RAO BAHADUR P AYYANNAH CHETTY Vs. PKSUBRAMANIA IYER

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The Chief Justice :This is an appeal from a judgment of Coutts-Trotter, J. in which he found in favour of a Commission Agent that he had earned his commission.

(2.) All these cases - and there have been a very great number of them in England - depend, in the first place, on what is the contract between the parties. Where you have a contract in plain terms stating when commission is payable and when it is not, there is no difficulty : but, where you have a contract containing terms which may bear more than one interpretation, there have been many cases where difficulties have arisen. Different Judges have taken, different views and have left to some extent the law not as clear as one would wish to find it : but, in my judgment, one gets very little assistance from examining those authorities. What one has to do is to take the contract and the surrounding circumstances and see what was the intention of the parties to be deduced therefrom.

(3.) In this case the contract was verbal and it is stated by the plaintiff in his evidence, but the defendant has not had the opportunity of stating his version because he died before the case was heard. The plaintiff says, "The defendant engaged me for the purpose of purchasing the house. The terms of the engagement were that I should negotiate for the purchaser at a commission of two per cent, on the purchase price." In the absence of words to the contrary, "purchasing a house" means the completion of the purchase of that house. It does not mean a conditional contract, or even an unconditional contract, for the purchase and sale of it. In the same way, "the purchase price" means the price paid and not the price agreed to be paid conditionally or unconditionally. For that proposition, there is direct authority in the case of Peacock V/s. Freeman 4 T.L.R. 541, where Lord Esher, Master of the Rolls said, "Land could only be said to be sold when the conveyance was complete, not when there was a mere contract to sell," and, interpreting the contract, Lord Justice Lindley said that the meaning of the contract was that if a sale were effected commission should be payable and that, though there had been acceptance of the terms of the contract itself, the commission being payable on sale, none was payable where the sale fell through.