Listen To ‘We Will Remember Them’: Words & Music For Remembrance

As we mark another Remembrance Day, we are proud to present a poignant tribute to the men and women who sacrificed their lives in the service of our country. We Will Remember Them is a seamless sequence of prose, poetry, and newsreel readings from the First World War through to present-day texts written by servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The readings, by an impressive line-up of celebrities, are underscored by some of the world’s most uplifting and moving pieces of classical music.

Listen to We Will Remember Them: Words & Music For Remembrance on Apple Music and Spotify.

We Will Remember Them: Words & Music For Remembrance

However you choose to mark Remembrance Day, we hope you’ll enjoy listening to the poignant collection of words and music featured on We Will Remember Them. Among the readers taking part are Joanna Lumley OBE (whose grandfather and father both served in the British Indian army), forces songbird Hayley Westenra (her uncle served in the New Zealand Royal Air Force), and Lt Gen Sir John Kiszely KCB, MC, DL, former National President of The Royal British Legion and hero of the Battle of Mount Tumbledown during the Falklands War.

Dame Vera Lynn reads the moving Kohima Epitaph

Dame Vera Lynn CH, DBE, ‘the Forces’ Sweetheart,’ reads the moving Kohima Epitaph by John Maxwell Edmonds carved on the memorial of the 2nd British Division in the cemetery of Kohima (North-East India).

When you go home
Tell them of us and say
“For your tomorrow
We gave our today.”

Richard Baker reads For The Fallen

Reading the newsreel items and Laurence Binyon’s poem For The Fallen is the late Richard Baker OBE, the much-loved broadcaster (he introduced the first BBC television news broadcast in 1954) and who, in the Second World War, served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve on Arctic convoy minesweepers.

Other readers featured on We Will Remember Them are broadcaster John Humphrys, and actors Bernard Cribbins OBE (who did his National Service with the Parachute Regiment), Stephen Fry, Nigel Havers, and Simon Williams.

It includes some of the nation’s favourite poems of remembrance

The album includes some of the nation’s favourite poems of remembrance ordered chronologically through various conflicts, from Rupert Brooke’s famous World War 1 sonnet The Soldier (‘If I should die, think only this of me …’) to Sunset Vigil by Staff Sergeant Andrew McFarlane, written to commemorate his comrades killed while serving alongside him in Afghanistan. Legendary record producer Gordon Lorenz reads Wilfred Owens’s Anthem For A Doomed Youth.

Joanna Lumley is particularly moving on I Am With You

In addition, Stephen Fry reads In Flanders Fields by John McCrae (‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row…’), while Nigel Havers reads Our Wall written by William Walker, an RAF veteran whose Spitfire was shot down in 1940 and who, at the time of his death in 2012, was the oldest surviving pilot from the Battle of Britain. Joanna Lumley is particularly moving on I Am With You, written by service wife Hannah Carpenter, and noted, “I’ve observed Remembrance Day all my life. Because my father was a soldier, Remembrance Day is always sacred to me.”

A poignant selection of music

The music for We Will Remember Them includes Holst’s The Planets (extracts), Elgar’s Enigma Variations (extracts), Barber’s Adagio For Strings, Handel’s ‘Sarabande’ from Suite No.3, Debussy’s Clair De Lune, Vaughan Williams’ Partita For Double String Orchestra (extracts), Elgar’s Pomp And Circumstance ‘March No.3’, Saint-Saëns’ The Swan (arr. Godowsky), Handel’s Water Music (extracts), Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia On Greensleeves, Amazing Grace (Trad.), Ellerton and Scholefield’s The Day Thou Gavest Lord Is Ended and Elgar’s Pomp And Circumstance ‘March No.1’.

The artists include Sir Charles Groves and Andre Previn conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Jane Glover directing the London Mozart Players, and Ross Pople leading the London Festival Orchestra. Also featured are the Band of the Coldstream Guards, the Jonathon Price Quartet, and pianist Gordon Fergus-Thomson.

“Remembrance Day is a time to remember all those who sacrificed their lives”

When the recording was originally released in 2010, Lt Gen Sir John Kiszely remarked, “Remembrance Day is a time to remember all those who sacrificed their lives, particularly those from the British armed forces. It’s a personal time for many of us as we remember those individuals we have known who’ve been killed.”

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them

(from For The Fallen by Laurence Binyon published in The Times on 21 September 1914)

Listen to We Will Remember Them on Apple Music and Spotify.