Allen v Allen
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | THE MASTER OF THE ROLLS,LORD JUSTICE HARMAN,LORD JUSTICE DONOVAN |
| Judgment Date | 12 July 1961 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1961] EWCA Civ J0712-2 |
| Court | Court of Appeal |
| Date | 12 July 1961 |
[1961] EWCA Civ J0712-2
In The Supreme Court of Judicature
Court of Appeal
The Master of The Rolls
(Lord Evershed)
Lord Justice Harman and
Lord Justice Donovan
MR M.O. STRANDERS, Q.C. and MR INGRAM POOLE (instructed by Messrs Barnes & Butler, agents for Messrs J.W. Miller & Son, Poole.) appeared as Counsel for the Appellant.
MR C.A. SETTLE, Q.C. and MR MICHAEL HOARE (instructed by Messrs Charch Adams Tatham & Co., agents for Messrs Dickinson, Manser & Co., Boole) appeared as Counsel for the Respondent.
: This is an example of one of those extremely difficult and unhappy cases in which a marriage has come to grief and the question has arisen between the husband and the wife as to the rights which they or either of them may have in the bungalow in Poole where they lived during the marriage. The learned Judge having heard the two parties, husband and wife (if I may so describe them) give thoir evidence found, again not surprisingly in a case of this kind, that they were not very reliable witnesses. I do not repeat what he said about them in the Judgment but it is certain that he was unable to place very great reliance on all they told him in the witness box. Having drawn attention to that fact, he then proceeded to state certain conclusions in regard to what, during the marriage, they had done in the way of earning wages for the purpose of their joint home, living expenses and so on. This part of his Judgment had been first preoeded by a considerable citation from the Judgment of Lord Justice Denning in the case of Cobb v. Cobb, reported in 1955 2 All England Reports, p. 696, and the citation was followed by this sentence or (I am not, I hope, being discourteous to the learned Judge) collocation of words because, unfortunately, strictly speaking it is not a sentence: "Of course in this case tne property is not in the joint names. That seems to me to indicate quitu clearly that what the Court has to do in the case where the house is acquired in the name of one spouse alone and both contributed to it from sources of their own".
It would appear that something has been omitted, and one of the things that has gravely troubled the Court in considering this case is whether there is inherent in those words, or possibly omittod in the transcript, something showing that it was the learned Judge's view that both husband and wife contributed in fact to the purchase of the house in whatever proportions from their own respective resources. The language that follows, to which I have briefly referred in connection with his view of the evidence, is, at any rate in some respects, not entirely consistent with that view. All I can clearly assert on those findings is: first, that the husband had acquired the house from his mother, that it was in his namo solely and that he was solely responsible to the mortgagee for the payment off of the balance of...
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