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SECRETARIAL PRACTICE
(4) This section applies to payments and acts made
and done before or after the commencement of
this Act, and in this section ‘power of attorney’
includes a power of attorney implied by statute.

Express A power of attorney, even though executed under seal,

Revocation. may be revoked by parol [R. v. Wait (1823) 1 Bingh. 121].
In practice, however, express revocation by the donor should
be effected by deed. It is also open to the donee to effect
revocation by giving notice to the donor that he renounces
the power.
Implied The common law was thus laid down by Lord Blackburn in

Revocation. Debenham v. Mellon (1880), 6 A.C. at p. 36: ‘Where an
agent is clothed with an authority and afterwards that
authority is revoked, unless the revocation has been made
known to those who have dealt with him, they would be
entitled to say: “The principal is precluded from denying
that the authority continued to exist, which he had
led us to believe, as reasonable people, did formerly
exist.””’

But there is left the problem which dwells in those words
in Lord Blackburn’s judgment (above)—‘as reasonable
people.” The expression suggests at once that there is such a
thing as implied revocation, and that the third party may
be deemed to have constructive, as distinct from actual,
notice of revocation. There are many circumstances which
would be held to amount to such an implication, e.g. the
appointment by the principal of another attorney—especially
if the second attorney were invested with powers, the exercise
of which would clash with the authority of the first; a lapse
of time since the creation of the power, such as would lead
any ordinary man to doubt the probability of its continued
currency; the intervention of the principal himself in the
conduct of the business for which the power had been origin-
ally granted. Similarly, if a donor says that the attorney
is to act only when he is himself prevented from acting, a
third party may be at his wits’ end to know what to do.
In all such cases the third party would be justified in requir-
ing proof of the continuing validity of the power of attorney.
The first paragraph of s. 124 (2), which is printed above in
italics, enables the third party to obtain protection by requir-
ing the attorney to make a statutory declaration as therein
provided. Such a declaration, however, will not protect a
third party who is in fact aware, of his own knowledge, that
the power has been revoked [Mutual Provident Land Vv.
Macmillan (1889), A.C. 596]