Court case[1931] AC 333

Cyril Tolley was a well-known amateur golfer. The defendants, chocolate manufacturers, published without his knowledge or consent an advertisement containing a caricature of him in golfing attitude with a packet of Fry's chocolate protruding from his pocket, together with a limerick comparing the excellence of the chocolate to that of his drive. Tolley sued for libel, pleading an innuendo: that readers would understand that he had agreed to the advertisement for money, and so had prostituted his reputation as an amateur golfer for advertising purposes, conduct unworthy of an amateur and likely to lead to his exclusion from clubs.

The House of Lords held that the caricature, in the circumstances known to the public (that a firm would not ordinarily use a famous amateur's likeness without paying him), was capable of bearing the defamatory meaning alleged, and that the jury was entitled to find that it did. The innuendo was therefore made out. The Court of Appeal's judgment for the defendants was therefore reversed on liability, but a new trial was ordered limited to the question of damages. The decision turned on the principle that the meaning of a publication is to be judged in the light of what ordinary readers would infer from it, and that an apparently harmless advertisement may carry a sting for those who know the plaintiff's position.