Treasure 84: Nine Lessons and Carols by Christopher Gray^[1] ~ An Article from Bulletin 315, Autumn 2019

Introduction:

On Tuesday 17th December 2013, Truro Cathedral was packed to the rafters for a reconstruction of the first ever ‘Nine Lessons with Carols’ which took place in Truro on Christmas Eve 1880. [A recording of our live webcast of that reconstruction service is on Truro Cathedral Choir’s Soundcloud page, and you can buy a Truro Cathedral Choir DVD/CD about the history of Nine Lessons on the Regent label (2014)].
King’s took over the service in 1918 under Eric Milner White. It was broadcast annually from 1928 to the present day with one exception. We are grateful to our friends at King’s for lots of innovations, some of which we in Truro have borrowed back (eg opening with a solo chorister singing ‘Once in royal’).
The paper that follows is in two parts: context and then music.

Part 1: Context The Anglican church in Cornwall

There is a strong sense of identity in Cornwall: many consider themselves to be Cornish rather than English. Some words from Edward Fish in a letter to the Royal Cornwall Gazette published on the 5th January 1877:

Looking around in this great non-conformist county, we did not need a bishop any more than a duck needs an umbrella. My statement as a non-conformist is this, and I do but echo the opinion of thousands in the county: we do not need a bishop.

So if we think the church has problems at the moment, ’twas ever thus. That new bishop Cornwall didn’t really need in 1877 was Edward White Benson, who went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury from 1883 until his death in 1896. He is buried in Canterbury Cathedral.

Just to give you a little more of a picture of the county Benson was moving to: a few lines from the biography of Benson’s wife Mary, by Rodney Bolt (‘As Good as God and As Clever as the Devil’):

…he would head off to isolated – sometimes desolate – spots, where he was a ‘foreigner from England’. Here were ancient churches, barely attended. Lonely priests who struggled with poverty on miserable endowments, who were shunned, even harassed by Dissenters. One priest was so lonely in his unpeopled church that he rented a pew in the Wesleyan chapel, and would go there of a Sunday evening ‘to get a little warmth and light, and to see human beings and hear them speak’. Others were more eccentric in their isolation, such as the vicar who did not go into his church at all, but spent Sundays walking in the rectory garden in a flowered dressing gown, smoking a hooka; the one who requested ‘white wine for a change’ at Communion; or the absent minded parson whose sister had to secure him to the altar rail with a dog chain and padlock to prevent him from wandering off before the service was over.

Three Truro Cathedrals

Against that backdrop, the first service of Nine Lessons with Carols took place in 1880 in Truro Cathedral but not the Truro Cathedral we know today. There have, in fact, been three Truro Cathedrals. The Diocese of Truro was created in 1876 and St Mary’s Parish Church in Truro was chosen to be elevated to cathedral status.

St Mary’s Parish Church must have been very pleased with its ‘promotion’, but it was short lived. A year later, in 1877, Edward White Benson was appointed Bishop of the new diocese and he immediately set about planning a new cathedral to be built from scratch. On 20th May 1880, two foundation stones were laid for the new cathedral, and by 11th October 1880 the old parish church was closed and demolished, except for one aisle that was to be incorporated into the new building that had been designed in the Gothic Revival style by John Loughborough Pearson. A temporary wooden structure was built which was Truro Cathedral mark two, and stood for seven years, until the first phase of Pearson’s cathedral was consecrated in 1887.

When we think about Benson’s Nine Lessons with Carols on Christmas Eve 1880, it’s perhaps a good idea to have that early history of the cathedral in mind. Whilst there was the somewhat vague assurance of a new cathedral, some years down the road, and finances permitting, all the people of Truro had seen by December 1880 was that their sixteenth century parish church had been all but destroyed and some residents had had their homes repossessed and torn down to make way for the promised new building.
It would seem an opportune time for a fairly new Bishop to bring his flock together for something special, but why a carol service?

The carol revival

Carols were popular in medieval times, but they often used secular tunes and church authorities were therefore wary of them.

