AFTER the refusal of a school by the Deputy Chancellor of the diocese of Guildford, the Chancellor has granted the college for the exhumation and reinterment of the cremated stays 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 kids of the deceased, consequently of his sudden death and burial several a long time ago, were exceptional circumstances that justified a departure from the rule that the committal to God by a Christian burial was everlasting, the Chancellor stated when reversing the Deputy Chancellor’s decision.
The deceased was born in Conistone, Yorkshire, and was killed in a automobile 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 on the time and didn’t attend their father’s funeral. Their mother was distressed and moved to Australia without the kids. She died there in 2008.
In June 2023, the Deputy Chancellor, Judge Sarah Whitehouse KC, noted that each one the kids of the deceased had moved away and felt that their father’s ashes were “abandoned” in Surrey, which he wouldn’t have chosen. She recorded the unresolved trauma surrounding their father’s death.
She said, nonetheless, that compelling reasons needed to be shown for the granting of a school for exhumation after 56 years, and there have been no such reasons. She due to this fact refused the college.
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 now not properly handed over our father to God and have as a substitute abandoned him within the place and time at which he was suddenly taken”.
The petitioner also described her brother’s spiritual wound, which had not healed for a long time, because they as children weren’t in a position to be present on 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 school sooner in order to not “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 related to the tragedy, and to reinter with a therapeutic committal service at St Mary’s, Conistone, in North Yorkshire, where there have been other family graves.
The Chancellor, the Worshipful Andrew Burns KC, said that the brand new petition didn’t raise substantially different grounds from before, although they were explained in far more detail and gave the Christian context of the continued 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 within the Blagdon Cemetery case, had not taken place for the kids of the deceased. She discussed her brother’s spiritual wound as essentially the most severe, as he was very ailing in hospital until well after the funeral. He suffered PTSD after visiting Brookwood Cemetery and will not face going there again.
The Chancellor said that, in deciding whether to put aside the Deputy Chancellor’s ruling, the query was whether the petitioner was misusing or abusing the strategy of the court by searching for to lift a problem that would have been raised before.
The additional reasons recommend within the second petition included the rationale that almost all of the 56-year delay had been to avoid distressing the petitioner’s mother. It still didn’t fully explain why the applying 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 up to date change of mind because it seemed to be on the evidence before the Deputy Chancellor”. It was not a case “through which the exhumation was hunted for the convenience or comfort of the living”, and the Chancellor “accepted that there’s long-lasting and severe psychological harm which might be alleviated by a second committal, which was not emphasised in the primary petition”.
The Chancellor considered the matter afresh and was satisfied that the long delay in applying for the college was now largely explained by the family’s reluctance to distress their mother, who suffered from mental illness after their father’s death. It didn’t indicate that their mother was content for her husband to rest in Brookwood Cemetery.
Those were exceptional circumstances, the Chancellor said, through which “a family [was] suffering psychological harm that could be healed and resolved by a Christian committal within the churchyard where Mr Tennant might be laid to rest along with his ancestors and away from the place where such a distressing and sudden death took place”.
The faculty was granted provided that the exhumation happen on a date that may allow reburial as soon thereafter as practically possible. The exhumation have to be carried out discreetly and out of public sight, and the burial arranged with the essential permission from the parish or the diocese of Leeds within the proposed family plot at St Mary’s, Conistone.
