‘The Choir: Military Wives’, and those without a voice

Gareth Malone and the RMB Chivenor
Military Wives Choir
(picture courtesy of the BBC).

A new series of ‘The Choir’ has just started on BBC Two. Called ‘The Choir: Military Wives’, it follows choirmaster Gareth Malone as, working with the wives and girlfriends of troops deployed to Afghanistan, he forms the RMB [Royal Marines Base] Chivenor Military Wives Choir. In an interview with Lorraine McBride for Defence Focus, Gareth explained why it was important to him to work with military partners: ‘To my mind, we only ever see military wives when something tragic happens. I wanted to show what they are doing and literally give them a voice.’

All of the choir members live in married quarters/service family accommodation at the tri-service RMB Chivenor, near Barnstaple in Devon, on a ‘patch’ familiar to umpteen army families, past and present (for further details of army families’ accommodation through history, see TACA’s ‘Accommodation’ page). Living as they do ‘inside the wire’ – that is, apart from the wider civilian community, and also typically at a distance from their extended families – these civilian women feel their isolation especially acutely in the absence of their military menfolk. And while they support each other as best they can, putting on a brave face as they try to get on with everyday life, their fears for their deployed partners, as well as their lack of confidence, is all too evident.

Military children are often also badly affected by a parent’s deployment, although this was only touched upon in the first episode of ‘The Choir: Military Wives’, when a young boy spoke of having a nightmare in which the news of his father’s death was about to be broken to him. And while many may be too young to understand that their absent parent may be injured or killed, they certainly miss him or her regardless; do not understand why their beloved parent is no longer at home with them; and may be unsettled by the considerable stress and anxiety felt by the parent – temporarily effectively rendered a single parent – who remains at home, looking after them.

That’s not all either, as a study commissioned by the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Children’s Fund found in 2009. ‘The Overlooked Casualties of Conflict’ report makes sobering reading, Julian Brazier, MP for Canterbury and Whitstable, being quoted, for instance, as saying:

Canvassing on the married quarter estate for our local regiment, I met one little boy whose father had been badly wounded the previous night on active service. It brought home to me the stress which young children are bearing as result of their parents’ service.

The section entitled ‘The Stigma of the “Military Brat” Label’ is, moreover, shocking, recording as it does that ‘children of deployed parents are often “prime targets” for bullying’ by children from a civilian background, some of whom may have anti-war parents.

‘The Choir: Military Wives’ shows the members of RMB Chivenor Military Wives Choir finding ‘their voice’ and, through it, winning the support of the civilian community. Talking to Lorraine McBride of the day when the choir sang in front of the locals in Barnstaple, Malone reflected: ‘It was incredibly emotional . . . for those women to know that they have the support of the town and the impact that had on them was unbelievable.’

'Always in our thoughts':
a postcard from World War I.

In an interview with Gerard O’Donovan published in the Telegraph on 7 November 2011 (‘Gareth Malone: Keeping the home fires burning with The Choir’), Malone spoke of trying to tackle ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning (’Till the Boys Come Home)’, a song written by Ivor Novello and Lena Gilbert Ford in 1914, with the choir:

They couldn’t get through it. We all felt it, because it connects you to history, to generations of women who have been in the same position before. When we sang it at the homecoming parade, I had to really hold myself together because I could see some of them cracking. The guys had just had their medals parade, they’d all come home… that’s so overwhelming. I mean, my life isn’t like that. Most of our lives aren’t like that.

In highlighting the reality of day-to-day life for military families on the ‘home front’ in Chivenor, maybe the 'The Choir: Military Wives' will give the wider public a greater understanding of what thousands more are going through, and have gone through, when a life partner and parent is also in the armed forces.

The RMB Chivenor Military Wives Choir will be performing at the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall on 12 November 2011.