A Cwmbran woman is asking for help to find an urn containing her late father’s ashes that has been stolen from the grounds of a church.

Angela Kelly, from Oakfield, took flowers to put in her dad’s urn at St Michael’s and All Angels Church Llantarnam on Thursday 31 August. She was surprised to find it was missing from the row of urns alongside the church wall.

She said she and her brother had already put flowers on their mother’s grave in Christchurch Cemetery that day before returning to Cwmbran. She said: “It’s on the right hand side of the church, against the wall. It’s got his name on it, Wat Tyler. I can’t understand why it’s gone. It must be yobs. You can see the space where it was. He died in 2006. I thought perhaps the church gets rid of ones that have been there for many years, but there are ones there from people who died before 2006. The reverend told me it wouldn’t be the church who would have done that. There is no CCTV. I think it’s absolutely terrible. I just don’t know if this has happened in other churchyards.” Her father was a former police officer based in Newport.

The last time they put flowers in Mr Tyler’s urn was February 2023. She said: “We don’t go every week by any means, we go every few months. We scoured the grounds last Saturday and looked in all the bushes and trees but obviously didn’t find anything. As you can imagine it is very upsetting and of course, it is of no use to anyone else with my father’s name on it. Why someone would do this is beyond comprehension, absolute lack of respect and no idea of how sacred it is for families to visit a loved one’s resting place.”

The urn is inscribed with the name, Wat Tyler.

Do you have any information?

Contact the police on 101 or through Gwent Police’s social media channels and quote reference number 2300303723

Photo

Image from Google Street View.