Events at St Mary's Church, Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Wales, UK*

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FRIENDS OF ST MARY'S CHURCH

ANNUAL LUNCH

The Annual Lunch will be held at Wolfscastle Country Hotel on Sunday 12 May at 12.30 for 1pm. This year's Principal Guest and Speaker is Rt Rev. Bishop John Saxbee.

The cost of the two course lunch is £19.

MENU

Roast fillet of salmon with a herb, pine nut crust and citrus hollandaise sauce

or Confit of duck leg with a blackcurrant sauce

Both served on a bed of colcannon with new potatoes, glazed carrots and mixed green vegetables.

White chocolate and raspberry cheesecake served with raspberry coulis

or Bread and butter pudding served with a whisky and creme anglaise sauce

Coffee/tea with homemade fudge.

Tickets are available from Paul Lucas 01437-741225

Events 2012

Candlelight Christmas Concert

Haverfordwest Ladies Choir performed their Candlelight Christmas Concert in St. Mary’s Church on Friday 7th December, under the baton of Nancy Mann, and with the accompaniment of Gerald Nicholas. They raised over £260 towards the Church’s Heating Fund. The audience was welcomed to the church by the Rev.Fr  Paul Mackness.

        The evening’s programme was extremely well conceived, following an intriguing progress from the wistful and often haunting quality of some of the traditional airs in the first two sets, through to an increasing lyricism and jollity in the last two. The range was such that John Rutter was the only composer whose work was featured twice.

        There was a healthy representation for Welsh musicians with ‘Benedictus’, by the Gwynedd composer Robat Arwyn, a piece which was a huge success recently for The Priests, being sung by the choir for the first time. The Welsh traditional carol ‘Deck the hall’ was among the most popular items and the choir also delivered ‘Sussex carol’ and ‘Ding dong! merrily on high’.

        Highlights of the third set were ‘Away in a manger’ and ‘Dawel nos’, the translation of Franz Gruber’s famous ‘Silent night’. The choir, which had showed such a delicate control over some very subtle pieces earlier in the evening, was now able to display its capacity for more lyrical singing too, as well as its ability to sing in Welsh!

        The final set gave the audience ‘Snow!’, Teena Chinn’s arrangement of several classic Christmas favourites, Mel Tormé and Robert Wells’ ‘The Christmas song’ and was rounded off with Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’, in which Gerald Nicholas and Inka Lesinska accompanied with a piano duet.

        The depth of talent in the choir was displayed once again by the range of choristers who appeared as soloists. Frances Oates gave us MacGimsey’s ‘Sweet little Jesus boy’, Carol Mayhew sang Cumming’s ‘As dew in April’, with Emma Halls accompanying on oboe. Marian Graceson gave us Ireland’s ‘The holy boy’ and ‘What child is this?’ to the air usually sung as ‘Greensleeves’.

        Another successful feature of the evening was the sequence of short poetry readings interspersed among the songs. Again there was the same progress from an older tradition to hilarity. The pieces in the first set, read by Dot Swainson and Gyll Nisbet, harked back to the hymnologist Isaac Watts and the century after Chaucer.

        Thereafter, each reading seemed to give a pointer to the songs which were to follow it. After Anne Davies had ushered in the second set with a satirical piece about an egg-nog, from 1817, successive readings by Beryl Porter, Angela Preston and Linda Fowler had offered the more benign moods of several Victorian poets. The final set was brought in by Gladys Morris’s very funny dramatization of ‘A visit from Saint Nicholas’ and Sandra Devonald gave us the final poem, de la Mare’s ‘Mistletoe’.

      . The evening ended with mince pies and mulled wine, but the concert in itself been a most warming and inspiriting experience on what was a rather bleak evening outside.

Robert Nisbet

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Friends of St Mary's Annual Lunch, 6 May 2012.

The massive logistical and security problems posed by the London Olympic Games were stressed by the Llangwm-born Executive Vice-President of the British Olympic Association, Richard Palmer, speaking at the annual luncheon of The Friends of St Mary’s Church, Haverfordwest.
The 11,000 athletes, 60,000 officials, 25,000 media correspondents, 10,000 sponsors and thousands of spectators expected at the games would be protected by hundreds of Army, Police, SAS and other security personnel, ships, aircraft and missiles in a huge security exercise, he told his audience at The Wolfscastle Country Hotel.
Even so, there was no guarantee that nothing untoward might happen, and, following “the great rumpus in Parliament,” unless the authorities get the airport border control situation sorted, there could be total chaos.
Mr Palmer referred to the boycott and security problems experienced in Berlin in 1936, in Munich in 1972 and in Moscow in 1980.
Outlining the 2,000 year history of the Olympics and his own long association with its administration, he said there was great kudos in staging the games and tremendous benefits for future generations in the development of new sporting arenas and the encouragement of young people to take part in sport and lead more active lives.
Once the games were over the organisers had to go through the whole thing again with the Para Olympics.
“We are going to see some outstanding sport and we hope to win some medals,” he said, adding, “It is important to encourage more youngsters to lead a more active lifestyle and get away from their TV screens and computer games.”
Introduced by Friends chairperson Joyce Wonnacott, Mr Palmer praised the work of the Friends and said the landmark church of St Mary’s played an important part in his life, as the time on the church clock as he left the Grammar School determined which direction he took to catch his bus home to Llangwm.

Derek Rees

The Friends account benefited by £647.26.

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