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Sight and Sound
Page 67
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COMMENTARY by JANUS
FHENEVER I read one of those admirable monologues attributed to the president of the Transport Tribunal and embodying the Tribunal's decision on ising appeal, I wonder how much better I should be ). understand it if it also included the stage directions ramatists provide in the printed version of their plays fp us, visualize the expression on the face of the :r, and his, tone of voice. The argument running ffi each decision is sometimes difficult enough in It is harder still to crystallize out the mood in which !cision was composed and to decide which passages particular and permanent significance.
cad of reading the speeches, the armchair playgoer nnetimes gel a better idea of what the play is about dying the bits that are printed in parentheses and in It is often essential to know that the lines should id sarcastically, or with deep feeling, or between
ed teeth, or even flippantly. Many authors are .ed to enter enthusiastically into the game. They rovide explanations that take up almost as much
as the text. Bernard Shaw perhaps carried the s to its ultimate conclusion by making his plays little than light-hearted postscripts to the prefaces.
Tribunal can hardly be expected to go quite as far ;. They are not public entertainers first and foreand they are entitled to expect a certain level of ty among their readers. All the same, not every F us is a licensing expert. We cannot be expected, many of the experts seem to do, to carry around in !ads a list of past cases that must by now be almost uminous as the telephone directory. An even more 1 confession is of our inability to pick out, as the does with such contemptuous ease, the stray remark /ill from that time forward be taken as enshrining v much it would help us if these remarks could be
d 1.1D in some way in the actual written decision. We . then feel ourselves as wise as the experts. Without ; to be fold, we should know what were the really .ant cases. In the traffic court, we should recognize
e the moment when the Licensing Authority might pected to sit up and take notice and the other far prolonged periods of time when he might be excused ling asleep. Above all, we should not find it neces) puzzle over apparently innocuous sentences in the ins on the offchance that they contain some concealed ig of overwhelming importance.
as an example the following typical gnomic utter' We do not desire to be understood as laying down neral principle on the question whether the Licensing rity should never have regard to anything but that is stated to him at the actual inquiry. That point the way, the appeal boils down to the normal quesIf fact." This almost finicky reservation is to be in the last decision given by the Tribunal in 1961. is one to make of it? When all is said and done, estion for which the Tribunal do not pause for an • is hardly one that seems to call for the enunciation eneral principle. Why, therefore, should they hasten laim any intention of doing this?
or two stage directions might have been invaluable. [ways possible that the Tribunal were speaking with mgue in their cheek. One of the favourite accusations against them, fortified by certain conclusions drawn from the judgments in the Merchandise Transport case, is that they are too fond by half of laying down general principles to cover this, that and the other aspect of licensing. Perhaps nobody is more surprised than the Tribunal when an airy aphorism thrown off in the course of a lengthy decision is seized upon in every traffic court as a lever for persuading Licensing Authorities.
There must be sympathy for the Tribunal if their purpose is to write in a disclaimer that will forestall future criticism. One may depend upon it that, whatever they say, somebody or other before long will call the decision in aid when the 'circumstances in his own case are at' all similar. If there is then an appeal, the Tribunal might feel hound to give the same judgment as before. There would then be two decisions instead of one that could be quoted on be next occasion, and so the process would continue of adding one more folio to the already substantial body of case law.
What, it may be wondered, was the background to the quotation I have given? According to the evidence at the public inquiry summarized in the Tribunal's decision, the General Steam Navigation Company decided some years ago to direct some of their traffic from the Continent to Felixstowe rather than to London. Later on they began to use containers for the traffic.
There seemed to be great difficulty in finding a suitable haulier. After an unsatisfactory experiment through a clearing house, the company agreed to support an application by East Anglian Carriers, Ltd., for a 3i-ton vehicle on A licence. The normal user was to be "General goods East Anglia and London." At the public inquiry, a representative of the company appeared as witness and apparently established his point, but the Eastern Licensing Authority felt bound to reject the application because the normal user was too widely drawn.
ANOTHER application was made, and this time the normal user was given as "Mainly general goods in containers for General Steam Navigation to and from Felixstowe." The witness -did not come to the traffic court a second time, but his immediate superior sent a letter saying, in effect, that the situation was the same as before, or if anything worse. When the licence was granted, three objectors appealed, partly on the grounds that the Licensing Authority ought not to have based his decision in one case on evidence given in another case heard some month-; previously. This was the contention that the Tribunal refused to accept. They were satisfied that the Licensing Authority was right to take the earlier evidence into account, and the criticism that it was out of date was met by the statement in the letter that, if anything, the company's need had become more acute in the period between the two cases.
In short, the Tribunal were saying that in at least one set of circumstances a Licensing Authority was entitled to take notice of something other than what had been stated to him at the actual inquiry. Whether they liked it or not, the Tribunal were inevitably laying down some kind of general principle. For them to deny this categorically seems merely to be confusing the issue. Some marginal comment such as "(quizzically)" Or' "(in an aside to the experts)" might have helped to clear the matter up.