Laytime
and Demurrage Reception – 26th May 2016 – John Schofield’s Address
My Lord’s, ladies and gentlemen,
On behalf of Taylor and Francis, their parent company,
Informa, as well as Michael Daiches and myself, may we welcome you to this
Reception to mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of the
first edition of my book, Laytime and Demurrage in 1986 and the publication of
the 7th edition earlier this year.
It also marks 35 years of Mike Daiches’ tenure as Editor of Lloyd’s
Maritime Law Newsletter.
The origins of the concept of Laytime and Demurrage, can, as Chapter One of the 7th edition
of my book makes clear, via the Laws of
Oleron and Eleanor of Acquitaine, the
wife first of Henry VII of France, then Henry II of England (who is in the news
this week, which has been dubbed Henry II week for what happened to Thomas a
Becket), be traced back to the Lex Rhodia which governed
trade in the Mediterranean for over a thousand years. It was Eleanor who was
also the mother of Richard I, Richard the
Lionheart, and regent whilst he was away at the crusades, who introduced the laws of Oleron, part of her native
Acquitaine, into English law.
My own connections with the sea and maritime matters, do not
go back quite that far, but they do go back
55 years to when I joined Dartmouth or Britannia Royal Naval
College, HMS DARTMOUTH to give it its
full name, in 1961. I am particularly pleased to see 2 of those who joined the
Navy with me, so long ago, with us today. In those days, there was no graduate entry to
Dartmouth so I went straight from school.
A few years later when Mike Daiches joined, he already had a
law degree.
I joined as a General List officer and the Murray Scheme of
entry, under which I joined provided for
a four year training cycle before being given my first complement job. That involved time at Dartmouth undergoing
partly professional and partly academic training, a term as a Cadet in the Dartmouth Training
Squadron and a year in the fleet as a Midshipman. The wider experience I gained in that period
ranged from a number of hours flying training in Tiger Moth biplanes at
Robourgh airport, made of wood and canvas, doing low altitude bomb attacks on
the Cape Wrath lighthouse in Hawker Hunter jets and even submarine escape training from a 100
foot tower at HMS DOLPHIN at Gosport to stripping down a diesel engine and
rebuilding it in the workshops at Dartmouth. I can assure you that if you have
ever done a loop the loop in an open cockpit biplane and looked up at the
ground, that is something you will not
forget.
At the end of the 4 year cycle having gained a certificate
of competence as a daytime bridge watch
keeper and an Ocean Navigation Certifcate confirming my competence at star and
sun sights , I was one of half a dozen officers provisionally selected for full
time legal training lasting approaching
4 years, the first two years being to get up to law degree standard, then the
Bar Professional Training Course, call
to the Bar and finally pupillage. The Navy’s thinking at the time was that you
can turn a sailor into a lawyer but not the other way round. That half dozen provisionally selected was
eventually reduced to two to actually undergo legal training and I was one of the two so selected to start
training at the Inns of Court School of Law here in Gray’s Inn in 1972, after
eleven years in the Navy. It was also in 1972 that I joined Gray’s Inn.
Amongst those I met when I arrived at Gray’s Inn was my good
friend Jim Collins, who is with us today and who can fairly be described at the
Godfather of Laytime and Demurrage.
Having returned from Uganda, where he was a teacher, Jim decided to
strike out in a new direction and read for the Bar, but because his first
degree was in Physics and pure Mathematics, he also was required to do the course at the Inns of Court School of Law
to get up to law degree standard, as did another friend of ours, Guy Jones, who
is due to go into hospital today for an operation tomorrow and who we wish
well, who also had to do the degree standard course, even though he did have a
law degree, although one issued by Perth Univerity, that is Perth in Western
Australia. After we were each called to
the Bar, we all went our separate ways, me
back to the Navy, I left the Navy in
1980, my last job being standing by HMS GLASGOW during fitting out in Swan
Hunter’s Shipyard and participating in extended sea trials of over 6 months
with her, invaluable experience for dealing with shipbuilding disputes.
On leaving the Navy, I got a job with Bilbrough’s the Managers of the
London P&I Club, handling the full range of P&I and Defence cases,
including laytime and demurrage cases.
Jim, who by then had gone back to teaching, but this time teaching law
at what is now part of Middlesex University, persuaded me to do a 2 year part time course
at what is now the Guildhall University, resulting in me gaining a Master’s
degree in Business law.
Jim then approached Lloyds of London press, saying he would
like to write a law book asking what would they like it to be on. They said
they would like a book on Laytime and
Demurrage. He said he didn’t know
anything about laytime and demurrage but
he knew someone who did, me, so we signed a contract that we would produce a
150,000 word draft within 12 months.
