The petitioner sought a faculty for the exhumation of the remains of her husband and daughter from the cemetery at Bingham. The daughter had been buried there after dying at the age of six months in 1948 and the husband was buried in the same grave in 1989. Bingham was the usual cemetery to bury residents of Gamston, which was seven miles away and where the family had roots. The petitioner's other daughter and son-in-law had bought plots in Wilford Hill Cemetery, a mile from Gamston, with a view to their being buried there along with the petitioner in due course. Accordingly, the petition sought exhumation of the remains of the daughter and husband to establish a family grave, arguing that the unexpected circumstances of the daughter's death, the distance of Bingham from Gamston and the intention now to create a family grave should constitute exceptional circumstances justifying exhumation.
The chancellor set out the principles governing the application, namely the permanence of Christian burial, as laid down in Re Christ Church, Alsager [1999] Fam 142 and Re Blagdon Cemetery [2002] Fam 299. He touched briefly on the possible conflict of authority between the two decisions and between ecclesial provinces as noted in Re St Chad, Bensham [2016] ECC Dur 2. Following Bensham, the chancellor found that Alsager is binding in the northern province, either as the appellate court of that province or as a decision of a quasi-bidivisional appellate court with temporal priority over Blagdon. He noted that the factual matrices for what is exceptional differ in Blagdon and Alsager but neither is an exhaustive list of exceptional circumstances. Exceptional circumstances are facts not law and therefore not bound by precedent. In this case, reviewing the various categories of circumstances the chancellor found that the proposal would not create a family grave as one already existed at Bingham, where there was space for the petitioner to be interred. There was no mistake at the time of the burials at Gamston. There were therefore no exceptional grounds justifying exhumation. The faculty was refused. [Catherine Shelley]
