Music in the Face of Adversity
Victoria Peet
Marketing Officer, BBC London Performing Groups
Music in the Face of Adversity: the story of Alexandra Palace and Ruhleben civilian internment camps during World War One
Ruhleben Camp Orchestra with kind permission of the Historical & Special Collections, Harvard Law School
As part of BBC Radio 3’s two-week season Music in the Great War, the BBC Concert Orchestra is presenting a concert of music that was either performed, or written and performed, in two civilian World War One internment camps. The camps, Alexandra Palace in London and Ruhleben just outside of Berlin, contained enemy aliens who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when war broke out.
Of the people interned at the camps, a small number were musicians and composers who organised themselves into musical societies and orchestras, putting on concerts for their fellow captives. From programmes that have been unearthed in the British Library, we know that both sides performed a huge range of music from Gilbert and Sullivan to Wagner, Elgar and Saint-Säens. Plus there are also works written in the camps by composers including Edgar Bainton, Benjamin Dale, Bryceson Treharne and Anton Wüst. For the first time since the signing of the armistice, these works are being brought together once more.
For any concert we carry out research to find out as much as we can about the music and its context. The more we discovered about the history of Alexandra Palace and Ruhleben, the more interested we all became and so when local Watford resident Penny Pomroy got in touch to tell us her great-great uncle was interned at Ruhleben we jumped at the chance to find out more.
You can listen to Penny’s story of Uncle Rome and how he ended up at Ruhleben via the SS Hitachi Maru, the German raider SMS Wolf, Gustrow and Holzminden POW camps:
Penny Pomroy talks about her Uncle Rome's journey to Ruhleben internment camp in WW1
Uncle Rome’s story is just one of many from both sides. At the concert we will be joined by actor Alex Wyndham (Miles in the recent BBC drama The Crimson Field), who will read a selection of letters, memoirs and reports from the camps to tell the real-life story of the prisoners.
A Captive Audience: Words and Music from World War One
Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3: Thursday 26 June, 7.30pm from Watford Colosseum
