English Contract Law General Principles

In Blackburn Bobbin v Allen & Sons 1918(388), the defendant timber merchants, based in Hull, contracted in 1914 with the claimant buyer to deliver them Finnish birch timber “on rail at Hull”. The deliveries were to commence in June or July of 1914, ending in November that year. The First World War broke out before any deliveries could be made. The war made it impossible to ship timber from Finland due to the presence of German warships in the Baltic. The defendant argued that the contract

The Court of Appeal held that the contract had not become frustrated. Pickford LJ,…

“To dissolve the contract the matter relied on must be something which both parties had in their minds when they entered into the contract, such for instance as the existence of the music-hall in Taylor v. Caldwell, or the continuance of the vessel in readiness to perform the contract, as in Jackson v. Union Marine Insurance Co. Here there is nothing to show that the [buyer] contemplated, and there is no reason why they should be deemed to have contemplated, that the sellers should continue to have the ordinary facilities for dispatching the timber from Finland.”(389)…