Four Valuable Hours

At 2 p.m. on June 2, 1947, a wealthy India tea planter named John Spencer Wilkie arrived in England for surgical treatment. After a couple of operations and months of hospitalization, Scots-born Planter Wilkie began to worry about the length of his stay in England. He knew very well that a visitor who stays longer than six months in Britain must pay full British income tax (in 1947 the rate was 45%, plus surtax on incomes over $8,000. At 10 a.m. on Dec. 2, after an anxious two-day delay, he had himself flown out of England on a stretcher. Wilkie thought he had beaten the tax collector, but Britain's revenue men grabbed him, demanded 16,000 ($16,800).

Wilkie fought his case through to Britain's High Court of Justice. There last week plaintiff and defendants really got down to cases. Wilkie's lawyer argued that since 1948 was a leap year, the 194-48 tax year (beginning April 5) had an extra day, and the half year was therefore 183 days. The revenue people, determined to get their man, dug up an 1842 tax law which says that six months means six lunar months. This would have defeated Wilkie but Judge Sir Terence Norbert Donovan ruled the 1842 law out of date. Britain's Solicitor General Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, for the Inland Revenue Commissioners, then argued that an old general rule of law states that fractions of days shall be treated as whole days. Thus, both June 2 and Dec. 2 counted as full days, and, for their purposes, Wilkie had been in England altogether 184 days. The judge nipped that one: by that kind of reckoning, the year had 368 days, and Wilkie could count 184 days as a nonresident of Britain. Then Judge Donovan had another bright idea: Why not count hours? That did it. In the 366-day, 8,784-hour, 1947-48 tax year, Wilkie had spent 4,388 hours in England. It was four hours less than a half year. Tea Planter Wilkie won his case.

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