THE Rame Peninsula Male Voice Choir has become the first men’s choir in Britain to be given the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service.

The choir has raised more than £250,000 since 1976 and nearly £17,000 for cancer diagnosis in the past year.

The choir was nominated for the award because of the scale of its long-term fund-raising. The choir and its folk, sea shanty and 60s rock ensemble, Halfway Harmony, has donated to schools and churches on the peninsula, to earthquake victims in Nepal, to Rame Peninsula Beach Care, to Coverack flood victims, to the Royal British Legion, to Cornwall Air Ambulance and to ShelterBox.

Mesothelioma, caused by inhaling asbestos dust, has claimed the lives of five choir members in recent years, and those of more than 460 people in the Plymouth area in the past two decades. Mesothelioma South West has consequently received several thousand pounds from Halfway Harmony.

All that is in addition to more than £90,000 raised by participation in events run by the Cornish Federation of Male Voice Choirs at London’s Royal Albert Hall and Plymouth Pavilions.

Choir chairman Clive Brinkmann said they were ‘proud to receive this honour, and humbled by the remarkable generosity of the people of East Cornwall’.

He said: ‘In the best traditions of “one and all”, our own community has helped us raise nearly £17,000 in less than a year.

‘That money is being used to fund state-of-the-art cancer diagnostic equipment at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, and without the people of Rame we would never have been nominated for the Queen’s Award by the local public.’

He insisted that thanks should also go to the Cornish federation of MVCs, many of whose choirs held independent concerts, further boosting the cancer equipment fund and helping spare Cornish residents round trips of up to 400 miles for the nearest available diagnosis, which was in Bristol.

The choir’s CD, Minnadhu Breaks, was used as the soundtrack to a documentary, Last Fisherman, which has won several international film festival awards.

Malcolm Baker, the Rame fisherman who is the focus of the film, chose the oncology charity to receive £700 raised from the sale of a boat he renovated with youngsters in the film.

Another local resident, Brian Rayden, sold off the jewellery and records of his late wife (a cancer victim), donating nearly £900 to the cause, while choir supporters raised more then £2,000 from coffee mornings.

The Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, Colonel Edward Bolitho, said: ‘This is a great accolade, and recognition not only of your singing work, but also of the notable fund-raising you have carried out over so many years.