Archive of the Month
The Nine Lessons & Carols at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and the role of Dean David F.R. Wilson
By Dr David O’Shea (with archival additions by Dr Susan Hood & Rachel Bennett)
For many, the Christmas service of Nine Lessons and Carols celebrated on or near Christmas Eve in Anglican churches around the world marks real beginning of Christmas. The origins of the service are attributed to Truro Cathedral in Cornwall, where Bishop EW Benson conducted the first formal service of on Christmas Eve 1880. Responding to what he regarded as excessive consumption of alcohol in local pubs during the festive season, his joyous religious alterative celebration of Christmas put songs and readings back into a church service context.
After the conclusion of World War 1, the Dean of King’s College Cambridge, a former army chaplain, the Very Revd Eric Milner–White, adapted a service for his college’s chapel at Christmas 1918. This liturgical format of songs and scripture readings to tell the nativity story has continued in use to the present day, with the service at King’s College having a global following in the BBC annual live television broadcast. In Ireland the broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 at 4pm on Christmas Eve live from St Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin is also a cornerstone for thousands of listeners at home and abroad. What is less well known is that the tradition of singing carols on Christmas Eve in St Patrick’s appears to have begun in 1879 thus predating the Truro and Cambridge traditions, and that the broadcast of the Nine Lessons and Carols actually commenced as early as 1936.
Extensive research on the tradition of Christmas carols and using newspaper sources together with archives in the Library’s safe–keeping has traced the true origins of Christmas carol traditions within the Church of Ireland to Dublin most especially the national cathedral.
Of the St Patrick’s Cathedral service held at 8pm on Christmas Eve 1879, discovery of a report in the Freeman’s Journal reveals how ‘selected Christmas carols on Christmas Eve’, at which before the sermon the Christmas carols ‘See Amid the Winter Snow” and ‘The First Nowell’ were sung, and after the sermon, ‘For Unto Us A Child is Born’ from Handel’s Messiah was performed, an initiative likely introduced by Charles Marchant, appointed organist in 1879. The following Christmas Eve, St Patrick’s introduced the practice of singing carols at the regular evensong, which took place at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and this tradition continued for about 20 years, after which time the use of carols in this service began to become increasingly elaborate.
In 1899, the Revd David F.R. Wilson (1871–1957) was appointed Warden of the Cathedral Grammar School and Cathedral Succentor, a role associated with the preparation of the musical liturgy Wilson was a skilled musician, an authority on hymnody, with a special interest in Christmas carols. In December 1910 he delivered a lecture on the subject at St Bartholomew’s parochial hall and his galvanising influence as Succentor (1899–1914) and later Precentor (1924–1935) resulted in the introduction of a varied repertoire of both ancient and modern carols. His innovations may be seen in the orders of service that the Library’s holds in the St Patrick’s cathedral collection (RCB Library C2). These capture his role as both musician and teacher.
In 1903 it was titled simply ‘Christmas carols’; in 1904 there was an arrangement a service of ancient carols; in 1911, the Magnificat was sung to an ‘ancient chant’; by 1912, the service was described as a ‘Christmas Eve Festival Evensong’, which included the singing of the Magnificat with a seasonal antiphon ‘Drop down ye heavens from above’ mirroring pre–Reformation liturgical tradition. ‘Christmas, 1910’ which listed hymns rather than carols. By 1915 it was even a more elaborate ‘Christmas Eve 1915 Carols’ including detailed historical information on each piece. This format for this order of service (7 pages long) would become the norm from then on – clearly demonstrative of Wilson’s knowledge of the subject and enthusiasm to share with the throngs attending the carols. The full service sheet as used from 1915 is available to view here.
From the diary of the Library’s founding benefactor, Rosamond Stephen, we know that from the later 1910s (even in the aftermath of the Spanish Flu pandemic) the cathedral was packed out on Christmas Eve. In 1921 she described sitting on the back of a
‘most delightful Irish wolf hound’ guarding a tomb in the one of the transepts because the cathedral was “cram jam full”!
From her position she could see and hear well, finding the singing lovely. She made particular remarks about the traditional setting of the “Conquering Hero” tune to the Hark the Herald Angels Sing hymn unique to St Patrick’s and accompanied with drums and trumpets. In Wilson’s notes for the order of service sheet he remarked how ‘Handel’s melody from Judas Macabaeus “See the Conquering Hero Comes” was the popular setting in Ireland to these words for nearly a century prior to 1879 but was then superseded by Mendelssohn’s Chorale from the Festgesang, composed in 1840. It is fair to speculate that Wilson may have encouraged the use of percussion and trumpets to add to the drama.
When Wilson eventually became Dean of St Patrick’s in 1935, he introduced the service of Nine Lessons and Carols to the Cathedral specifically for the Christmas Eve. One contemporary press–cutting noted how
‘Since the beginning of the present century … the choir at St Patrick’s had pioneered the popular use of the old Christmas songs of the people … [These were] carols not printed in books but familiar everywhere and later hawked by pedlars who had them printed with rude woodcuts on broadsheets.’
It transpired that Wilson had previously experimented with the format during his earlier incumbencies in Dublin parishes: evidence uncovered in parish custody has identified first Irish context for a Service of Nine Lessons and Carols in the style of Bishop Benson was in fact held in North Strand Church in Dublin, after he became rector there on Christmas Eve 1914. Evidence discovered in local parish custody by Canon Roy Byrne ensured that the 100th anniversary of that service was held in 2014 (click here):
Then in another first (when Wilson was rector of Donnybrook from 1917 until 1935) he and the parish choir were involved in first ever radio broadcast of carol singing in Ireland. On Christmas Eve 1925, a week before the first Irish wireless station 2RN was launched, with Wilson delivering an illustrated lecture, the choir sang carols as part of a test broadcast programme, as revealed in an Irish Times report.
Remarkably, the original broadcast notes in Wilson’s handwriting survive for the first wireless broadcast from St Patrick’s Cathedral which appears to have been on Christmas Eve 1936 – the second after his appointment as dean. Timings and precisions then as now are evident from this original annotated service sheet, which is safely in the custody of the RCB Library. No wonder when a memorial commemorating his role as dean was unveiled in the cathedral in 1969, a report in the Church of Ireland Gazette, published on 19 December 1969 commented that in introducing inducting the Nine Lessons and Carols to the cathedral’s annual calendar Dean Wilson’s “happy inspiration had become a tradition”.
A variety of Wilson–related and other festive items from the cathedral archives may be viewed in the display case in the Library foyer, where visitors are always welcome.