OSMOND v. HUGHES
June 5, 1967
COURT OF APPEAL
CORAM
- OLLENNU
- AZU CRABBE
- APALOO JJ.A
Areas of Law
- Property and Real Estate Law
- Equity and Trusts
- Evidence Law
- Probate and Succession
- Civil Procedure
June 5, 1967
COURT OF APPEAL
CORAM
AI Generated Summary
The Court of Appeal reversed a High Court judgment in a dispute over Plot No. 21, Ashanti Road, Takoradi. The late Osmond Alfred Hughes, a government pharmacist, applied for the lease in 1938 using his son’s name, “Kofi Osmond,” and later wrote to the Lands Department in 1946 that he was paying ground rent on behalf of “my son Kofi Osmond.” After government issued re‑entry proceedings in 1949, Hughes caused the plaintiff to sign for an extension; a new lease (1952) and supplementary deeds (1955, 1956) followed. Upon Hughes’s intestate death, his sister, acting as customary successor, collected rents and claimed the property, arguing “Kofi Osmond” was Hughes’s alias. The appellate court held common law and equity applied, found a presumption of advancement, rejected the alias claim, declared the land and building belonged to the plaintiff, and ordered the defendant to pay and account for rents and costs, with concurrences by Olennu J.A. and Azu Crabbe J.A.
This is from the judgment of the High Court, Sekondi, (Bruce-Lyle J. as he then was) dated 24 January 1964. By the judgment, the court dismissed an action brought by the appellant (hereinafter called the plaintiff) against the respondent (hereinafter referred to as the defendant) for a declaration of title to land and building situate at Ashanti Road, Takoradi, described as plot No. 21 and for recovery [p.407] of the sum of £G312 which the plaintiff claimed the defendant collected as rent form tenants of the said premises.
The plaintiff was born in June 1927. He is the son of the late Osmond Alfred Hughes who died in or about 1959. He has a serious deformity in the leg and is a near cripple. The learned trial judge described this as an abnormality in one leg. His late father was a qualified pharmacist and was, for many years, employed in that capacity by government. Some years before his death, Mr. Hughes retired from government service on pension and thereafter set up private practice as a pharmacist. The plaintiff who left school in 1954, was for a while, in the employment of Messrs. Elder Dempster Lines as a book-keeper but in 1955, he left this employment at his father's request and joined the latter in his dispensary. He continued to assist his father in his dispensary until his death about 1959. The evidence suggests that the late Mr. Hughes formed a great attachment for the plaintiff and both seemed to have lived together in affection till the former's death.
In 1937, when the plaintiff was aged ten, his father applied for the leasehold premises the subject-matter of this action. Although the application for the land was admittedly addressed to the Assistant Commissioner of Lands by the late Mr. Hughes, it purported to come from Kofi Osmond which, on the undisputed evidence, is the plaintiff's name. The applicant gave his address as c/o O.A, Hughes and the application was signed simply as "Kofi Osmond." The application was successful and on 8 June 1938, the Governor of the Gold Coast acting by the Commissioner of Lands executed a lease in which the land in question was demised to "Kofi Osmond" for a term of 99 years subject to the usual covenants. There is no evidence as to who executed the lessee's part of the document, but it seems clear that this was done by the plaintiff's father who merely wrote the name of the lessee as "Kofi Osmond."
A photostat copy of the original lease was produced in evidence and this shows that it is a building leas