Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
SALVAGE IN NON-TIDAL WATERS
The Goring
The Goring, one of Salter’s river steamers known all too well to Oxford oarsmen, broke adrift from her moorings above Reading in September 1984. Three members of the Island Bohemian Club made fast a line to the vessel and succeeded in mooring her before she did damage to herself on Reading Bridge and to the many pleasure craft moored nearby. Like the snail in Miss Donoghue’s ginger beer, the facts of this claim have yet to be proved before a court of law, since the Admiralty Court was asked to rule on the preliminary point that the writ issued by the claimants disclosed no cause of action, the services having been rendered in non-tidal waters. The Admiralty judge, Sheen, J., held that, although no previous court decision had awarded salvage remuneration in such circumstances, the terms of the 1910 Brussels Convention on Salvage, and particularly the phrase in Art. 1: “in whatever waters the services have been rendered”, justified the recognition of such a right to salvage remuneration.1 His decision was reversed by the Court of Appeal, Donaldson, M.R., dissenting.2
The case raises two distinct issues, namely:
- (1) the extent of the jurisdiction of the Admiralty Court in salvage matters; and
- (2) whether the nature of a right to claim salvage remuneration is restricted to services rendered in a defined geographical area which excluded non-tidal waters.
Comparisons were drawn with the cases and statutes of Canada and the United States, where special rules have been made to deal with the Great Lakes and the major inter-state commercial waterways in which services in the nature of salvage will give rise to a recognized claim for remuneration. The judicial dicta and legal writings from the other side of the Atlantic, however, appear to recognize the fact, or at least the belief, that no such claim lies in the courts of England.
Interesting parallels were drawn in the Court of Appeal between the competition in the Middle Ages between the courts of common law and the jurisdiction of the Lord High Admiral (later administered by the Admiralty Court) with the jurisdictional competition between federal and state courts in the United States, admiralty matters lying within the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal courts.
The claimants relied heavily on the provisions of s. 20(1)(j) of the Supreme Court Act 1981, which confirms the jurisdiction of the Admiralty Court in respect of “any claim in the nature of salvage”. Counsel for the claimants argued that the wide terms of this section swept aside any previous restrictions on salvage claims by reference to the high seas or the body of a county, and indeed on a simple reading of the section this would appear to be so. It is, however, difficult to envisage that, in passing this Act, which was essentially a codification statute, Parliament intended
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