Reverend Richard Coles has admitted that he broke the law by burying people with their pet’s ashes while he was vicar at a Northamptonshire church. Speaking at the Hay Festival on Saturday 23 May, the 64-year-old said he slipped the ashes into coffins when the undertaker was not looking, because he was trying to honour the last wishes of his parishioners.
Coles said the rule was clear: it is illegal to bury a dog’s ashes with a body. But he described a practice that, in his telling, became almost routine. “So I would quite often go to the undertaker – I can’t tell you this, I am breaking the law – with the dog’s ashes and say, ‘Have you screwed down Mrs Haversedge?’ And they’d say, ‘Not yet,’ and I’d say, ‘Look at that bird!’” he said, recounting how he would wait until the coffin was not sealed before placing the ashes inside.
The remarks came during a conversation with Dawn French and shed light on the way Coles handled burials during his time at St Mary the Virgin church in Northamptonshire, where he served from 2011 to 2022. Pet burials are heavily regulated in the UK, and only certain cemeteries allow humans and pets to be buried together. Coles’ account suggests he was willing to ignore those rules when he thought the request reflected a parishioner’s final wish.
He said he was not the only one at the church willing to bend the rules. “I know that my predecessors didn’t really care,” he said, adding that earlier vicars had also allowed unbaptised parishioners and people who died by suicide to be buried in the churchyard even though the rules required a separate area. “They would extend mercy, because there are no limits to God’s mercy,” Coles said, framing the decision as an act of pastoral discretion rather than defiance for its own sake.
That sense of latitude has followed Coles through a public life that began far from the pulpit. He found fame in the 1980s with Bronski Beat and the Communards, studied theology after the Communards split in 1988, and became a priest in 2005. He later presented programmes on Two and Radio 4, came third on I’m A Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! in 2024 and spoke publicly that year about being a gay reverend, saying he had “never given it a moment’s twinge of anxiety over whether God thought it was alright or not.”
His comments at Hay also pointed to the wider tension in the church between formal rules and the way some clergy choose to apply them. Coles said, “There is a wideness to God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea, and it’s our job to live in accordance with that,” and added, “Whether other people thought it was alright or not, well I’m happy to have that argument.” On the evidence he offered, the question is no longer whether he knew he was breaking the law. It is why he decided mercy mattered more than the rulebook — and why, in his view, the answer was obvious.
