David Chapelton went to a beach with his friend, Miss Andrews, at Cold Knap, a district of Barry in south Wales.

The county court judge held the council would have been negligent but that liability was exempted by the ticket.

Therefore, the ticket was merely a receipt of the contract, and the exclusion clause could not be incorporated as a term, because it was too late.

As I read the learned county court judge's judgment (and we have had the advantage of a note taken by Mr. Carey Evans in addition to the summary reasons which the learned county court judge gives for his decision), he said that the plaintiff had sufficient notice of the special contract printed on the ticket and was, accordingly, bound thereby – that is to say, as I understand it, that the learned county court judge has treated this case as a case similar to the many cases which have been tried in reference to conditions printed on tickets, and more particularly, on railway tickets – and he came to the conclusion that the local authority made an offer to hire out this chair to Mr. Chapelton only on certain conditions, which appear on the ticket, namely, that they, the council, would not be responsible for any accident which arose from the use of the chair, and they say that Mr. Chapelton hired the chair on the basis that that was one of the terms of the contract between him and themselves, the local authority.

Then the notice contained these further words: "The public are respectfully requested to obtain tickets properly issued from the automatic punch in their presence from the Chair Attendants."

It is wrong, I think, to look at the circumstance that the plaintiff obtained his receipt at the same time as he took his chair as being in any way a modification of the contract which I have indicated.

This was a general offer to the general public, and I think it is right to say that one must take into account here that there was no reason why anybody taking one of these chairs should necessarily obtain a receipt at the moment he took his chair – and, indeed, the notice is inconsistent with that, because it "respectfully requests" the public to obtain receipts for their money.

I do not think that the notice excluding liability was a term of the contract at all, and I find it unnecessary to refer to the different authorities which were cited to us, save that I would mention a passage in the judgment of Mellish L.J.

This, therefore, is not, I think, as Mr. Ryder Richardson has argued, a question of fact for the learned county court judge.

The learned county court judge decided this case relying upon a dictum of Sankey L.J.

If a man does an act which constitutes the making of a contract, such as taking a railway ticket, or depositing his bag in a cloak-room, he will be bound by the terms of the document handed to him by the servant of the carriers or bailees; but if he merely pays money for something and receives a receipt for it, or does something which clearly only amounts to that, he cannot be deemed to have entered into a contract in the terms of the words that his creditor has chosen to print on the back of the receipt, unless, of course, the creditor has taken reasonable steps to bring the terms of the proposed contract to the mind of the man.

In this case there was no evidence upon which the learned county court judge could find that the defendants had taken any steps to bring the terms of their proposed contract to the mind of the plaintiff.

in order to have the right to sit on a chair on the beach, and he was asked to take a ticket in the form of a receipt for that purpose, and was given a document which shows nothing on the face of it, except that the man had the right to sit in the chair until 7.30 P.M. on the day when the accident occurred and the fact that the ticket was not transferable.

under those circumstances for the privilege of sitting in a chair on the beach would think for one moment that some conditions were being imposed upon him which would limit his ordinary rights, or that the document he received when paying his 2d.