## Facts

- Post Office workmen repairing underground telephone cables in a public street opened a manhole and placed a canvas tent over it.
- Four lit red paraffin lamps were placed around the tent as warnings.
- During a tea break, the workmen left the manhole open, the tent unsecured, and the lamps burning; they removed a ladder from the manhole and left it nearby.
- Two boys (ages 8 and 10) entered the tent, took a lamp and the ladder, and climbed into the manhole to explore.
- As they returned to the surface, the lamp fell into the manhole, broke, and released paraffin that vaporized and ignited, causing an explosion and severe burns to the 8-year-old.

## Issues

1. Whether the Post Office employees owed and breached a duty of care by leaving an unattended, dangerous “allurement” in a public street where children might meddle with it.
2. Whether the claimant’s burns were too remote because the injuries occurred through an unforeseeable mechanism (a paraffin-vapor explosion), even if burn injuries from the lamps were foreseeable.

## Decision

- The House of Lords allowed the appeal and held the Lord Advocate liable in negligence.
- It was reasonably foreseeable that leaving an open manhole and lit paraffin lamps unattended could attract children and result in burn injuries.
- The fact that the burns were caused by an unexpected explosion did not prevent liability because the damage was not different in kind from the harm that was foreseeable.
- The children’s meddling did not break the chain of causation because it was within the risk created by leaving the site unattended.

## Legal Principles

- For remoteness in negligence, the relevant foreseeability inquiry is whether the kind (type) of damage was foreseeable, not whether the precise sequence of events or mechanism was foreseeable.
- A defendant remains liable where a foreseeable source of danger causes foreseeable-kind harm in an unpredictable way, so long as the harm falls within the scope of the risk created by the negligence.
- Where a defendant creates a dangerous attraction to children in a public place, children’s inquisitive interference is commonly treated as foreseeable and within the duty to take reasonable precautions.

## Conclusion

The House of Lords held that the defendants’ negligence in leaving an unattended, dangerous attraction on a public street made burn injuries foreseeable, and liability was not avoided merely because the burns occurred via an unforeseeable explosion rather than a more predictable fire-related mishap.


Hughes v. Lord Advocate, [1963] A.C. 837 (H.L. 1963)