Facts
On 9 August 1947, during a game of cricket against the Cheetham 2nd XI at Cheetham Cricket Ground in Manchester, a batsman from the visiting team hit the ball for six. The ball flew out of the ground, hitting the claimant, Miss Stone, who was standing outside her house in Cheetham Hill Road, approximately 100 yards (91 m) from the batsman.
The club had been playing cricket at the ground since 1864, before the road was built in 1910. The ground was surrounded by a 12-foot (3.7 m) fence, but the ground sloped up so the fence was 17 feet (5.2 m) above the level of the pitch where the ball passed, about 78 yards (71 m) from the batsman. There was evidence that a ball had been hit that far out of the ground only very rarely, about six times in the last 30 years, although people living closer to the ground reported that balls were hit out of the ground a few times each season.
The claimant argued that the ball being hit so far even once was sufficient to give the club warning that there was a risk of injuring a passer-by, fixing it with liability in negligence for the plaintiff's injuries. The claimant also claimed under the principle in Rylands v Fletcher, that the ball was a dangerous item that had "escaped" from the cricket ground, and in nuisance.
Read more about this topic: Bolton V Stone
Famous quotes containing the word facts:
“Now what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.”
—Jon Wynne-Tyson (b. 1924)
“There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)