Megarry mentions the case of the town clerk in his Miscellany-at-Law (though he attributes it to Clause 64 of a waterworks bill "mingled with something technical about filter beds and stopcocks". He went on in his Lectures on the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947 to pose the question whether the provision was personal to that town clerk or applied to his successors as well. However, I do not think that anyone has identified the local act and the story seems to be apocryphal. He quotes a similar story to the opposite effect: "the head of an Oxford college, in far-off days when such appointments were subject to the condition of celibacy, astonished the fellows of his society by announcing his marriage and confronting them with a clause in a local Canal Act which gave him statutory sanction." On a topical point, though, he was able to cite an instance in 1844 (therefore about 67 years before the Parliament Act 1911) in which royal assent was given to a bill before it had even been considered by the House of Lords. Should it be of interest, it was one of two bills promoted by the Eastern Counties Railway Company. What is more, I once appeared in a nullity case in which the decree was pronounced before any evidence had been given. Jeremy Wilkes