the contract", a breach so fundamental it would permit the distressed party to repudiate the contract and claim damages. However, since both common law and statute already recognised that while that breach of warranty entitled a claimant only to damages, any breach of condition would entitle a claimant to both repudiation and damages, it seemed that fundamental breach offered nothing new. Resolution – the Suisse Atlantique The matter came to a head in 1966 in the House of Lords decision Suisse Atlantique. The case involved a two-year time charter to export coal, the shipowners to be paid freight dependent on tonnage of cargo carried. If laytime (the allowable period for the charterer to arrange loading and unloading) were exceeded, the charterers were to pay demurrage of $1,000 per day. The charterers caused huge delays and few round trips were made. Demurrage totalled only $150,000, so the owners claimed damages for their full losses, saying they should not be limited to the demurrage terms because the charterer's gross delays amounted to fundamental breach. The House of Lords boldly held that Karsales Ltd v Wallis had overstated the law, and that whether or not a fundamental breach extinguishes any protection that the defendant might rely on was a "question of construction" and not a "question of law". Although the demurrage clause was so absurdly low that it amounted to an exemption clause, nevertheless its existence plainly showed that the parties had contemplated the possibility of delay, so delays would not amount to fundamental breach. After the Suisse Atlantique decision, there was a series of cases where the Court of Appeal patently ignored the House of Lords' findings. One such case was Harbutt's "Plasticine" Ltd v Wayne Tank and Pump Co Ltd. The House of Lords was less than amused, and in the 1980 Photo Productions case they emphatically reaffirmed their decision in the Suisse Atlantique. Lord Wilberforce effectively overturned the "rule of law" doctrine of Karsales Ltd v Wallis and instead maintained a strict "rule of construction" approach whereby a fundamental breach is determined by examining the full circumstances, such as the parties' intentions at the time of the contract. These two cases (the Suisse Atlantique and Photo Productions) thus form the definitive statement of the law up to the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977. More recently, this law was successfully applied in two cases related to carriage of goods by sea