One difficulty with this book is whether there is any real need for it. The publisher’s blurb hails it as a total revision and update of L. Kovats’ The Law of Tugs and Towage (Barry Rose Publishers, 1980). Kovats was a rather idiosyncratic and disappointing book, being longer on lists of cases than on analysis. When Alfred Bucknill produced the first edition of his Law Relating to Tug and Tow (Stevens, 1913), the steam tug was approaching its heyday. The second edition in 1927 had been practically rewritten to take account of the case law and increased from 72 to 82 pages. Both editions were produced in an economical, straightforward style. A perusal of the law reports at the time indicates the enormous amount of litigation concerning tugs, especially on the Thames. Since then the towing industry has declined for a number of reasons. Tugs are larger and more powerful, so fewer are needed, and ships are more controllable, often being fitted with bow thrusters. Towage law might also be said to have suffered a decline, certainly if one takes as a yardstick the number of reported towage cases since the end of the Second World War. Draconian standard form contracts heavily favouring tug owners, such as the U.K. Standard Towing Conditions, have generally been enforced by the courts. The result has been that very few cases in the U.K. have not been settled.

So what new developments have there been which justify a new (and fairly expensive) book on towage? Certainly there are new standard form contracts, such as TOWCON and TOWHIRE in 1985, and a slightly revised version of the U.K. Conditions in 1986. Still, most of the recent legal changes are of a very minor nature, being incidents of other developments in maritime law where there are plenty of specialist texts. Limitation of liability and marine insurance are two examples. Limitation is treated in a very brief fashion, so that there is no mention of the limits that actually would apply to a tug under the Merchant Shipping Act 1979. The limitation breaking provision of Art. 4 of the 1976 Limitation Convention is described in three small paragraphs, but no examples are given to highlight the sort of practical problems that might arise for tug owners. The authors do identify, however, the two important limitation issues for tugs, namely the flotilla issue and whether a contractual indemnity is subject to limitation. The flotilla issue is whether a third party suing a tug and various craft in tow is to be met by the limits of the tug alone or an aggregate of the limits of the whole flotilla. The authors rightly note that the 1976 Limitation Convention “may have affected this issue” but perhaps one might have expected a specialist book to provide a much more positive opinion than they eventually give.

On marine insurance, the authors acknowledge that the general principles of marine insurance could not be covered by them, but we are given a most basic view of the subject with little or nothing of any originality. The same could be said of the chapters on “Salvage” and “Master and Crew”, in the latter of which there is virtually nothing of particular relevance to tugs, as opposed to merchant ships generally. One might have thought that the only case involving tugs and employment to reach the House of Lords in recent years, McDermid v. Nash Dredging and Reclamation Co. Ltd. (The Ina) [1987] A.C. 906, could have merited more than a footnote and a short paragraph in the chapter on “Registration, Health and Safety”. The latter contains a long catalogue of general regulations applying to merchant ships, to which anyone could add “and that also applies to tugs”. In chapters such as these