Chris Hoban was joined at the Manor Pavilion on Sunday, August 6 by the Sidmouth Town Band, led by Adrian Harvey and celebrating their 160th year, to present an elegiac and thoughtful narrative performance piece of his own songs, insights and observations about the lesser-known stories from the First World War.
Chris is passionate about the role of folk song and building for the younger generations in particular a new understanding of the lessons to be learned. His very well-constructed concert starts at the very beginning of the war when young men were blithely heading off across the Channel without any notion of what lay ahead of them.
Chris was joined on stage by veteran Folk Festival legend Steve Knightley, and the audience was invited to join in a spirited acapella rendition of Bully Beef and Biscuits, charting the logistical challenge of feeding so many troops. Chris sang a joyful piece called Love Will Make the World Go Round inspired by the dancing of the male officers with each other in the barracks, three trenches back from the front.
As the enthusiasm to sign up began to wane, in came Lord Kitchener’s more active recruitment campaign, and in 1916, the Conscription Acts, first for single men and later for married men. This stage of the war started to see the appearance of conscientious objectors. Some of them refused to fight but would help with transport and ambulance work. Others, the courageous absolutists, refused to have any involvement in the war and ended up interned and forced to perform hard labour. Chris addressed this aspect of the war in his heart-breaking The Conchie’s Lament.
Despite an injured tendon in his all-important left index finger, Chris managed deftly to play the accordion to accompany himself singing As Tommy Was Digging a Trench One Day which had a lively chorus of “Yah-ho” with which the audience joined in.
Final guest singer, Miranda Sykes, sang the exquisitely beautiful The Lily and The Rose. The concert concluded with a re-telling of the mutiny of the British West Indies Regiment and the song No Parades it inspired, and The Christmas Truce, when troops on both sides put down their weapons and exchanged gifts and stories instead, “bringing hope again/To the hearts of men”.
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