Almost 100 people came to Blandford’s Corn Exchange to enjoy our fundraising concert in support of the Museum Development Appeal. Local male vocal group The Gravellers sang a wide variety of songs, from traditional shanties (What shall we do with the drunken sailor?) to 20th century classics by the Beatles, Beach Boys and Freddie Mercury. Pianist Chris Dowie provided a different style of entertainment, with medleys from West End hits Salad Days and West Side Story. All in all, an evening of great singing and good company, raising over £1600 to help to secure the future of the Town Museum
Raffle prizes were generously donated by The Beauty Workshop, Blandford Information Centre, The Collective, Coralie’s Crafts, Cotton Moon, The Crown Hotel, Dec the Halls, The Dolphin, Indigo Tree, Gallery 1, The Georgian Tea Rooms, Koh Gurkha, La Vita, Off Camber, Realtime, Salon 13 and Sweetpea, as well as Museum volunteers Clara, Joy, Ness and Sylvia.
Visit this page to find out more about our plans and the progress of the Appeal.
Who are the Gravellers? Difficult to say, probably. They came together over 25 years ago, a small group of friends who wanted to sing together. So two of them went to see Ros Evans, a fellow resident of Gravel Lane and musician, and asked for her help. ‘That was fun’, they said, ‘can we bring some friends?’. And so it started and so it has remained: a group of men who enjoy each others’ company. They share a wide variety of skills: farming, teaching, engineering, building, sailing – at one time four of them worked for the RNLI – but they are all communicators and between them they share 650 years of experience. And that is about the range of their repertoire : their earliest song comes from the 15th century and their latest from our own. They love their singing and they love any opportunity to inflict it on others…