The petitioner sought a faculty to exhume the cremated remains of her late husband from the consecrated part of Gravesend and Milton Cemetery for reinterment in a reserved plot in a consecrated cemetery in France. This followed the court’s dismissal of an earlier, identical petition (at [2025] ECC Roc 1), which the petitioner had sought to appeal on the basis of new evidence; the court treated that application as one to set aside the previous decision and consider the petition afresh with the additional evidence.

The deceased had served in the SOE during World War II, and was awarded the MBE and Croix de Guerre with palm, and made an Officier of the Légion d’honneur. After the war he lived and worked in France, but on his death there in 1979, his remains were returned to England for interment in his wife’s home town of Gravesend, in a casket designed to contain the cremated remains of two persons in separate compartments. The petitioner’s grounds included: reuniting the family, as all her relatives lived in France; fulfilling a deathbed promise to her husband that they would always be together; and recognising his French honours, with local and state organisations in France wishing to mark the return of his remains.

Applying Re Blagdon Cemetery, the court set out the general presumption that Christian burial was permanent and faculties for exhumation were only granted in sufficiently compelling circumstances. The court accepted that the petitioner had secured the legal right to establish a family grave in France; but, because there was already a family grave in Gravesend with a casket designed for the petitioner’s remains, exhumation was not a necessary precursor to creating a family grave.

The petitioner had stated this was not a case of either a mistake or a change of mind, but rather that both the original interment in Gravesend and the present petition resulted from her promise to her dying husband. However, this would quintessentially treat the remains as portable, which binding authority required the court to guard against. The petition was dismissed.