Tour

After 18 months of fund-raising and organisation, the Band left Frimley to visit Belgium on a sunny Friday morning. We travelled by ferry from Dover to Calais and reached our hotel in West Flanders late the same afternoon. Day one of our tour was spent visiting Bruges and, after some sightseeing, we played in the Market Square to an enthusiastic and large audience. Day Two we visited the Tyne Cot War Cemetery to pay our respects to some of the soldiers who lost their lives in this area of Belgium during World War I. We then played a concert outside the Cloth Hall in Ypres, which houses a magnificent museum in memory of all those who died in the Ypres Salient area of Belgium.

The main purpose of the tour was to pay our respects at the Menin Gate. This memorial remembers 54,896 of the soldiers who lost their lives in the 1914-1918 war, whose names are on the Menin Gate and who have no known grave. We were honoured to take part in the Last Post Ceremony and we laid wreaths on behalf of the Band and the Royal British Legion.

Twenty-nine musicians attended this tour, supported by some of their partners and also, representing the Royal British Legion’s Farnborough branch, the Chairman, Steven Gatfield and the Poppy Appeal Organiser, Jacki Gatfield. None of this would have been possible without sponsorship from local authorities, businesses, organisations and community groups.