On Sunday 10 November, St. Clare’s Norwegian students joined the Remembrance Day service at Wadham College, accompanied by the College's Norwegian teacher, Rigmor Batsvik.
It was a very moving service with beautiful songs by their choir and organ music in a chapel evensong service by candlelight, as described by one of Norway's national poets, Nordahl Grieg in his poem 'The Chapel in Wadham College' written in 1923 when he as a Norway scholar spent a year here. Our IB students study his works in their Norwegian Literature programme and the 3 Pre-IB students had been prepared by reading the poem with Rigmor, coming to an extra class with her.
Towards the end of the service and after the reading of an appalling long list of the fallen from Wadham college, particularly in WWI, which Nordahl Grieg called an 'endless grief of names', Hermine Fossum Simonsen in IB2 read a short biography of the poet who as a captain in the Norwegian army and a war reporter was killed in RAF plane shot down over Berlin now almost 70 years ago.