He was regularly engaged in driving non-striking miners to work, as the bitter industrial dispute had made them targets for physical retaliation by those miners who were on strike.
The company and its customers might choose to exercise the recently strengthened commonwealth protections against economic harm caused by industrial dispute.
The case represented a rare occasion in which a common law verdict was used to resolve an industrial dispute despite the existence of specialist industrial courts.
The movement is credited with bringing feminist ideas into practice in an industrial dispute and empowering women to take a public role in a community with a male-dominated sphere.