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I quote Viscount Sumner’s judgment in Blackwell v Blackwell [1929] A.C. 318.

Equity allows parol evidence for secret trust to prove ‘fraud’ which does not conflict with legislation regulating testamentary disposition. This seems to be a perfectly normal exercise of general equitable jurisdiction. For the prevention of fraud equity fastens on the conscience of the legatee a trust, a trust, that is, which otherwise would be inoperative.

‘Why should equity forbid an honest trustee to give effect to his promise, made to a deceased testator, and compel him to pay another legatee, about whom it is quite certain that the testator did not mean to make him the object of this bounty? [emphasis mine]’

In both fully and half secret trusts ‘the testator's wishes are incompletely expressed in his will. Why should equity, over a mere matter of words, give effect to them in one case and frustrate them in the other? No doubt the words "in trust" prevent the legatee from taking beneficially, whether they have simply been declared in conversation or written in the will, but the fraud, when the trustee, so called in the will, is also the residuary legatee, is the same as when he is only declared a trustee by word of mouth accepted by him’.

To my mind, "the him" makes emboldened relative clause wrong.

To simplify this relative clause, let's overlook “it is quite certain that”. whom appears to refer to “another legatee.” Simplify the emboldened relative clause to

about another legatee […] the testator did not mean to make him the object of this bounty?

about is pied-piped. If I strand this preposition, then the emboldened relative clause is

the testator did not mean to make him the object of this bounty about another legatee

My simplified rewrite makes it obvious that the him is ungrammatical, and must be deleted. The final version is

the testator did not mean to make the object of this bounty about another legatee

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    Not really a very useful text for studying English... Probably it's valid in 1920s legalese. Commented Oct 8 at 5:43
  • @jamesk please, can you explain why this is "valid in 1920s legalese"? i know this judgment is from 1929, but this remains such relevant and important judgment in 2025 that it's studied in 2025! Commented Oct 8 at 13:42
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    @user226902 What James K is saying is that the language used in legal contexts has lots of features not seen in other varieties of English; and that all varieties of English have changed in the last 100 years. So although understanding and studying the judgement may be useful, analysing the language in it may not teach you anything useful about modern every day English. Commented Oct 8 at 16:18
  • Yes, this is a good question for English Language & Usage Because, although you may also be a learner of English, when you are reading this, you are reading it as a lawyer (or student of law) who is using English. Commented Oct 8 at 16:37

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The text in question is admittedly complex, but makes good sense as it stands.

The original text is:

Why should equity forbid an honest trustee to give effect to his promise, made to a deceased testator, and compel him to pay another legatee, about whom it is quite certain that the testator did not mean to make him the object of this bounty?

Now in the original question, the text has been analysed in a way that makes about whom and him refer to different people. But this is incorrect. They describe the same person. A better way of seeing this is to convert the pronouns into nouns. I will use A and B as markers to indicate two different beneficiaries. We then get something like this:

Why should equity forbid an honest trustee to give effect to his promise, made to a deceased testator, and compel him to pay B instead of A, when the one thing we can say for sure about B is that the testator did not mean to make B the object of his bounty?

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  • thanks. pls clarify who is "him" in "compel him to pay B instead of A"? is "him" A or B? Commented Oct 8 at 13:43
  • @user226902 Neither. There are four people in the case, the "honest trustee" (who is handling the money of someone who died); the "deceased testator" (whose money it was); and two "legatees" (possible recipients of the money), labelled here as "A" and "B". The "him" in "compel him to pay" refers to the "honest trustee" - "compel the person who is handling the money to pay recipient B instead of recipient A" Commented Oct 8 at 16:15
  • @user226902, That's part of the complexity. In the original text there are three pronouns, and they refer to different people. Compel him to pay = "Compel the honest trustee" (as described by @IMSoP). But about whom and make him the object both refer to the second beneficiary (B in my rewrite). Commented Oct 8 at 18:53
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    From a purely linguistic point of view, the text is at best unusual, at worst ungrammatical. The underlying phrase (with the pronoun’s antecedent resolved and wh-fronting undone) is “it is quite certain about him that…”, which is at the very least unusual English; personally, I would consider it ungrammatical, although the meaning is clear enough. It would have been much clearer English if it had said, “another legatee, about whom it can be said with certainty that the testator did not mean to make him the object of this bounty”. Or indeed, somewhat simpler, just → Commented Oct 8 at 22:39
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    → “another legatee, whom it is quite certain the testator did not mean to make the object of this bounty”. Adding about whom the way the text does here really serves no purpose except to make the text more confusing and less idiomatic. Commented Oct 8 at 22:40
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This kind of grammatical construction is typically not considered standard in English today. There are some languages where the use of a "resumptive pronoun" in relative clauses is common and normative, but English is not one of them.

The expected construction would be "another legatee, whom it is quite certain that the testator did not mean to make the object of this bounty".

Explaining why "about whom" was used along with "him" in the quoted sentence is not simple.

What follows is my guesswork: the normative construction with "pied-piping" of a prepositional phrase is fairly formal, and so may not be as deeply integrated into the innate grammatical capacities of English speakers as other grammatical rules. In long sentences like this (another clause, "it is quite certain...", intervenes here between the embedded clause and the main clause) it seems possible that a writer might not remember how the sentence began. While we might expect editing to catch such sentences, I don't think it is a surprise if ungrammatical sentences occasionally slip through the cracks even in formal writing.

For whatever reason, irregularly constructed relative clauses have appeared, with fairly low frequency, for a long time in the history of English writing. Here is a Language Log article about a similar, although distinct, phenomenon, where an "extra" preposition is found (as in "to whom I besech you to take credence on"): BACK TO THE FUTURE, REDUNDANT PREPOSITION DEPARTMENT

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  • You do realize that by not defining any of your terms or giving concrete bits of the sentence as an example, a learner won't get much out of this answer... Commented Oct 9 at 12:55

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