring another vessel to do the work; but it did not, and could not, lay down a rule of universal application for the ascertainment of the damages in each particular case. For the damages depend upon the facts and upon the actual loss sustained by the owner, which will vary in different cases. It seems to me that the loss sustained in the present case under the claim of demurrage is the value of the work which would have been done by the dredger during those days, had she not been disabled. So many tons of sand would have been removed, which it is the duty and interest of the plaintiffs to remove, and by reason of the defendants' negligence they were not removed. If the plaintiffs had hired another vessel to do this work they could have recovered the cost of doing it. They have not done so, no other vessel being available at so short a notice, and, perhaps, not being available at all; for the construction is peculiar. Failing that evidence, the plaintiffs were entitled to put their case in another way. They might say the cost to us of maintaining and working this dredger, while it is working, amounts to so much per day, and its depreciation daily amounts to so much more. We take the total daily sum which it costs us as a fair measure of the value of its daily services to us. Those services are at least worth what we are habitually paying for them year after year, including what we sacrifice in depreciation. In fact the plaintiffs put in a mixed claim, made up mainly on the basis of what the dredger's services cost them; but they added an item for owners' profit, which was appropriate enough if they had paid it to the owner of a vessel which they hired, but had no place in a claim based on the cost to themselves of the services rendered

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