UR TV CAST

The Employment Appeal Tribunal had, therefore, erred in their approach.. REFORMERS or reactionaries, Home Secretaries have to deal with two of the most powerful trade unions in the country. The teeth to tail figures of the Royal Marines were better than those of the Navy as a whole. This meant that a greater proportion of the men were employed on operational tasks and fewer at home in barracks, training establishments and other administrative tasks.

This was largely due to the fact that the Marines had adopted the functional system, as opposed to the old home port system of the Royal Navy.It was very satisfactory to have more men in the operational teeth than in the administrative tail but that led to increased disturbance and no assurance that when a man had finished his foreign service and come home he would be stationed near his home port, where probably his wife had established a home. So we had the vicious circle: more on operational tasks, more disturbance, less home service and inevitably fewer recruits.The Marines were the Navy’s handymen who, at short notice, could be turned into soldiers, sailors or parachute troops. But for Wall it had to be borne in mind that if so small a corps accept too many commitments it meant more foreign service, more disturbance and strain all round, which in turn would reflect on recruiting figures. Wall believed that the contented man was his service’s best recruiter, and therefore detained the Commons at length as to how the lot of the marine could be improved.His great friend Sir Patrick Duffy, the former Labour MP for Sheffield Attercliffe, like Wall a brave war hero, described to me their joint visit to the Marines in the Arctic during training: “I take my hat off to any man over the age of 60 who could go through the Arctic rigours in a way that Patrick Wall would subject himself, to be with his beloved Marines.”Patrick Henry Bligh Wall, politician and Marine officer: born 19 October 1916; commissioned in the Royal Marines 1935, Acting Major 1943, Major 1949; MC 1945; MP (Conservative) for Haltemprice Division of Hull 1954- 55, for Haltemprice Division of East Yorkshire 1955-83, for Beverley 1983- 87; Chairman, Monday Club 1978-80; Kt 1981; married 1953 Sheila Putnam (died 1983; one daughter); died Chichester, West Sussex 15 May 1998..

Secondly, the Employment Appeal Tribunal’s own jurisprudence clearly established that a point not taken by a party in the industrial tribunal could not be taken on appeal even though the failure to take it originally was due to the lack of skill or experience of the party’s advocate, and even though the omission could have been rectified by the industrial tribunal taking the point itself.The self-same considerations which underlay the Employment Appeal Tribunal’s approach to fresh points on appeal applied with no less force to the question whether or not to operate the Henderson v Henderson rule. In the first place, it must be recognised that the rule applied in full measure in ordinary courts irrespective of whether the person being estopped had or had not been represented in the earlier proceedings. It had found, as one of those special circumstances, that an industrial tribunal should be readier than an ordinary court of law not to apply the rule in Henderson v Henderson, given in particular that the parties before such a tribunal were encouraged not to be legally represented.That approach posed considerable difficulties. There was no doubt that issue estoppel applied in industrial tribunal cases, but the present appeal raised the question of how an industrial tribunal should approach the wider form of issue estoppel, or the rule in Henderson v Henderson, and whether special circumstances existed for not applying the rule.The Employment Appeal Tribunal had concluded that the second tribunal had not had regard to the special circumstances which could make it unjust to apply the Henderson v Henderson rule.