Deiniolen brass band members discuss community ties ahead of Remembrance Sunday

A 14-year-old brass musician will join Seindorf Arian Deiniolen at the village’s Remembrance service, playing hymns as residents gather to honour people from the area who died in war.

Efan Thomas has been a member of the band for almost a year. The service is due to take place by Deiniolen’s war memorial, on the village’s main street. The memorial bears the names of local men lost in the First and Second World Wars.

The service is scheduled for Remembrance Sunday, 8 November. Efan said brass bands helped keep a longstanding tradition alive and could support communities as they remembered people from their area who had been killed in war.

He has taken part in a Remembrance service with a brass band once before. In 2024, he played hymns including “Abide With Me” and “St Clement” on cornet at the Blaenau Ffestiniog service with Seindorf Arian yr Oakeley.

Efan, who lives in Chwilog, also plays trumpet and flugelhorn. He is a member of the National Youth Brass Band of Wales and the Gwynedd and Môn Schools Music Service senior brass band. He described the sense of belonging and shared purpose in a band as a major part of its appeal.

Dylan Williams, known as Dylan “Corn”, is Efan’s brass-instrument teacher and a fellow member of the Deiniolen band. In the run-up to Remembrance Sunday, he has been teaching local cornet players to perform “The Last Post”, played at the start of the two-minute silence at remembrance services.

Williams said communities ask local brass bands to take part in their services, and that the connection mattered particularly in an area with a strong tradition of brass bands. He said the sound of a band playing a hymn in a quiet place could move people.

A professional musician, Williams has taught dozens of cornet players to play “The Last Post” over the years and has performed it many times himself. He said young people gained confidence, teamwork, concentration and discipline through band membership, as well as opportunities to socialise.

Efan first played “The Last Post” in public at a performance in December 2025, when the theatre company Mewn Cymeriad took its show about Welsh poet Hedd Wyn to Pencaenewydd Chapel. After a workshop with actor Siôn Emyr, who portrayed Hedd Wyn, Efan played the call before the evening performance.

The story of Hedd Wyn, born Ellis Humphrey Evans, is part of Efan’s Welsh lessons. Evans was killed in the First World War before learning that he had won the chair at the 1917 National Eisteddfod in Birkenhead.

Remembrance gatherings were first held on 11 November 1919, a year after the First World War ended. Williams said local bands could bring together people who might otherwise never meet, and could inspire some to start playing themselves.

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