A MEMORIAL plaque to commemorate a serviceman killed in action in Iraq in 2003 cannot be installed on a church wall in Derbyshire, because the man did not have a close enough link with the parish, a Chancellor has ruled.
The Consistory Court of the diocese of Derby refused to grant a faculty for the plaque in the Grade I listed church, St Helen’s, Etwall, even though the parents of the deceased lived in the parish and worshipped at the church.
Flight Lieutenant Kevin Barry Main (“the deceased”) was killed on active service in Iraq on 22 March 2003. His parents had been parishioners for more than 20 years, were on the electoral roll, and attended services regularly. Another family member is buried in the churchyard. When the parents moved to the parish, however, their son had already left home as a teenager to join the RAF. He was buried at RAF Marham, in Norfolk. His name is inscribed on the War Memorial at Burntwood and at the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas.
The Rector and churchwardens of St Helen’s petitioned for a faculty to introduce the memorial plaque to the deceased on the interior wall of the church to the side of the existing war memorial for the fallen of the Second World War and Malaya. The parents of the deceased supported the petition but were not themselves petitioners.
It had been decided at a PCC meeting that there should be a memorial to the deceased and other service personnel with links to Etwall who had died in active service. The latest such memorial in the church recorded a death in Malaya in 1950.
The petition stated that there was a family in the parish who had suffered the loss of their son, who had no memorial in the parish. The aim was to create a memorial for his family and for others in the future to be able to remember their loved ones in the parish church. It was said that others who came into the church, including schoolchildren, would also be able to recognise and remember those who were lost.
The DAC recommended 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 provided with information about the other war-memorial plaques in the church.
While one of those to whom there was a memorial appeared “only to have had tenuous links to Etwall”, the Chancellor said, “the remainder were either born, lived, or died in Etwall or the surrounding area.” Therefore, none of that evidence was supportive of the petition for a memorial to the deceased.
Having considered all the evidence and the view of the DAC, the Chancellor said that, while it would be entirely appropriate for those who had died on active service with links to Etwall to be commemorated in memorials in the parish church, and while he commended the pastoral motivation behind the petition, the deceased did not appear to have had any links with Etwall at all.
The deceased was commemorated entirely appropriately in three locations: in Burntwood, where he grew up; at RAF Marham, where he was based at the time of his death; and at the National Memorial Arboretum.
In the Chancellor’s judgment, there “must be a real link between the service person . . . and the memorial location if there is not to be an excessive proliferation of memorials”. There was no such link in the case of the deceased, he ruled.
The petition was not granted, and a faculty was refused. It was ordered that the fee for the petition should be paid by the PCC rather than the diocese. The Chancellor added that, if the PCC was “dissatisfied” with his decision, it could appeal to the Court of Arches in accordance with rule 23.1 of the Faculty Jurisdiction Rules 2015.
