lasted nearly three weeks. The result was a verdict for Mr Thomas against the Crown for £8790. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the Chief Baron was dissatisfied with it. In summing up he had complained more than once that he could never get a straightforward answer from the Crown witnesses to questions which bore on the most essential points of the case.
Substantially the verdict of the jury involved their belief that the principle of the construction of guns which had been for years advocated by Mr Thomas had been actually adopted from him in the construction of heavy guns by the Elswick firm and in the Royal Arsenal. Secondly, it involved the conclusion that Mr Thomas had been led to suppose, in such a way as virtually to constitute a contract, that if he succeeded in establishing the principle of his guns, the cost of his experiments would be repaid to him.
In June 1877 the Crown moved the Court of Queen's Bench for a new trial. The argument lasted several days. In its judgment the Court expressed no opinion, either favourable or adverse to the verdict on the first point, whether Mr Thomas's gun or ideas had been adopted; but on the second point, their decision was that the Chief Baron was wrong in leaving the question of contract to the jury at all – that the alleged contract, if any, being in writing, its interpretation was for the Court, not for the jury; and lastly, they decided that there was no contract upon which an action would lie.
From this decision it was open to Mr Thomas to appeal to the Court above. But he had had four years of litigation; and this, with the ten thousand pounds which the experiments had cost him, had brought him to the end of his resources. He was a ruined man.
Assuming, then, that the Court was right, and that the jury also was right as to so much of their verdict as was not affected by the judgment of the Court, the case stands thus: That the principle of the guns manufactured by the Ordnance and by the Elswick firm, and now the property of the country, was substantially taken from Mr Thomas; but that the department had so guarded itself by its rules, and in its correspondence with Mr Thomas, that not only was no remuneration legally due to him, but that the cost of the experiments which had led to the adoption of the guns, of which the department and the Elswick firm reaped the advantage, amounting to £8790, was left to be borne by him.
Surely it was a hard case! And what followed made it harder still. When Lord Eustace Cecil, then Surveyor-General, was asked in the House of Commons, on July 28th 1879, how it happened that the jury in Mr Thomas's case had found a verdict in his favour, if it was the fact, as Lord Eustace had stated on a previous occasion, that the evidence on the trial proved that the method of construction adopted in the service-guns had been discovered in the Royal Arsenal, when this question was put to him, the following incorrect and misleading answer was put into his mouth by his subordinates: –
"He had made inquiry at the War Office," he said, "but he was unable to obtain any explanation of the extraordinary verdict which the jury had come to in the case referred to. He had, however, been informed of a fact of which perhaps his honourable and gallant friend was ignorant, that the judges of the Queen's Bench had come to the unanimous conclusion that the verdict should be set aside, on the