The carol did not fare well through the Reformation in the fifteen hundreds, or at the hands of the Puritans in the sixteen hundreds (the Puritans of course abolished Christmas altogether in the mid-1600s). Those carols that survived did so mainly in the aural tradition, through community singing in pubs and so on.

In the 1800s, interest in carols began to be rekindled. In the first part of the century, the way was being paved for the Victorian Carol Revival and leading the vanguard was the MP for Bodmin, Davies Gilbert. In 1822, Gilbert published a collection under the catchy title ‘Some Ancient Christmas Carols with the Tunes to which they were formerly sung in the West of England’.

Another important figure was William Sandys who was a solicitor in London but also an able musician and an enthusiastic contributor to the carol revival. Sandys claimed to have collected more than one hundred carols from the west of Cornwall alone. He published his collection ‘Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern’ in 1833, just over a decade after Davies Gilbert’s collection. The work Gilbert and Sandys did in travelling around the country, and writing down what they heard, was of vital importance to preserving the carol.

Maybe it’s because of the strong tradition of folk music and community singing in Cornwall that it was such a rich source of carols waiting to be mined by Gilbert and Sandys. The fact is that carols were in the blood so much down here that Cornwall was the place for collectors to come.
Benson and his carol service

Back to Benson, a new bishop who found himself in a town that needed something positive after its parish church had been knocked down, and who happened to be in a diocese that was central to the carol revival that was, by 1880, in full swing. The idea of harnessing the carol to reconnect the church with the people was perhaps an obvious one, but it was one that was being used widely across the country and this was not part of Benson’s unique legacy. Nor did Benson invent the carol service. There had been carol services in previous years at Truro Cathedral, and in other cathedrals and churches.
What Benson invented was a particular format for a carol service, a format built around nine short readings, interspersed with various pieces of music.

Carols in Truro in the years running up to 1880’s Nine Lessons

In 1878, and remember this is two years before Benson’s Nine Lessons with Carols, The West Briton announced that ‘The choir of the cathedral will sing a number of carols in the cathedral tomorrow evening’ (tomorrow evening being Christmas Eve). We know that on Christmas Eve in the years before 1878, the choir had sung carols at the houses of prominent local parishioners, but that changed in 1878 with the appointment of a new Succentor, the Reverend Somerset Walpole.

It was Walpole’s suggestion that carols were no longer sung at the houses of parishioners, but were brought into the Cathedral (which in 1878 was the old St Mary’s Parish Church) and into an act of worship at 10 pm. F.W.B. Bullock’s book, A history of the parish church of St Mary, Truro, makes mention of the new 1878 Christmas Eve service which was needed ‘both as a counteraction to the public houses and as a right prelude to Christmas’.

This is perhaps a good time to debunk a quick myth. It’s been said, in print and on TV, that Benson came up with his Nine Lessons with Carols to keep people out of the pubs so they weren’t drunk at Midnight Mass. We checked our cathedral records and we had our first Midnight Mass in 1952. I suspect someone along the line has made an incorrect assumption based on the late start time of 10 pm and the quote from Bullock’s book about the new service being a counteraction to the public houses. The 1880 Nine Lessons with Carols was certainly not intended to keep people sobre for a Midnight Mass that didn’t take place for another 72 years.

Why did Benson devise the service?

Three reasons that might be behind Benson’s new Nine Lessons with Carols seem much more compelling to me:

• Giving the people of Truro something special in the wake of their parish church being pulled down.
• Using the carol revival and its Cornish roots as a way of connecting with the local people.
• Simply creating a beautiful structure for a service that tells the Christmas story and what it means for humankind. I think that as a passionate teacher, this would have really appealed to Benson.

It was the most humble of beginnings for a service that has since travelled all over the world. It received only a tiny mention in The West Briton in December 1880: ‘the usual festal service is to be held, but this time a pamphlet with the order of service is to be issued’.

In fact it was a great success and there were around 400 people crammed into the wooden shed which was notoriously very cold indeed in winter. I’m sure none of them suspected they were making a piece of Christmas history.

