Court case[1947] AC 1

The Mersey Docks and Harbour Board owned mobile cranes and employed drivers to operate them. It let a crane, with its driver, to a firm of stevedores, Coggins and Griffith, for use in loading a ship. The contract of hire provided that the driver should be the servant of the hirers, but the Board paid his wages and retained the power to dismiss him. The stevedores could direct the driver as to which goods to lift and where to put them, but they had no power to tell him how to operate the crane. While loading the ship, the driver negligently operated the crane and injured a checker employed by a firm of forwarding agents, who sued both the Board and the stevedores.

The House of Lords held the Board, the general employer, liable, and not the stevedores. There is a heavy burden on a general or permanent employer to shift the prima facie responsibility for the negligence of servants engaged and paid by him, and that burden can be discharged only where the temporary employer has the authority to control the manner in which the work is done, not merely what work is to be done. Here the stevedores could tell the driver what to do but not how to drive the crane; the driver's negligence was in the manner of operating the Board's crane, which remained under the Board's control. The contractual term between the Board and the hirers could not affect the rights of the injured third person.