Court case[1943] AC 448

A church picnic party, caught by rain, was allowed by the manageress of tea rooms in a park owned by the Glasgow Corporation to take their tea inside. Two members of the party carried a heavy tea urn, containing several gallons of hot tea, along a narrow passage in which a number of children were buying sweets and ice cream at a counter. For some unexplained reason one of the men lost his grip, the urn tilted, and several children were scalded. The children sued the Corporation, alleging that the manageress had been negligent in permitting the urn to be carried through the passage without clearing the children away.

The House of Lords held the Corporation not liable. The manageress was bound to take reasonable care to guard against dangers that a reasonable person would foresee. Carrying an urn by two careful adults is not an operation that a reasonable person would regard as dangerous to those near it, and she had no reason to anticipate that the bearers would lose their grip. Lord Macmillan explained that the standard of foresight of the reasonable man is an impersonal test: "It eliminates the personal equation and is independent of the idiosyncrasies of the particular person whose conduct is in question." Some people are unduly timorous and imagine every path beset with lions; others are over-confident; the reasonable man is neither.