Sound Installation • ‘Anthem for Old Road’

22 Dec 2024

  [playlist ids="12550"] Listen to a sound installation entitled ‘Anthem for Old Road’ which was placed in a garden in Old Road, Wimborne, linked to the themes of the forthcoming production ‘What They Left Behind’.   ‘Anthem for Old Road’ was created by Adrian Newton (sound), Gill Horitz (poem) and Lynn Davy (decoupage). It is a creative response to research undertaken by WCT, which discovered: ‘There are few districts in the kingdom which have supplied so large a number of volunteers as the Old Road, in Wimborne, has done; and Sergeant Rossiter is the seventh inhabitant, from a road which contains only 24 cottages, who has given his life for King and country’ (Wimborne Minster Parish Magazine, 1917). James Power, who generously hosts the installation in his garden in Old Road, has a particular knowledge and interest in the First World War, through his organization Somme Battlefield Tours.  James says,

“I have been organising tours to the battlefields of the Great War 1914-18 for many years and during this time I have visited so many Commonwealth War Grave cemeteries where so many of those who never came home still lie today, known and unknown, lying side by side.  Even sadder, are the Memorials to the many thousands whose remains were never found and who still lie beneath the fields of Picardy, Flanders and beyond to this day. Wimborne Community Theatre’s painstaking work in focusing on just one town, our town, and for me the significance of ‘my’ very road (Old Road), truly brings home the sometimes overlooked impact these losses had on the mothers, fathers, wives, fiancées, brothers, sisters, children, friends of those who did not return. As we now remember one hundred years on from the war they truly thought was the ‘War to End All Wars’, one very much appreciates this most fitting focus on the theme of ‘What They Left Behind’ by Wimborne Community Theatre.