The petitioners sought to exhume the ashes of James Sandilands and re-inter them in East Sheen cemetery. The family lived in Fulham but James had been buried at Uggeshall in 2001 as the local churchyard was full, following a suggestion by the Uggeshall churchwarden who was godfather to James’s son.

The petition arose from a family rift with the churchwarden following a car accident in 2022. The family alleged the churchwarden had fallen asleep whilst driving, causing an accident in which James’s brother sustained minor injuries. When pressed to acknowledge responsibility, the churchwarden ended the friendship whilst offering to continue maintaining James’s grave. The family described visits as ‘unthinkable’ due to the churchwarden’s proximity to the grave.

The petitioners advanced three grounds for exhumation: the rift making visits impossible; the desire to create a family grave in London where James’s widow could eventually be buried; and transport difficulties, particularly for James’s father who was 78 and recovering from cancer treatment. Applying the Blagdon requirement for ‘exceptional circumstances’, the court rejected all three arguments.

Regarding the family rift, he distinguished the case from previous successful petitions involving families ‘at war’ or graves used as battlefields. The court characterised this case as a friendship ending courteously but coldly, rather than hostile behaviour which might justify exhumation.

The family grave argument was rejected as merely another aspect of the rift, as space existed at Uggeshall and the memorial was already designed to accommodate the widow’s eventual burial. The transport and health difficulties were dismissed following Re Blagdon, which firmly rejected advancing years, deteriorating health, and residence changes as grounds for exhumation.

The court concluded that the petitioners ‘will not’ rather than ‘cannot’ visit the grave, finding no evidence approaching the threshold established in previous successful exhumation cases. The court expressed the hope that the rejection of the petition might create space for reconciliation.