Part 2: Music, authenticity and decisions

Considerations in our reconstruction

In this second part of my paper, I’m going to look at the music that was sung in 1880 and how we approached some of the decisions we had to take for our reconstruction of Nine Lessons with Carols back in 2013.

We started out with the broad aim of being as authentic as we could, but it was impossible to follow that through too far. Aside from the fact that we were in a different building, there was the problem that our congregation, was quite different. Different in terms of what they knew and expected from being in church, and different in the way they would process music, which was influenced by everything from Benjamin Britten to The Beatles. To paraphrase a lecturer from my time at university: ‘the first thing you need for an authentic performance is an authentic audience’.

Our guiding light in reconstructing the Nine Lessons with Carols was the original order of service that survives from 1880.

The order of service

Looking at the order of service, there are headings for the different pieces of music listed. There are four carols, three anthems, two hymns and one canticle. We are confident that all the items labelled ‘Carol’ were sung to music from Bramley and Stainer’s collection Christmas Carols, New and Old. Copies of this carol book are to be found alongside the 1880 order of service in Cornwall Record Office, stamped with ‘Truro Cathedral Choir’, and the collection contains all four of the carols used in 1880.

Three items titled ‘Anthem’ are sections from Handel’s Messiah and they present few difficulties. For our reconstruction, the choir did not sing from a 19th century edition of Messiah, simply because we have better, clearer editions nowadays.

Hymns

Our first assumption was that two items entitled ‘Hymn’ would be found in the cathedral’s hymnal, Hymns Ancient and Modern, which was published in 1861. O come, all ye faithful is indeed there, with only a small alteration of the rhythm compared with the version we know today. It’s in A major, rather than G, so some Victorian fortitude would have to have been mustered for the top Es.

The other ‘Hymn’ was more problematic. At first glance Bethlehem! of noblest cities did not seem to appear in Hymns Ancient and Modern. A little further digging revealed that it was a translation of a fourth-century Latin text which did appear in another translation, Earth has many a noble city. It seems that Benson took the opportunity of having a printed order of service to introduce the new translation, which he obviously preferred to the one in the cathedral hymn books. Both translations were sung to the tune Stuttgart as set in Hymns Ancient and Modern.

Back to the order of service

Tucked away at the end of the order of service is a final musical item titled ‘Canticle’. There is a missing piece of the jigsaw here. The absence of any text or pointing in the order of service suggests that it was sung by the choir alone. With no further information to go on, we decided for our 2013 reconstruction to sing the Magnificat to Anglican Chant, as set in the 1890 Truro Diocesan Choral Union Festival Book. We know that there was a strong tradition of singing the Magnificat to Anglican Chant at that time in Cornwall and this version is the earliest one we know was used at Truro Cathedral. If this is not the correct chant, it would certainly have been something very similar indeed.

Another curiosity that is often retained to this day is Benson’s hierarchy among the readers of the lessons. He starts with a lowly Chorister and moves up gradually until the ninth lesson, which is read by the Bishop.

It’s interesting that Benson had gone to the trouble of typesetting and printing a special order of service for his Nine Lessons. This suggests that he viewed it as an important event. A number of these orders of service survive and are kept at Cornwall Record Office, but the most important one is Benson’s own copy, which has three comments handwritten in the margin. The first tells us that a collection was to be taken during O come, all ye faithful. Benson writes: ‘Offertory collected and placed on altar during this hymn’.
The second comment is beside the anthem ‘There were shepherds abiding in the field’ where he writes: ‘Three boys sing the Recitatives standing in the midst of the Choir looking East – (Should they stand at Choir door looking West; & [?] East for Chorus)’. On the inside front cover, he writes: ‘During the Benedictions each Reader stands in Choir door looking East then goes to lectern –’.

Much of the spirit of the 1880 service may lie in these small touches, theatrical as they may be. In the face of the kinds of pressures that surely come with building a new cathedral in a new diocese, it is clear that Benson nonetheless took great care over this innovative service. We can only marvel at his vision and creative energy and try to emulate it in our own climate today.

Christopher Gray

[1] A transcript of a paper given to the The Hymn Society Conference, Thursday 25th July 2019

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