Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
BOOK REVIEW - COMMENCEMENT OF LAYTIME
COMMENCEMENT OF LAYTIME by Donald Davies, R.D., R.N.R., Barrister, Master Mariner, Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers, Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, Nautical Institute. Lloyd’s of London Press Ltd., London (1987, xiii and 88 pp., plus 9 pp. Index). Hardback £24.50.
Donald Davies, the author of Commencement of Laytime, is uniquely qualified. He has served as an officer both on board merchant vessels and in the Royal Navy, is a Master Mariner, a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers, one of the leading maritime arbitrators in the City of London and has qualified as a barrister. Furthermore, as he points out, the commencement of laytime is a subject of extreme importance because it arises in relation to every voyage charter. It is a subject which has led to a great many court cases and is the source of a constant stream of arbitrations which shows no sign of drying up. This book has, therefore, the potential of being of real importance.
As a senior and well-liked maritime arbitrator, Mr Davies has had access to a number of arbitration awards which have never been published. He refers to no fewer than 19 such awards, as well as to nine reported awards. Some of these awards may cause the reader to regret the Arbitration Act 1979, as explained in The Nema [1982] A.C. 724 and The Antaios
[1985] A.C. 191, and Mr Davies does not hesitate to express his doubts about the correctness of any decision of which he does not approve. The awards referred to are valuable as illustrations of factual situations which have arisen and which might arise again. But too much should not be built upon them, especially because the relevant facts and even the relevant clauses are not always fully set out.
It is not only arbitration awards that Mr Davies is prepared to criticize. No tribunal is immune. Thus, of the test suggested by Lord Reid in the Johanna Oldendorf [1974] A.C. 479 to determine whether a ship has arrived at a place where laytime could start running, Mr Davies says (after referring to two arbitration awards on the subject),
Neither of these arbitrations would have been necessary if the House of Lords had plumped for the simple test advocated by the vast majority of shipping commercial persons, namely, completion of the sea passage and at the immediate and effective disposition of the charterers.
This is not the only instance in which Mr Davies seems to give less weight to the actual words of the charterparty than to what he thinks the parties, as sensible commercial people, probably meant and should have said. Not infrequently he refers to a “traditional” view that
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