Re Brown

The petitioner's late husband died at the age of 50 in 1983. The petitioner was hospitalised through illness brought about by her grief, and the funeral was arranged by her daughters while she was hospitalised. The burial took place in Alnwick, where the petitioner had lived for just over a year, on a temporary basis with her husband, who had been looking for work. Unknown to the petitioner's daughters, the petitioner and her husband had determined to be buried in Darlington where they had lived for twenty years. The petitioner sought a faculty for the exhumation of her late husband's remains and their re-burial in Darlington. The chancellor considered the decision in Blagdon ¹ and ruled that this was an unusual case – it was not a classic case of ‘mistake’, although he accepted that there was a mistake in that the daughters acted in ignorance of their parents' wishes, and there was no ‘change of mind’ in relation to the move to Darlington, as they had lived there for twenty years. The delay was explicable on the basis of a lack of knowledge of whether or how the mistake could be rectified. The faculty was granted. [JG]