Source 5
Extract adapted from the judgment of Viscount Haldane LC in Herd v Weardale Steel Coal and Coke Co. [1915] AC 67 HL.
Close to the start of their shift miners believed the work they were being asked to do was unsafe. As a result they asked to be taken to the surface but the employers refused. The miners were sued in the County Court for breach of their employment contract. They appealed arguing that they had been falsely imprisoned but their appeal was unsuccessful because the employer had a right to expect them to stay underground for the duration of their shift. VISCOUNT HALDANE LC: By the law of this country no man can be restrained of his liberty without authority in law. [However] if a man chooses to go into a dangerous place at the bottom of a quarry or the bottom of a mine; from which by the nature of the physical circumstances he cannot escape, it does not follow that he can compel the owner to bring him up out of it. There is another proposition which has to be borne in mind, and that is the application of the maxim volenti non fit injuria. If a man gets into an express train and the doors are locked pending its arrival at its destination, he is not entitled, merely because the train has been stopped by a signal, to call for the doors to be opened to let him out. He has entered the train on the terms that he is to be conveyed to a certain station without the opportunity of getting out before that, and he must abide by the terms on which he has entered the train. So when a man goes down a mine, from which access to the surface does not exist in the absence of special facilities given on the part of the owner of the mine, he is only entitled to the use of these facilities on the terms on which he has entered. It results from what was laid down in Robinson v Balmain Ferry. There was a pier, and by the regulations a penny was to be paid by those who entered and a penny on getting out. The manager of the exit gate refused to allow a man who had gone in, having paid his penny, but having changed his mind, to come out without paying his penny. It was held that that was not a false imprisonment; volenti non fit injuria. So, it is not false imprisonment to hold a man to the conditions he has accepted when he goes down a mine. |