Donoghue v Stevenson (1932) is one of the most important court cases in legal history. Decided by the House of Lords, it basically created the modern law of negligence used across common law countries worldwide, including Scotland and England.
On the evening of Sunday 26 August 1928, during the Glasgow Trades Holiday, a woman named May Donoghue took a train to Paisley, Renfrewshire. She went to the Wellmeadow Café with a friend. Her friend ordered a pear and ice, while Donoghue asked for a Scotsman ice cream float, which is ice cream mixed with ginger beer.
The café owner, Francis Minghella, brought over a tumbler of ice cream and poured ginger beer on it from a brown, opaque bottle labelled “D. Stevenson, Glen Lane, Paisley.” Donoghue drank some of the float, but when her friend poured the rest of the ginger beer into the tumbler, a decomposed snail floated out of the bottle.
Donoghue felt sick, complained of stomach pain, saw a doctor on 29 August, and was admitted to Glasgow Royal Infirmary on 16 September for emergency treatment. She was diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis and shock.
The ginger beer was made by David Stevenson, who ran his company at 11 and 12 Glen Lane, Paisley, less than a mile from the café. Donoghue contacted Walter Leechman, a local solicitor whose firm had recently handled a similar case called Mullen v AG Barr & Co Ltd. On 9 April 1929, Leechman issued a writ on Donoghue’s behalf against Stevenson, claiming £500 in damages and £50 in costs.
Before this case, if you got hurt by a product, you usually had to show you had a contract with the seller to make a legal claim. But Donoghue had not bought the ginger beer herself, her friend had. So she had no contract with the café owner or with Stevenson the manufacturer. This meant she had to try a different legal route and claim damages for negligence.
The problem was that at the time, there was no general duty of care in law. Only very specific situations allowed negligence claims, and most of those involved contracts. The recent Mullen case, where children found dead mice in ginger beer bottles, had gone against the claimants at the Court of Session.
The court there ruled that manufacturers only owed consumers a duty of care if there was a contract, if they deliberately hid danger, or if the product was inherently dangerous like explosives. Ginger beer obviously did not fit any of those categories.
Donoghue’s legal team argued that manufacturers should owe a duty of care to consumers when the goods could not be examined before use, like a sealed opaque bottle. The case first went to the Court of Session Outer House, where Lord Moncrieff ruled in Donoghue’s favor on 27 June 1930, saying manufacturers of food and drink should not be able to avoid responsibility just because the danger was hidden.
Stevenson appealed to the Inner House, where the same judges from the Mullen case heard it and overturned the decision, with Lord Alness noting that the only difference between the two cases was “a mouse in a ginger-beer bottle” versus “a snail in a ginger-beer bottle.”
Donoghue then appealed to the House of Lords, filing her petition on 25 February 1931. She was granted permission to pursue the case as a pauper, declaring she was “not worth in all the world the sum of five pounds.” Her legal team worked for free. The appeal was heard on 10 and 11 December 1931 by five Law Lords, and judgment was delivered on 26 May 1932.
The court ruled 3-2 in Donoghue’s favor. Lord Atkin, who gave the most famous judgment, laid out his neighbour principle: “You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour.” He defined neighbours as “persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation.”
Lord Thankerton agreed that manufacturers who sealed their products and prevented examination had brought themselves into a direct relationship with consumers. Lord Macmillan stated that “the categories of negligence are never closed” and found that Stevenson’s carelessness was proven because bottles were left where snails could access them.
The dissenters, Lord Buckmaster and Lord Tomlin, argued that expanding liability beyond contract would open the floodgates, with Lord Buckmaster calling it “little short of outrageous” to make manufacturers responsible for every bottle they produced.
The case never actually went to a full trial on the facts because Stevenson died on 12 November 1932, aged 69. His executors eventually settled out of court in December 1934 for £200 of the original £500 claimed. Donoghue herself died on 19 March 1958 at age 59 in Gartloch Mental Hospital. The Wellmeadow Café closed around 1931 and was demolished in 1959.
The neighbour principle from this case became the foundation for negligence law globally. It was further developed through cases like Hedley Byrne v Heller in 1963, Home Office v Dorset Yacht Co in 1970, and Caparo Industries plc v Dickman in 1990 which added a three-part test requiring foreseeability, proximity, and fairness.
Lord Reid in the Dorset Yacht case called Donoghue “a milestone” and said Lord Atkin’s principle “ought to apply unless there is some justification or valid explanation for its exclusion.”
Interestingly, whether there was actually a snail in the bottle was never proven in court. Lord Justice MacKinnon once joked that it was found there was never a snail at all, but he did not know the trial never happened because Stevenson died. The case is so well known that its name is used as a metaphor for groundbreaking decisions in other legal areas.
