Tag Archives: Judge Owen

Judge Owen and the Business of Bees

Today, I went to a nice event at the University of Bristol Botanic Garden, a Bee and Pollination Festival – lots of honey, hives, demonstrations etc. Inevitably, it got me thinking about the bee in legal history. Now, scholars of Roman law[i]  and Irish law in particular have taken an interest in property in bees, but, fascinating though that is, I am not going to go in that direction. No. I am going to my old mental stamping ground, the South Wales of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, and to another case featuring one of the characters in whom I have taken an interest in recent years – Judge Owen.

The Weekly Mail 14th October 1899 under the thrilling headline ‘Are Bees A Nuisance?’ notes that the good judge, at Cardiff County Court, had to decide a ‘fine point’ on this, but was not going to decide it straight away. The case of the buzzing peril had arisen between Juan Cascago, ship broker, of Valladolid, but resident, less glamorously perhaps, in Radyr (plaintiff) and Benjamin Davies clerk, Coedwyn, Radyr. Cascago wanted £20 in damages, plus an injunction to restrain Davies from keeping bees (or bees which caused a nuisance, anyway).

Judge Owen, as was his little way, made a joke of the case, reportedly causing laughter by his remark, ‘Ho, ho, ho! Here is some one wanting an injunction to restrain some one from keeping bees!’. Another report has him exclaiming that it was the funniest case which had been brought before him. Which seems a little strong. But, anyway, Owen thought it was ‘absurd’ to think an order could be made against keeping bees so as to be a nuisance, because it would be impossible to enforce, and there was discussion of an even weaker joke about the muzzling of bees, and of whether they could sting more than once.

It was pointed out that there had been a similar case recently, at Bath,[ii] but Owen persisted in thinking that the whole thing was a bit mad, and adjourned the case for a month so that the parties could come to an agreement.

Tantalisingly, no end is reported, so I am not able, at this point, to say whether Mr Davies was restrained, and his bees muzzled, or not. We are, of course, missing important aspects of context – what was the location of the hives, the size of the properties, the number of bees? It is not too difficult to imagine a situation of bee-keeping which might amount to a tort. Judge Owen, however, does not seem to have seen this – or at least he did not see the possibility of making an order which would stop the defendant from keeping bees which were causing a nuisance (as opposed to injunctions against individual bees). So – interesting on bees, but also telling on attitudes to what neighbours could do, and what they must tolerate. Injunctions were granted in similar situations in the 20th C (see, e.g., Halifax Evening Courier, 15th February 1939, p. 8) And, of course on the wit and wisdom of South Wales’s newspapers’ favourite Victorian/Edwardian judge.

The story also made it into the Welsh language press, (see Y Cymro, which, I note, does not translate ‘nuisance’, clearly a nasty English concept unworthy of being rendered in the old language … ).

GS

27/8/2023

 

Image: a bee, though this bee wants it made clear that it is not implicated in any bee-nuisance activities. Photo by Tania P on Unsplash

[i] See Paul du Plessis, Borkowski’s Textbook on Roman Law 6th edn, 7.2.3.1 and Kearry v Pattinson [1939] 1 KB 471).

[ii] This is confirmed by other reports of an injunction against bee-keeping in a ‘congested district’, which had caused the plaintiff not to be able to use or tend her garden.

Festive mercy from Judge Owen

Here’s a seasonal snippet on somebody I have become interested in, as a biographical subject: a report in the Evening Express for 14th December 1906, telling readers that Judge Owen was giving ‘contemptuous debtors’ who were brought before him, in his court at Newport, an additional week to pay, so as to avoid locking them up over the Christmas period, giving them a marginally less bleak midwinter.

 

 

GS

21/12/2022

Candles, ‘cocoanuts’ and cold courts: further thrilling adventures of Judge Owen

As I sit next to two non-functioning radiators in a rather chilly office, and as we all face the possibility of interruptions to power supplies, I am drawn to some accounts from the life of Judge Owen on closely connected matters. (For more on this ‘character’ of the Welsh bench, see this post.

First, I note that newspapers in 1908 felt that it was worth reporting – under the deathless headline ‘Judge Owen Complains of a Cold Court’ – that – well – just that: he said, in Monmouth, that the court in which he was sitting was ‘as cold as an ice-house’.

