FRIEND TO RAY

Taranaki Daily News, 2 September 1933, Page 7

FRIEND TO RAY

£13,000 DAMAGES AWARDED. SEQUEL TO CAR FATALITY. - Thirteen thousand pounds’ damages was awarded by Mr. Justice du Parcq in the King’s Bench Division, London, to the widow and son of an underwriter killed in a motor collision near Maidenhead last December. The widow, Mrs. Mary Mitchell Leslie Wood, of Cumberland Place, W., was awarded £11,500 damages, and her son, Anthony James Wood, £l5OO, against .Mr. A. Gleitzmah, furrier, of Knightrider Street, E.C., who was driving the car in which Mr. Arthur Frederick Wood was a passenger when the accident occurred. . . Mr. Wood had missed his tram, at Paddington, and his friend, Mr. Gleitzman, was driving him home to Goring-on-Thames. The car collided with a stationary lorry at Littlewick, on the LondonReading Road, and Mr. Wood died from his injuries. The owners of the lorry, the Thatcham Road Transport Station, of Thatcham, near Newbury, were also defendants to the action, but Mr. Justice du Parcq held that there had been no negligence on their part. It was stated that Mr. Wood, who was 36 years of age, was earning £3OOO a year, and the agreed value of his estate was £4500, excluding two life policies totalling £12,100. The payment under life policies, said Mr. Justice du Parcq, did not affect the question of damages. His duty was to shut his eyes to the fact that any sums had been received under them by the widow. • . , , ‘ „ “So far as the assessing of damages goes,” he added, “it is not a task which can be performed according to any rule or measure. It depends on a large number of uncertain factors. “Mr. Wood, at the outset of his career, was making something like £3OOO a year. He might have gone on to make a much larger income. But human life is uncertain. He had gone through the war, and a pension was paid to him because he suffered from neurasthenia. I cannot leave out of account the possibility that the old enemy, neurasthenia, might have come un again, making it difficult for him to do his work. “I have to do the best I can, and though I am not going to pretend that the result I have arrived .at is completely satisfactory to myself, I have come to the conclusion that I ought to