What a joyful evening! Yesterday the QPO Foundation organised a dinner onboard SS Rotterdam, the former flagship of the Holland America line, with guests from the Netherlands, the UK, and the US, including our minister of defence, Ruben Brekelmans.
It was truly an honour to present the Dutch marines’ hymn, in a special arrangement by Ron Cuijpers, with the combo of the Marine Band of the Royal Netherlands Navy.
It was lovely to join the West Yorkshire Police Band on their tour to Belgium to sing on this year’s armistice day. We performed in the Menin Gate and at Tyne Cot Cemetery. Still more heart-warming was seeing the many people who made the pilgrimage to Ypres.
The officers and soldiers who fought in the Battle of Passchendaele passed through Ypres, so it is poignant that those who were reported missing – those who died and whose bodies were never found, so those who have no grave – are commemorated on the Menin Gate. This gave the people they left behind a place to remember them.
Still more poignant is the fact that the immense Menin Gate, with its 54,593 names, was too small to commemorate all the missing. New Zealanders and those who were missing after 16th August 1917 are commemorated at Tyne Cot – a further 35,971 men and boys, along side 11,961 grave, 8,373 of which contain unidentified people.
We supported the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate and the annual commemoration at Tyne Cot on 11th November, in the presence of various diplomats and other VIPs.
I’ll be supporting British, Northern Irish, and Irish ceremonies in Thiepval, the Ulster Tower, and Guillemont to commemorate the Battle of the Somme, one of the darkest moments in British military history. Men ran towards gun fire through mud: a horrendous imbalance between man and machine, and in many ways the beginning of the warfare we have today.
If you are able, I recommend making the pilgrimage to the Somme. It is beautifully peaceful, and yet scarred by thousands of white headstones representing those who risked everything for this peace.
The Dutch have a warm-hearted tradition of honouring their veterans on the last Friday of June: each city or town organises an event, usually a meal, to bring local veterans together. This year I’ve been asked to sing in Leiden as part of the city council’s programme. I’m really looking forward to it!
“In My Heart
He Will Always Live,
The Best Of Sons
That God Could Give – Mother”
Traveling to Normandy for D-Day remembrance is something of a pilgrimage for the many visitors each year. Singing for remembrance is likewise more to me than simply performing. It is part of a bigger process in which I’m trying to understand why we go to war and what, if anything, can make the cost of war worthwhile. Meeting veterans and hearing their stories is part of this. Notably, no veteran I have met has ever said he regretted standing up against tyranny and terror by fighting. And yet the personal cost was great: the loss of friends, the years of sleepless nights and of having nightmares when still awake, the pain from injuries from more than eight decades ago.
This year, I sang for British, Canadian, French, and US ceremonies, ranging from the official UK ceremony at the British Normandy Memorial in Ver sur Mer organised by the Spirit of Normandy Trust to a ceremony at a single grave in Vauville. I drew up the Orders of Service for the ceremonies in Bayeux Cathedral and at Bayeux War Cemetery, working with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the City of Bayeux, the clergy, and, for the cemetery, the Royal British Legion. I sang at the farewell dinner of the Best Defense Foundation, in the presence of twenty-two US veterans in the magnificent setting of Caen City Hall, a former Abbey and the resting place of William the Conqueror. I also sang at the ashes of a British airman, Wally Trout, who, having found peace in Grangues in 1944, asked to be interred there. Both the large-scale ceremonies and the personal ceremonies had their impact.
One message was clear to me from the veterans. Our liberation and freedom should not be taken for granted.
With US Cpl. Jack Myers, Company B, 692nd Tank Destroyer Battalion, attached with the 104th and 42nd Infantry Division
On 8th June I sang for 22 US veterans in the Abbaye aux Hommes, the city hall of Caen.
Best Defense Foundation, supported by Delta Airlines, Michelin, Next Gen, and a warm and wonderful team of volunteers, arranged the tour in a specially chartered plane from Atlantis to Deauville – a rare event as the airport does not usually receive trans-Atlantic flights.
The motto of the foundation is “Taking care of the ones who took care of us.”
Perhaps the greatest honour of all was being asked to lead “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the veterans’ farewell dinner.
And the memory that will stay with me forever was Jack Myers pure joy when he asked me to sing “How Great Thou Art.”
The glider pilots played a fundamental role in the Normandy campaign, transporting troops and equipment. Being towed in a mostly wooden glider was not without risk.
The Glider Pilot Regiment Society was established to remember the glider pilots, bring veterans and descendants together, and to pass on the history of the Glider Pilots. In 2022 they unveiled a memorial in Ranville, and today I supported their ceremony, along with the members of Massed Bands of the Pegasus Memorial.
