Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, CH (1890 – 1971)

As an addendum to yesterday's post, many of A. P. Herbert's Punch stories have been collected and published in a book under the title "Uncommon Law", and there may be those of you who remember some of them being dramatised on the BBC in the late 1960s in a series called "Misleading Cases". Although written to be funny, his stories were always founded on proper law. One of my favourites involved a collision between a car and a rowing-boat on a flooded road - the point being that the anti-collision rules of the road and the sea are the opposite of each other. On the road you keep to the left, at sea you keep to the right. So the issue was - is a flooded road still a road, or does it become subject to maritime law? The car was keeping left, while the rowing-boat was obeying the "port to port" rule, and bang! Perhaps the most amazing aspect of these stories is that apparently when they were published in other countries many of them were taken seriously and as a true representation of English law!