Re Aster (an Infant)
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | THE MASTER OF THE ROLLS,LORD JUSTICE JENKINS |
| Judgment Date | 24 March 1955 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1955] EWCA Civ J0324-5 |
| Court | Court of Appeal |
| Date | 24 March 1955 |
[1955] EWCA Civ J0324-5
In The Supreme Court of Judicature
Court Of Appeal
The Master Of The Rolls
(Sir Raymond Evershed) and
Lord Justice Jenkins
No need not trouble you, Mr Plattsills. I would just like to say that inquities about this order have led me to think that (although I do not think it is worth while pursuing it) the reason why there was such long delay was that those responsible, or who had to be consulted in the drawing up of the Order, kept coming back at considerable intervals with new points upon the draft.
This is an appeal from an Order made by Mr Justice Harman which bears date the 1st December 1954, in regard to the present custody and maintenance of a small girl called ermadette ary ater or McNiff, a child who was born on the 25th May 1952. As the learned Judge said, the case is a difficult one, and indeed all these cases are necessarily anxious cases; but in this particular case the little girl's launching upon her voyage in this world was the more unfortunate in that she is the fruit of an illicit union between her mother, who was then a young girl of under twenty, and the father, who was very greatly her senior, and who was at the time living away from his wife. The relations between the mother and the father became somewhat embittered, and the Order from which the appeal is brought was an order made upon an application by way of originating one taken out by the father. Let me say at once that this is a case in which the natural father has never denied the paternity, and has obviously taken an interest in the child, and according to a note of what the Judge said, obviously has an affection for it. The Summons asks, first of all, that the infant may be a Ward of Court, and it asks for the custody and care and control, and so on.
The Order appealed from directed that, the child having become a Ward of Court, the child should remain a ward during her inority or until further order, and that she should be committed to the care and control of a Mr and Mrs Asher, Mr Asher being in the fast the father's brother. The order then proceeded to give directions for the child to be handed over,it then being in the actual care of a wall-known society known as the Incorporated Society of the Crusade of Rescue and Homes for destitute Catholic Children; and it is of importance that an undertaking vas given and signed by Mr and Mrs Asher that the child be brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, into which Church it had already been baptized.
It is not, perhaps, surprising that this young woman should feel a certain bitterness against the man with whom she lived and from whom she has parted; and I am bound to say that I think the present appeal is to be attributed in soma measure to that bitterness, and in some measure to religious zeal rather than to the single purpose of the welfare of the child. The reasons why I say that will later appear. But the Notice of Appeal is certainly a bold document, for it asks that the Order made by Mr Justice Harman may be reversed, that the Summons may be dismissed altogether, and that the coats be paid to the mother.
The two notes which were made of the learned Judge's observations by the learned Counsel appearing before him have been supplied to us, and they are in substantially the same form, except that Mr Platts-Mells' note is somewhat fuller. I have said that the learned Judge observed that the father was greatly attached to the child, and, putting the matter quite shortly, the learned Judge came to the conclusion that the best thing to do in the difficult circumstances of this case was to let the child go to Mr and Mrs Asher. It was a case – and this is fundamental to the decision – in which the mother, being a young girl, quite naturally...
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