Court case[1951] AC 850

Miss Stone was standing on the highway outside her house in a quiet side road in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, when she was struck and injured by a cricket ball hit by a batsman playing on the adjoining ground of the Cheetham Cricket Club. The ball travelled about a hundred yards and cleared a fence about seventeen feet above the level of the pitch. The evidence was that balls had been hit out of the ground into the road only about six times in the previous thirty years, and no one had been injured before. She sued the club members in negligence and nuisance.

The House of Lords held the club not liable. A reasonable man does not guard against every risk that is conceivably foreseeable; he takes precautions against risks that are reasonably likely to happen. The test is whether the risk of damage to a person on the road was so small that a reasonable man, considering the matter from the point of view of safety, would have thought it right to refrain from taking steps to prevent the danger. Here the chance of a ball being hit out and striking someone was so slight that the club was not negligent in failing to take further precautions. The claim in nuisance failed with the claim in negligence.