Saint Gregory

Quite by chance, around the back of Canterbury Cathedral, we came across what had been the church of St. Gregory, now used by the music department of Christ Church University and fitted out like a small theatre. Raked seats occupying the west end, stage at the east end and with a space in the middle, on this occasion filled with more seats.

Presumably, from the location, the Gregory who sent Augustine to Canterbury to bring the Frankish queen of Kent to heel, back into the Roman fold, the Franks of that time already having pretensions to ecclesiastical independence, pretensions which they have held onto ever since, despite the Gregorian initiative.

We saw various soldiers coming out of the church for a smoke, seemingly dressed in desert fatigues, but pressed on regardless, to be greeted inside the door by a very pleasant young man from the university who explained that there would shortly be a concert given by the band of the Royal Engineers. With the result that we got lost for half an hour or so, and came back to find the place fairly full, but still with a couple of seats there for us. Mainly, we thought, musical people from the university, some wives and girl friends, a few regular locals and some odd strays like ourselves.

The concert lasted about an hour and went from chamber through small band to big band, and I was most taken with the chamber - having forgotten that I like band music of this sort - our having turned up an opportunity to hear a military band at Bognor Regis last year, specifically a concert given by the Royal Marines Association Concert Band on the 6th September last. I think the main reason for turning up was that most of the audience looked to be both old and military - older than us, that is. And a lot of the ladies had very old fashioned hair do's. And this despite the fact that years ago we used to go to hear bands in the royal parks from time to time - while I don't even know now whether the army bands still perform in such places.

But the band master, a staff sergeant in a dress uniform which was completed with natty little spurs, did tell us that his band kept its roots in the ground, as it were, and could still do proper marching music, as well as the receptions, parties and weddings which were a large part of the diet.

The concert was followed by a rather more serious teach in for students from the Christchurch music department who were interested in bands, in the army or in both. We passed on this and proceeded to the Pilgrim Hotel for lunch, via Wetherspoons, as mentioned in a previous post.

PS: the programme included a lot of talk of sappers. Checking with the helpful army web site, I now know that the Royal Engineers is not the same as the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and that the two engineering bands are actually run from within the Corps of Army Music, with the RE band being sixth in the pecking order and the REME band being last. Maybe I am missing something. The sappers of the Royal Engineers were presumably the people who dug the siege works, the saps, for sieges from the 18th century on, but who went on to build an outpost up the road at Ewell. To quote: 'the 135 Geographic Squadron ... provides a range of capabilities ... ranging from raw data collection (including geodetic surveys) and information management; through information exploitation, terrain analysis and visualisation; to geospatial information dissemination (electronically across networks, by bulk reproduction and supply of hard copy mapping, or on a digital media)'. Which doesn't sound much like digging saps to me.

Group search key: cta.