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Re St James, Bulkington

Coventry Consistory Court: Eyre Ch, 8 July 2019 [2019] ECC Cov 3 Exhumation – permanence of burial – maintenance of graves

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2019

David Willink
David Willink*
Affiliation:
Deputy Chancellor of the Dioceses of Salisbury and St Albans
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Information

Type
Case Notes
Information
Ecclesiastical Law Journal , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 130
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical Law Society 2019

The petitioner sought the exhumation of the remains of her daughter and husband. Her daughter had died aged just one day in 1979. The petitioner's husband had died 21 years later, aged 50, and his cremated remains had been interred with their daughter in Bulkington. Seven years prior to issuing the petition, the petitioner had moved to Norfolk. She had continued to visit the grave every four to six weeks, making an eight-hour round journey each time. She sought to exhume the remains and re-inter them near her new home, because ill health had prevented her from visiting or maintaining their grave since 2016. The re-interment would also create a family grave where she planned to be buried herself. If the exhumation was not possible then the petitioner wished to be buried in the grave at Bulkington, but that would entail a long journey for her family to visit and maintain the grave. The incumbents of the respective churches had consented to the petitioner's requests.

The court in Re Blagdon Cemetery [2002] Fam 299 made it clear that the fact that visits to a grave are prevented by ‘advancing years and deteriorating health and change of place of residence due to this’ was not something which could be an exceptional circumstance justifying exhumation. In order to amount to exceptional circumstances, medical problems would have to be related to the location of the grave in question. The petitioner had intended to bury her daughter and, later, her husband in Bulkington churchyard. While there had been plans to move to Bacton with her husband, before his premature death, she had not in fact moved until 11 or 12 years after her husband's death. Although not maintained by the petitioner, the grave was nonetheless in a well-maintained churchyard which remained a fitting resting place for those interred there (the same churchyard having been considered in judgments at [2018] ECC Cov 2 and [2019] ECC Cov 1). There was no basis for finding an exception to the principle of the permanence of burial and the petition was dismissed. [Catherine Shelley]