## Facts

- Glasgow Corporation operated a tearoom in a mansion house at King’s Park, Glasgow.
- A church/Sunday school group sheltering from heavy rain was allowed, for a small fee, to eat its own food in the tearoom.
- The entrance passageway included a sweet counter; about a dozen children were queued there.
- Two adults from the group carried a metal tea urn containing hot tea along the passage, which narrowed to about 3 feet 3 inches at its narrowest point.
- The adults asked the children to stand aside and proceeded past them in single file.
- For unknown reasons, the rear carrier released his grip; the urn tipped and boiling tea spilled onto several children, causing serious scalding injuries.
- The Outer House dismissed the claims; the Inner House (First Division) reversed and found liability; the House of Lords reversed and dismissed the actions.

## Issues

1. Whether the tearoom manageress, acting for the occupier, breached a duty of reasonable care by permitting the urn to be carried through the passage while children were present.
2. Whether injury from an adult unexpectedly releasing the urn handle was a reasonably foreseeable and probable consequence of allowing the urn’s passage under ordinary conditions.
3. Whether negligence could be inferred despite the cause of the mishap being unexplained.

## Decision

- The House of Lords allowed the appeal and restored the trial dismissal of the actions.
- The occupier owed a general duty of reasonable care to lawful visitors, including children.
- On these facts, the manageress did not breach that duty by failing to take additional precautions (such as clearing children from the passage).
- The accident resulted from an unexplained mishap that was not reasonably foreseeable as a probable consequence of permitting responsible adults to carry the urn with ordinary care.

## Legal Principles

- Negligence liability is confined to harm that a reasonable person of ordinary intelligence and experience would foresee as a reasonable and probable consequence of the act or omission.
- The standard of care is objective (the reasonable person), excluding both undue apprehension and overconfidence, while remaining sensitive to the surrounding circumstances.
- An occupier may generally assume that responsible adults will exercise ordinary care in routine activities, absent features making the activity obviously and necessarily dangerous unless special precautions are taken.
- The mere occurrence of an accident, without proof of a foreseeable risk created or unreasonably left unaddressed by the defendant, does not establish breach.

## Conclusion

The House of Lords held that, although the occupier owed visitors a general duty of reasonable care, it was not negligent because the children’s scalding was not a reasonably probable result of permitting a normally safe tea urn to be carried through the passage by responsible adults, and the mishap’s cause was unexplained.


Muir v. Glasgow Corp., [1943] A.C. 448 (H.L. 1943)