WELLINGTON Choral Society is set to honour the memory of lives sacrificed a century after the end of the First World War in a Concert of Remembrance featuring poetry, organ music and choral singing.

The names of 178 men are listed on the war memorial in Wellington Park as killed in the First World War, together with 50 men and one woman who died in the Second World War.

Land for the park and funds for laying it out were donated in 1902 by Fox Brothers & Co, the woollen and worsted cloth manufacturers, whose name and activities have been interwoven with Wellington and its people since the late 18th Century.

During the First World War, Fox Brothers supplied more than 8,000 miles of cloth to the British and Allied governments including the khaki spiral leg bindings known as puttees for British Tommies.

The company also has an historical association with Wellington Choral Society – and its forerunner, Wellington Harmonic Society – with Fox family members and employees being on the society’s committee or otherwise involved with the society. It was a Fox’s employee who revived the Harmonic Society, renaming it Wellington Choral Society.

The many conflicts that have been endured since the end of the Great War are recognised in the poetry featured in the concert.

The programme will also include evocative choral works by Geraint Lewis, John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The latter served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Royal Artillery during the Great War, and his Lord Thou Hast Been Our Refuge written in 1921 in the aftermath of that war will be featured.

The Remembrance Concert will end with Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem, based on the old tradition of plainsong and generally considered a masterpiece. Duruflé was regarded as the greatest organist of his day in addition to being a well respected composer. He was a perfectionist and the Requiem took him six years to complete. Having been originally commissioned by the Vichy regime, the Requiem was completed in 1948 when contemporary audiences heard it as a memorial to French victims of the war.

Remembrance 100 Years is at St John’s Church, Wellington, on Saturday, November 24, at 7.30pm. Tickets priced £12 – under 18s free – are available from Odette’s Tearoom, 27 High Street, Wellington (phone 01823 667919), online at www.wellingtonchoralsociety.org.uk and on the door.

A retiring collection will be held for SSAFA Somerset, the Armed Forces charity.