Clause 7(b) said, ‘It shall be a condition of this agreement that [Wickman] shall send its representatives to visit [the six largest UK car manufacturers of the time] at least once in every week for the purpose of soliciting orders for panel presses.’ Clause 11 said either party could end the agreement if the other was in material breach and did not change its behaviour on 60 days' notice.

Clause 7(b) requires that over a long period each of the six firms shall be visited every week by one or other of two named representatives.

But if Schuler's contention is right failure to make even one visit entitle them to terminate the contract however blameless Wickman might be.

I am all the more happy to refrain from so doing because the judgments of Mocatta J., Stephenson L.J., and indeed of Edmund Davies L.J., on construction, give me complete satisfaction and I could in any case add little of value to their reasons.

I would only add that, for my part, to call the clause arbitrary, capricious or fantastic, or to introduce as a test of its validity the ubiquitous reasonable man (I do not know whether he is English or German) is to assume, contrary to the evidence, that both parties to this contract adopted a standard of easygoing tolerance rather than one of aggressive, insistent punctuality and efficiency.

I note finally, that the result of treating the clause, so careful and specific in its requirements as a term is, in effect, to deprive the Appellants of any remedy in respect of admitted and by no means minimal breaches.

The Arbitrator's finding that these breaches were not " material " was not, in my opinion, justified in law in the face of the parties' own characterisation of them in their document: indeed the fact that he was able to do so, and so leave the Appellants without remedy, argues strongly that the legal basis of his finding—that clause 7(b) was merely a term—is unsound.