FORMER Premier League footballer Garry Flitcroft has been ordered to remove a bench created at a Turton churchyard in memory of his father.

A Church of England judge has ruled that the memorials on it are “oversentimental”.

The one-time England Under-21 midfielder, pictured, had asked the judge for permission to keep the bench at St Anne’s Church, Turton, in memory of his father, John, who committed suicide while he was a psychiatric in-patient at Royal Bolton Hospital in April, 2008.

However, Geoffrey Tattersall QC, chancellor of the Diocese of Manchester and a judge of the Church of England’s consistory court, ruled that the two-seat oak bench, featuring a number of memorial inscriptions — which was erected without the proper permission — must go.

He said that it was “highly probable”

that Mr Flitcroft knew that a faculty — church court permission— was required for the bench to be installed.

He said more than 40 parishioners had written to register their displeasure with the bench.

They claimed that it did not match others in the churchyard and featured inscriptions that were “unduly sentimental” and “grossly extravagant memorialisation”.

Concerns were also raised about its size and the quality of the workmanship, and the fact that one of the memorial inscriptions featured a spelling error — the word ‘irraplaceable’ for irreplaceable.

The judge ruled: “The language used in the inscriptions is oversentimental and inappropriate. I would not permit such language on any similar memorial.

“Having concluded that the memorial plaques which are an integral part of the bench must be removed, which is likely to further damage the existing bench, I have reached the firm conclusion that it would be preferable to order the removal of the bench.

“I recognise that such order is likely to cause considerable upset to the Flitcroft family, but in my judgment, such is unavoidable and is a direct consequence of the fact that works were carried out before any faculty had been obtained.”

He said that Mr Flitcroft could install a new bench in keeping with the churchyard featuring a single metal memorial recording his father’s name and the dates of his birth and death.

The judge said the late Mr Flitcroft’s ashes had also been wrongly interred in the churchyard without permission. However, they had since been exhumed and reinterred in the garden of remembrance.

A parishioner, who asked not to be named, said: “It’s not the kind of thing you would put in a churchyard.”

Team Rector, Rev David Dunn, declined to comment