Towards the end of that period, in mid 1984, Jim got the
offer of an excellent job in Hong Kong, which he naturally accepted. By then I had written 10,000 words but had
also done a lot of research, which left me with the decision of whether to
complete the project on my own or abandon it.
I decided to complete it. The
first edition in those pre-desk top days was produced on a manual portable
typewriter with the aid of a bottle of snopake.
There is a quotation about writing this sort of book from
Sir Winston Churhill, who said:
“It starts off as a mild flirtation, it becomes a love
affair, a deep and passionate matter and when you can stand the pain no more,
it is flung upon an ungrateful public.”
The first part is certainly true, but perhaps not the last.
For at least the last six months before completion, I was starting work on the book at 5 am,
working for a couple of hours and then going off to my day job at Bilbrough’s
plus working at least one full day each weekend. It put quite a strain on my family to whom, I
would like to say sorry, to my daughters
who are with us here tonight and their mother, who is unable to be with us
tonight.
Anyway it was eventually done 2 years late and I delivered
the manuscript to the publishers, who I assumed would send it to a High Court
judge or some other eminent lawyer to pronounce on its worth. However just 6 weeks later, I got a phone
call from Ted, the production man at Lloyds asking if I could read the proofs. Incidentally that production time was much
quicker than any subsequent edition. [show
first edition]
The second edition was
published in 1990, by which time I had left Bilbrough’s and become a director
of Ravenscroft Shipping, a firm of Baltic Exchange shipbrokers and London
Agents for various South American ship owners and Chartering interests and a
Principal on the Baltic Exchange, and this second edition together with the
third edition of Time Charters, published the previous year and the first
edition of The Ratification of Maritime Comventions also published in 1990, formed the basis of
the Lloyd’s Shipping Law series, which currently stands at 28 titles.
In the early 1990s, I was asked by Texaco to analyse and
report on the demurrage due in respect of 250 voyages in respect of which they
were in dispute with the US Internal Revenue
Service and for which Texaco bought me my first computer. That was my introduction to the world of
computers. A couple of weeks before I
was due to give evidence in Houston. Texaco settled their dispute.
In September 1993, I was approached by Mr Zhang Yong Jian,
the Deputy Managing Director of Dalian Ocean Shipping Co, part of the Cosco
Group, who asked my permission to translate my book, Laytime and Demurrage into
Chinese, a request I passed on the publishers.
They gave their approval to this project and this is the results of his
labours in the familiar Lloyds Shipping law colours. I must say that producing a Chinese
translation must have been an even more daunting task than writing the book in
the first place. Laytime and Demurrage
is, as far as I know, the only major English law text book to be translated
into Chinese.
The Maritime Law Newsletter was first published in 1979 and
the very first edition contained a relatively short report of a laytime and
demurrage arbitration case. Mike Daiches
has taken that concept of reporting
awards in an anonymous form and
developed it with such awards now being reported in a numbered series. In 2015, 19 such cases were reported, of
which I was a member of the tribunal in 10 of them, and drafted 9 of those
awards.
Laytime and Demurrage was the first text book to include
reports of Arbitration awards as published in the Newsletter, and did so from
the first edition. All the major text books have now adopted this practice.
I am sometimes asked if the majority of my arbitration cases
are laytime and demurrage cases. The
answer is that normally only a small proportion are such cases. I mentioned the Texaco cases earlier. However, I and two senior LMAA colleagues are about to
publish an award relating to a COA and the demurrage due in respect of 81 disputed
voyages plus sums due under the Asbatankvoy form of charter ice clause. Although
every voyage charter has an ice clause relating to delays due to ice, there are remarkably few cases relating to
such delays and the last reported case was in the 1920s, almost 100 years ago. The
total sum in issue in this case is
around USD 4.5, million.most of which is demurrage
London Arbitration is sometimes criticised as slow and
costly. I would only mention that earlier this year, as sole arbitrator, I
published two awards for unpaid freight, in each case approaching USD 1.5
million. Each case took just 22 days
from presentation of Claims submissions to publication of the award and the
cost of each was only £2,500 less than that payable under the Small Claims
procedure. I contrast that with a
challenge in the High Court made to an award I published last year. Submissions
relating to the application for leave to appeal were completed in August, but
it took until the end of February this year, over six months, for the High
Court to reject the application, which they did in a half page email stating
that the application was unjustified.
I will ask Mike Daiches if he wishes to add anything and after he has
done so, I would invite you all to enjoy yourselves and circulate widely, and
talk not just to those you already know, but talk to those both younger and
older than yourself. You will certainly
make new acquaintances and possibly new friends.
Thank you very much.
