“Be that as it may, it is not disputed that the House of Lords in Gollins v. Gollins made it clear that the proof of an intention to injure or proof that the conduct was aimed at the other spouse was not an essential requirement of cruelty but that without an intent to injure if the inexcusable conduct of one spouse knowing the damage he was doing reduced the other to ill-health then that conduct amounted to cruelty, whilst Williams v. Williams [1963] 3 W.L.R. 215 to which Mr Omotosho also referred established that the test of whether one spouse treated another with cruelty was wholely objective. Mr Omotosho relied on Le Brocq v. Le Brocq [1964] 1 W.L.R.1085 to establish, as was said there by Harman, L.J. at page 1089 that- “Cruel is not used in any esoteric or ‘divorce Court’ sense of that word, but that the conduct complained of must be something which an ordinary man-or a jury: I suppose this court sits as a jury-would describe as ‘cruel’ if the story were fully told. There need not be blows. (There is no question here now of blows.) There need not be any physical force used (there can be words far harder than blows with a saucepan) but there must be something as to which a jury would be able to say, when they heard it related: ‘Well, that was cruel of him,’ before a husband can be branded with the serious charge of being cruel to his wife.” The test therefore to be applied objectively is whether this wife has been cruel to this husband and this is only to be decided after all the facts had been taken into account. We agree with Mr Omotosho that the cases that he cited help in showing how legal cruelty should be determined but we do not see that the learned trial judge misdirected himself in the passage complained of as Gollins v. Gollins certainly did overrule many previous decisions but it was not suggested that the whole of the law of cruelty in divorce is now to be found in that one case.”
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