A MEMORIAL plaque to commemorate a serviceman killed in motion in Iraq in 2003 can’t be installed on a church wall in Derbyshire, since the man didn’t have a detailed enough link with the parish, a Chancellor has ruled.
The Consistory Court of the diocese of Derby refused to grant a college for the plaque within the Grade I listed church, St Helen’s, Etwall, although the parents of the deceased lived within the parish and worshipped on the church.
Flight Lieutenant Kevin Barry Main (“the deceased”) was killed on energetic service in Iraq on 22 March 2003. His parents had been parishioners for greater than 20 years, were on the electoral roll, and attended services recurrently. Another member of the family is buried within the churchyard. When the parents moved to the parish, nevertheless, their son had already left home as a teen to hitch the RAF. He was buried at RAF Marham, in Norfolk. His name is inscribed on the War Memorial at Burntwood and on the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas.
The Rector and churchwardens of St Helen’s petitioned for a college to introduce the memorial plaque to the deceased on the inside wall of the church to the side of the prevailing war memorial for the fallen of the Second World War and Malaya. The parents of the deceased supported the petition but weren’t themselves petitioners.
It had been decided at a PCC meeting that there needs to be a memorial to the deceased and other service personnel with links to Etwall who had died in energetic service. The latest such memorial within the church recorded a death in Malaya in 1950.
The petition stated that there was a family within the parish who had suffered the lack of their son, who had no memorial within the parish. The aim was to create a memorial for his family and for others in the long run to find a way to recollect their family members within the parish church. It was said that others who got here into the church, including schoolchildren, would also find a way to recognise and remember those that were lost.
The DAC advisable the approval of the petition by the Consistory Court. The Diocesan Chancellor, the Worshipful Timothy Clarke, asked for evidence of a link between the deceased and Etwall, and was supplied with information concerning the other war-memorial plaques within the church.
While one in all those to whom there was a memorial appeared “only to have had tenuous links to Etwall”, the Chancellor said, “the rest were either born, lived, or died in Etwall or the encompassing area.” Therefore, none of that evidence was supportive of the petition for a memorial to the deceased.
Having considered all of the evidence and the view of the DAC, the Chancellor said that, while it might be entirely appropriate for many who had died on energetic service with links to Etwall to be commemorated in memorials within the parish church, and while he commended the pastoral motivation behind the petition, the deceased didn’t appear to have had any links with Etwall in any respect.
The deceased was commemorated entirely appropriately in three locations: in Burntwood, where he grew up; at RAF Marham, where he was based on the time of his death; and on the National Memorial Arboretum.
In the Chancellor’s judgment, there “should be an actual link between the service person . . . and the memorial location if there will not be to be an excessive proliferation of memorials”. There was no such link within the case of the deceased, he ruled.
The petition was not granted, and a college was refused. It was ordered that the fee for the petition needs to be paid by the PCC reasonably than the diocese. The Chancellor added that, if the PCC was “dissatisfied” together with his decision, it could appeal to the Court of Arches in accordance with rule 23.1 of the Faculty Jurisdiction Rules 2015.
