Southend Boys’ and Girls’ Choirs have been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund grant for a project to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.
The project, Never Forget, will work with four schools across South Essex to create a final piece of music that will be played at a concert in November.
The Heritage Lottery Fund have awarded the Southend Choirs £10,000 for the Never Forget project. The money will go towards working with schools in Southend and Basildon to explore the First World War and its impact on the local people of South Essex through poetry, literature, music, family history and creative writing. The project will focus specifically on the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in history with over 1 million men wounded or killed.
Working with two artists, photographer Alan Hockett and Jo Melville and a historian, Christopher Langdon, four schools - St Anne Line Junior School in Basildon, The St Christopher School Academy Trust in Leigh, St Mary’s Prittlewell Primary School and the Great Wakering Primary School - will take part in workshops to discover the connections between where they live, their families and the First World war, creating Rolls of Honour for the fallen, biographies of individuals and writing poetry and epitaphs in response to their discoveries.
The students will contribute lines of poetry to a new oratorio to be written by Southend Choirs Conductor, Roger Humphrey. The libretto and score will be published allowing free access to the piece for future performances. There will also be an exhibition of the work the students produce at Westcliff High School for Boys on Saturday 12th November in the evening, when the new work will be performed by all the participants for the first time.
Councillor Chris Walker, Chair of the Southend Choirs Trust said; "I am delighted that The Southend Choirs have been awarded this grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It has enabled a great many children and young people to work with some excellent artists and practitioners to create work which is truly inspirational.”
To find out more about the Southend Choirs, please go to www.southendchoirs.org.uk.
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