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Judge grants exhumation faculty after hearing of children’s trauma

20 December 2024

CHRISTINE JOHNSTONE/GEOGRAPH/COMMONS

Brookwood Cemetery

Brookwood Cemetery

AFTER the refusal of a faculty by the Deputy Chancellor of the diocese of Guildford, the Chancellor has granted the faculty for the exhumation and reinterment of the cremated remains of Cecil Gordon Tennant, which were interred in consecrated ground in Brookwood Cemetery, in Woking, Surrey, in 1967.

The continuing trauma being suffered by the children of the deceased, as a result of his sudden death and burial several decades ago, were exceptional circumstances that justified a departure from the rule that the committal to God by a Christian burial was permanent, the Chancellor stated when reversing the Deputy Chancellor’s decision.

The deceased was born in Conistone, Yorkshire, and was killed in a car crash on 12 July 1967, when the family lived in Surrey. Decisions about his funeral were made at a time of chaos and crisis. The petitioner, his daughter, and her siblings were children at the time and did not attend their father’s funeral. Their mother was distressed and moved to Australia without the children. She died there in 2008.

In June 2023, the Deputy Chancellor, Judge Sarah Whitehouse KC, noted that all the children of the deceased had moved away and felt that their father’s ashes were “abandoned” in Surrey, which he would not have chosen. She recorded the unresolved trauma surrounding their father’s death.

She said, however, that compelling reasons had to be shown for the granting of a faculty for exhumation after 56 years, and there were no such reasons. She therefore refused the faculty.

In a fresh petition in August 2024, the petitioner applied again for the exhumation. She stated that a “committal to God . . . has not taken place for my siblings or me which has caused significant spiritual harm, leaving us feeling that we have not properly handed over our father to God and have instead abandoned him in the place and time at which he was suddenly taken”.

The petitioner also described her brother’s spiritual wound, which had not healed for decades, because they as children were not able to be present at the funeral and burial. Alternatively, the petitioner said that her mother had made a mistake in burying their father so swiftly in Brookwood and leaving Surrey thereafter.

The petitioner explained that she had not applied for a faculty sooner so as not to “tread on her mother’s toes”, and to avoid her mother’s realising the severity of her mistake. The petitioner applied again to exhume from Surrey, which was painfully associated with the tragedy, and to reinter with a therapeutic committal service at St Mary’s, Conistone, in North Yorkshire, where there were other family graves.

The Chancellor, the Worshipful Andrew Burns KC, said that the new petition did not raise substantially different grounds from before, although they were explained in much more detail and gave the Christian context of the ongoing spiritual harm.

The petitioner said that a committal to God as discussed in Bishop Christopher Hill’s paper “A note on the theology of burial in relation to some contemporary questions” (2007) 7 Ecc LJ 447, which was relied on by the Court of Arches in the Blagdon Cemetery case, had not taken place for the children of the deceased. She discussed her brother’s spiritual wound as the most severe, as he was very ill in hospital until well after the funeral. He suffered PTSD after visiting Brookwood Cemetery and could not face going there again.

The Chancellor said that, in deciding whether to set aside the Deputy Chancellor’s ruling, the question was whether the petitioner was misusing or abusing the process of the court by seeking to raise an issue that could have been raised before.

The additional reasons put forward in the second petition included the reason that most of the 56-year delay had been to avoid distressing the petitioner’s mother. It still did not fully explain why the application for exhumation was not made soon after 2008, when her mother died.

The Chancellor said that it was “now clear that this was not a case of an unexplained and recent change of mind as it appeared to be on the evidence before the Deputy Chancellor”. It was not a case “in which the exhumation was sought for the convenience or comfort of the living”, and the Chancellor “accepted that there is long-lasting and severe psychological harm which could be alleviated by a second committal, which was not emphasised in the first petition”.

The Chancellor considered the matter afresh and was satisfied that the long delay in applying for the faculty was now largely explained by the family’s reluctance to distress their mother, who suffered from mental illness after their father’s death. It did not indicate that their mother was content for her husband to rest in Brookwood Cemetery.

Those were exceptional circumstances, the Chancellor said, in which “a family [was] suffering psychological harm that may be healed and resolved by a Christian committal in the churchyard where Mr Tennant can be laid to rest with his ancestors and away from the place where such a distressing and sudden death took place”.

The faculty was granted on condition that the exhumation take place on a date that would allow reburial as soon thereafter as practically possible. The exhumation must be carried out discreetly and out of public sight, and the burial arranged with the necessary permission from the parish or the diocese of Leeds in the proposed family plot at St Mary’s, Conistone.

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