Exhumations

The 16 months old child of Italian parents living in England died following a fall whilst the family were on holiday in the Netherlands. The child’s cremated remains were brought back to England and interred in a consecrated part of East Sheen Cemetery. It was always the parents’ intention to move back to Italy and they treated the interment as temporary until they could return to Italy and inter the child’s ashes there. They were not told that the ashes were interred in consecrated ground and that exhumation from consecrated ground would not be granted unless there were exceptional circumstances. If they had been informed about the consequences, the parents would not have had their child’s ashes interred in consecrated ground. Upon an application by the parents for exhumation before returning to live in Italy, the Chancellor considered that a mistake had been made which would allow an exception to the normal rule against exhumation and he therefore granted a faculty.

The petitioner applied for a faculty to authorise the exhumation of a relative and reinterment in an adjoining grave. The relative had reserved two plots, one for her sister and one for herself. Owing to a mistake, the relative was buried in her sister's grave. The Chancellor determined that the mistake justified the grant of a faculty for exhumation and reinterment.

A baby girl had died at birth, though a twin had survived. The baby had been buried in the churchyard of a village in Devon. Six months after the burial, the mother had managed to free herself from her relationship with the father of the baby, from whom she had suffered domestic abuse for two years and she sought help from local domestic abuse professionals and the police. The father had been given a prison sentence for offences relating to abuse. The mother returned to live with her parents in another village. She suffered post-traumatic stress symptoms and could not contemplate visiting the village where the baby was buried. She therefore wished to have the baby’s remains exhumed and reinterred in the village where she and her parents lived. The father objected, as he was under a restraining order not to visit that village. The Chancellor was satisfied that the need to protect the mother and her surviving daughter was sufficient to establish an exception to the general principle against exhumation, and he therefore granted a faculty.

The petitioner applied for a faculty for the exhumation and reinterment of a body buried (due to an administrative error of the burial authority) in a grave reserved for a member of his family, as part of a block of graves reserved for the family. The Chancellor refused to grant a faculty on the grounds that (a) the desire of the petitioner's family to keep family burials in a rectangular block was just a 'personal preference', which was outweighed by the distress which would be caused to the family of the deceased and the Christian theology of the permanence of burial (the burial authority were willing to grant an exclusive right of burial for the petitioner's family in a plot adjacent to the 'block'); and (b) there had been a delay of one year between the burial in the wrong grave and the lodging of a petition.

The Petitioner sought a faculty to authorise the exhumation of the body of his father from the cemetery at Bloxwich, the interment having taken place in 1985. The Petitioner proposed that his father's remains should be reburied in a recently opened cemetery at Strawberry Lane, Cheslyn Hay, which had been laid out on land which the deceased had formerly farmed. After considering Re Blagdon Cemetery and other judgments, the Chancellor concluded that "the fact that a new cemetery or the like is created after the interment in circumstances where that new cemetery is thought to be a more fitting resting place for the remains in question than the place where they are interred will not, save in the most extreme of cases, be capable of being a special circumstance justifying exhumation."

The petitioners' daughter had died aged 20 in a car accident in 1988 and her ashes had been interred in the cemetery. The petitioners wished to exhume the ashes and reinter them in a full-size plot in the same cemetery, which would become a family grave. There was no evidence of an existing legal right to a grave which could become a family grave. The Chancellor envisaged that, if the petition were dismissed and a family grave was subsequently purchased, the situation would then be different. He was not satisfied that the present circumstances justified exhumation. However, he determined to grant a faculty (without limit of time), which would allow the exhumation and reinterment of the ashes at the time of the first burial of one of the family members identified in the judgment in a grave intended to be a family grave.

The petitioner's father's body had been buried in a triple depth grave in 1976. In 1999 the cremated remains of the petitioner's grandfather had been buried in the same grave at a depth of two feet. The petitioner's mother died and before her death she had expressed a wish for a coffin burial in the same grave as her husband, but this could not be achieved without disturbing the cremated remains in the grave. The Chancellor granted a faculty to allow the cremated remains to be exhumed and reinterred at the head of the grave, in order to allow the burial of the petitioner's mother's body with that of her husband.

The petitioner wished to have the cremated remains of her husband exhumed from the consecrated part of the Gravesend and Milton Cemetery and reinterred in a plot in a cemetery in France where she and her husband’s family lived. Her husband was born to French parents in England and he had served in the SOE during the Second World War and had received high French military honours. He and his wife had subsequently moved to France to work and live near his family, and he had died in 1979, when his remains were interred in a reserved plot his wife’s home town of Gravesend. There was a double compartment in the casket containing the deceased’s ashes, where it was intended that the petitioner’s ashes would be added in due course. The Chancellor, following the guidelines in Re Blagdon Cemetery [2002] Fam 299, could not find any exceptional circumstances to override the normal presumption of permanence of Christian burial and he therefore refused to grant a faculty.

In Re Gravesend and Milton Cemetery [2025] ECC Roc 1, the Chancellor had refused to grant a faculty to permit the remains of Pierre Louis Le Chêne (a former Lieutenant of the SOE, but known to his family as “Captain”) to be exhumed from the cemetery at Gravesend (his wife’s home town) for reinterment in France, where the petitioner, the deceased’s widow, now lived. The petitioner now sought permission to appeal. She also produced new information in support of her application. The Chancellor considered that in the light of the new information he should treat the petitioner’s application as one to set aside the earlier decision and to consider the petition afresh in the light of all the evidence. However, the Chancellor concluded that it would be wrong to grant the petition: “It would be quintessentially to treat Captain Le Chêne’s remains as portable - precisely the denial of the principle of permanence that I am required by binding authority to guard against.“

The Chancellor granted a faculty to allow the exhumation of the body of the petitioner's father, who died in 1992, in order that the body might be cremated and the ashes taken to Italy to be interred with the cremated remains of the petitioner's mother, who died in 2015, in a family grave in the village where the petitioners' parents had been brought up and were married.