Moving from a lack of heat to a lack of light, we have the even more thrilling, earlier tale, ‘Judge Owen and the Electric Light: candles stuck in cocoanuts’ (1895).[i] Again, you can work out the general idea from the headline. This time, the uncomfortable court was in Newport: Judge Owen was presiding over the County Court, in the Town Hall, on a ‘dull morning’ in December. Things were dim at 10.30 in the court. Owen’s first task was to read a judgment, but when he tried to turn on the light …. It did not work! Owen ‘declared that he must have light of some kind.’ No light was to be found, however, despite the scurrying of various court officials. again, without result. He left the bench [flouncingly?] and then Collins, the town hall keeper produced a solution of a sort – putting four candles [Two Ronnies resonances anyone?] around the bench, and the judge came back. He was not going to accept it all as a bit of an accident, though – no, he complained of the ‘want of courtesy’ on the part of the Corporation officials, who ‘knew it was County Court day’ but ‘did not take any steps to provide light for the court’. They did get as far as providing some oil lamps as well as penny candles in ‘cocoanuts’. The problem stemmed from the change-over from gas-lighting to electric lighting: it was explained that connections to the electricity main had not yet been made, and the transition was incomplete.

So, a pretty banal little story, but interesting that the papers found so much that this judge did eminently worthy of note, even so, and perhaps also some sign of the quality of facilities available to courts sitting in Wales in this period.   I am getting the idea that the judge might have had a bit of a temper on him … sending everyone running around. Perhaps he was unconvinced that electric lighting was an improvement on gas. How quickly, or whether, Judge Owen simmered down is not made clear.

3/11/2022

[i] See also this report.

Photo by PhotographyCourse on Unsplash

Law and low literature

It is a wet morning and I am stuck indoors, an arm stiff from a Covid jab: not up to doing anything terribly energetic, but in need of some distraction. Naturally enough, I have turned to reading about some favourite topics – law, humour and poetry (loosely so-called). All of them come together in this report of goings-on in a county court in Cardiff, in 1907: Lloyd Meyrick, ‘Limericks and Law’. It alludes to the occasion, on 8th May 1907, when a judge, William Stevenson Owen, at Cardiff County Court, brightened up a dullish case by breaking out into a limerick.

This tale contributes to the image of this particular judge as something of a funny fellow. Newspapers of the period could not get enough of his ‘humorous’ remarks and caustic quips. Meyrick noted that, in court, Owen elicited laughter, ‘weak cackles and short hysterical yelps’, that he was known as one for ‘polished periods and sparkling epigrams’, but it was only at that point that he had revealed an ‘unsuspected vein of poetry’.

Mentioned in passing in this report were limericks about ‘A young lady from Chichester’ and another young lady, this time from Exeter, but Meyrick did not give the verses themselves. I had a bit of a search for possibles and found some rather rude ones.[i] (At least there was no hint of people hailing from Nantucket. If you don’t know, use your imagination). But, perhaps not surprisingly, there was no serious rudeness in Judge Owen’s court.

Luckily, the judge’s own limerick was reproduced in other, anonymous, reports, from 8th May 1907. Here it is in all its glory:

There was a young woman of Chichester

who went to see a solicitor.

He asked for his fee,

she said “Fiddle-de-dee:

I simply called as a visitor”.

Have to say the rhymes are a bit dodgy, but, according to the ‘stage directions’ in the newspaper report, the response in court was loud laughter. The newspaper report does not really explain what the nature of the case was, but it does seem likely to have involved an issue of whether somebody was consulting a solicitor professionally or not. Did he make it up there and then (in which case some struggling rhymes would be forgiven), or did he sit up for hours the night before, composing and polishing it (in which case, they would not)? In any case, it all adds to the picture of power-dynamics in court at this point, and, so it seems to me at least, the self-regard of judges.

I have quite a collection of judicial ‘humour in court’ reports now, and also a fair bit of material on Owen, who does seem worth investigating further.

Working from the newspaper archive (the easiest place to start!), the Welsh newspaper obituaries[ii] give us these apparent facts about his life:

1834       Born (1st February). Son of William Owen, of Withybush, Pembrokeshire (deceased), from a ‘well-known and highly-respected family in the county’.

?date    Married to Miss Ray, Kent family, had three daughters and a son.

