A SOUTH Lakeland parish church where a Great War VC hero preached is one of the poignant venues for a series of concerts marking the on-going centenary of the conflict.

The folk trio Harp and a Monkey has teamed up with Arts Council England and the Western Front Association to stage the free concerts at unusual sites with Great War links.

They begin on Sunday, August 21, at St John’s Church, Hutton Roof, where Rev Theodore Bayley Hardy was vicar before becoming a WW1 military chaplain in his 50s.

Remarkably, he won the Victoria Cross, Distinguished Service Order and a Military Cross on the Western Front, despite having been told that he was too old to serve and too poor sighted.

The trio's performances will include field recordings and interviews with veterans, new songs and re-workings of traditional and contemporaneous songs and will be filmed for a documentary.

Harp and a Monkey front-man Martin Purdy, who is a First World War historian, author and broadcaster, said: “It will be a real honour to perform in a church that was so dear to Theodore Bayley Hardy.

“The role of religion and chaplains during the war is hugely under-estimated. We live in an increasingly secular age where cynicism about religion is common, but that was not the case at the time of the First World War.

“Religion was very important to the men and, as a result, very important to the military as well."

The Rev Bailey Hardy took up his appointment at the small country parish of Hutton Roof in 1913.

When war broke out he was a 51-year-old widower and immediately volunteered as a Military Chaplain, but was turned down on the basis that he was too old and his eyesight far too poor.

However, after continual pestering, he was finally accepted for the role in August 1916 and subsequently posted as the CoE chaplain to a battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment.

He would become one of the most decorated non-combatants in British history. His medals were all for helping the wounded out in no man’s land in the worst of conditions, often despite injury to himself and the fact that he could barely see a few yards in front of himself.

He was presented with his VC by King George V. Wounded while helping others again on the battlefield - less than a month before the Armistice - Hardy died a week later on October 18, 1918, in Rouen, France.

He would have celebrated his 55th birthday just two days later. There is a memorial to him in the church at Hutton Roof where the free show will take place at 3pm.