Afternoon Concert – The Battle’s Over

Commemorating the Great War, and Dunbar’s part in it, in music and song, prose and poetry.

Dunbar Parish Church, 3 pm, admission £5 (tickets, limited to 230 from Crunchy Carrot)

This community event will be a mix of music and song, prose and poetry presented by a number of organisations from within Dunbar. It will begin with a lone piper playing the traditional lament ‘The Flowers of the Forest’, often used through WWI during burial services, before he marches up the central aisle playing ‘The Green Hills of Tyrol’, one of the oldest marches played by pipe bands today, or perhaps Andy Stewart’s ‘A Scottish Soldier’.
The concert will continue with a short extract from an edition of the ‘Haddingtonshire Courier’ near the beginning of the Great War read by a member of Dunbar and District History Society (and these readings will provide links elsewhere in the concert programme). Musical items will be performed by the choir Dunbar Sings led by Karen Dietz; Dunbar Primary School; and Nancy Bird from Dunbar Grammar School. Stuart Robertson will give two poems from the Great War era; two DGS pupils will read their accounts of DGS’s recent visit to the WWI battlefields in Flanders and France; and Dunbar Parish Church session clerk Moyra Wright will read extracts from the three surviving letters sent by Rev Kirk from the Western Front to his Congregation at DPC.
The concert will conclude with the audience being invited to join in singing a number of popular WWI songs.