1856      Called to the Bar 1856. Became a Chancery barrister. Travelled the South Wales Circuit. ‘An accurate  lawyer and a skilled equity draftsman’.[iii]

1883      Appointed County Court Judge in Mid-Wales

1884      Transferred to ‘Circuit No. 58’ (County courts at Cardiff, Newport, Barry, Chepstow, Abergavenny, Tredegar, Pontypool, Monmouth, Ross, Crickhowell and Usk.

1895      Chair of Pembrokeshire Quarter Sessions. Chair of Haverfordwest Quarter Sessions. Retired 1907.

1909      Died (4.30 a.m., 20th October) , at home in Abergavenny, Ty Gwyn, after an operation on ‘an internal complaint’.

1909       23rd October. Funeral, parish church, Llantilio Pertholey, nr Abergavenny. Grave on south side of church.

At the time of his death, he sat on the County Court Bench.

 

His legal views

Obituaries[iv] emphasise some detailed, technical views:

  • opposition to the judgment summons system (on the grounds that it encouraged credit)
  • support for a reduction in the time allowed for the collection of debt under Statute of Limitations, from 6 to 2 years.

 

His character or characterisation: ‘dry humour’ and ‘caustic and scathing observations’

In death, he was called a man ‘of strong character and striking individuality’,[v] and, in private life, ‘a charming host and a man of warm-hearted disposition’. [vi]

it was commented that he was ‘noted for the dry humour which he introduced into the prosaic proceedings of the county court’, and that ‘his smart, laconic commentaries frequently provoked laughter’. On the other hand, his ‘caustic and scathing observations … were things to be dreaded, as many a solicitor [would] admit’.[vii] There is a lot to interrogate there – both in terms of the apparent nature of his ‘dry humour’, and also the slightly sniffy suggestion that the proceedings of the county court were ‘prosaic’. My initial reading suggests that he was very keen to play up the importance of this, apparently scorned, jurisdiction. More on that in due course!

Obituaries noted the speed with which he picked up common law, that his judgments were rarely upset on appeal, that he was very fair to prisoners, in Quarter Sessions, and, in the County Court, ‘very much alive to the processes of the court being used to oppress the poor’, with particular attention to claims made by tallymen and moneylenders, and not to ask too much of poor defendants in terms of paying debts. Much, much more to say, I am sure, once I can delve further into his cases and the reports.

I note that the obituaries do not mention his poetical efforts. They do say that he had a ‘distinguished career’.[viii] That was clearly in law rather than literature, though.

GS

24/10/2022

 

 

Image from The Evening Express, 20th October, 1909.

 

 

 

 

 

[i] Chichester:

 

A pious young lady of Chichester

made all of the saints in their niches stir

and each morning at matin

her breast in pink satin

made the bishop of Chichester’s britches stir

(shame about the double use of stir, to my mind, but Chichester/britches stir is rather skilful).

 

Exeter:

There was a young lady from Exeter,
So pretty that men craned their necks at her.
One was even so brave
As to take out and wave
The distinguishing mark of his sex at her.

(grim and creepy, obviously).

No refs to author, nor date,  given.

Just how the Exeter verse mentioned by Meyrick was thought to end, we can’t be sure, but the first two lines were not quite the same as the rude version above – it began ‘There was a young woman from Exeter/ and a happy young man sat next to her’ [needs another syllable, doesn’t it ‘Sat down next to her’?]

[ii] See, e.g., ,. DEATH OF JUDGE OWEN.|1909-10-22|The Cambrian – Welsh Newspapers (library.wales)  JUDGE OWEN DEAD|1909-10-20|Evening Express – Welsh Newspapers (library.wales) DEATH OF JUDGE OWEN.|1909-10-29|The Welshman – Welsh Newspapers (library.wales)

[iii] DEATH OF JUDGE OWEN.|1909-10-29|The Welshman – Welsh Newspapers (library.wales)

[iv] ,. DEATH OF JUDGE OWEN.|1909-10-22|The Cambrian – Welsh Newspapers (library.wales)

[v] DEATH OF JUDGE OWEN.|1909-10-29|The Welshman – Welsh Newspapers (library.wales)

[vi] DEATH OF JUDGE OWEN.|1909-10-29|The Welshman – Welsh Newspapers (library.wales)

[vii] ,. DEATH OF JUDGE OWEN.|1909-10-22|The Cambrian – Welsh Newspapers (library.wales)

[viii] JUDGE OWEN DEAD|1909-10-20|Evening Express – Welsh Newspapers (library.wales)