Cofia Abergele Remembers.
Recording lists of the names of some of the people from Abergele and those with links to the town who took part in WWI was a challenge that Ysgol Emrys ap Iwan students relished as one of the school’s community projects to remember 100 years since the Great War.
Head Lee Cummins, head of sixth form John Seymour, music department and technicians and of course the students rose to the occasion, as you can hear in Sophie Peake’s recording:
Apart from Sophie’s, there are another 17 recordings. The first live performance, thanks to Abergele Town Council’s Delyth MacRae, is after the St Michael’s Vigil on 4 August 2014.
The participants’ names were researched by historian Andrew Hesketh with audio post production by AbergelePost.com’s Gareth Morlais.
Here’s a list of students who made the recordings:
Jordan Harwood
Chloe Merrison
Anna Humphreys
Teigan Thompson
Scott Carney
Alice Naylor
Chantalle Cox
Eleanor Lloyd
Iwan Coghlan
Cian Hanna
Mike White
Ben Stone
Sophie Peake
Laurie Wilson
Lara Wagstaff
Abbey Jacklin
Jamie Edwards
You can see some of the students below making their recordings using Ysgol Emrys ap Iwan’s Music Department studio.What’s poignant is that many of those who went to war a hundred years ago were a similar age to the young people whose voices you can hear listing the names. AbergelePost.com is grateful to these students for paying their respects.
Having spent more hours than I care to think about over the years looking through both on-line and Local Archive records in an attempt to trace my own elusive ancestors, I’m absolutely astounded by the grit and determination that Andrew Hesketh must have put into the years of research behind all of this work, commemorating all those with Abergele origins who participated in the First World War.
What a lovely touch as well, involving the young adults of Ysgol Emrys ap Iwan in reading out the lists of names, especially as they would be of a similar age to many of those who went off to the war.
What a tremendous way of showing our gratitude to that generation of young (and sometimes not so young) men who, to paraphrase John Maxwell Edmonds, gave selflessly of ‘their today for our tomorrow’.
Thank you to all concerned.