Himalaya clause
Contractual provision for the benefit of a third party
A Himalaya clause is a contractual provision expressed to be for the benefit of a third party who is not a party to the contract. Although theoretically applicable to any form of contract, most of the jurisprudence relating to Himalaya clauses relate to maritime matters, and exclusion clauses in bills of lading for the benefit of employees, crew, and agents, stevedores in particular.
The Himalaya case
The clause takes its name from a decision of the English Court of Appeal in the case of Adler v Dickson (The Himalaya) [1954]. The claimant, Mrs Adler, was a passenger on a voyage on the SS Himalaya. At the port of Trieste, she was injured when a gangway came adrift, throwing her onto the quayside, 18 feet below. The passenger ticket contained non-responsibility clauses exempting the carrier, as follows:
Passengers and their baggage are carried at the passenger's entire risk ...
The company will not be responsible for and shall be exempt from all liability respect of any ... damage or injury whatsoever of or to the person of any passenger ...
Being unable to sue the steamship company in contract, Mrs Adler instead sued the master of the ship and the bosun in negligence. The defendants sought to rely on the protection of the exclusion clauses on the passenger's ticket; but Mrs Adler argued that under the doctrine of privity of contract, the defendants could not rely on the terms of a contract to which they were not party.
“Himalaya clause” enters the record as contractual provision for the benefit of a third party. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Himalaya, clause and Contractual can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Himalaya clause” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Himalaya, clause and Contractual provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5764978. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1954.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Himalaya clause” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.