…the reality is quite different. The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols was celebrated at King\u2019s for the first time in 1918, not a historic service at all but an invented tradition \u201d\u201d modern and man-made. And tempting though it is to imagine that this delicate fusion of words and music was created in the exquisite interior of King\u2019s Chapel, the product of contemplation and beauty, its origins were in fact far less exalted: born in a wooden hut in Truro and conceived in the muddy, bloody trenches of the first world war, a child of horror and suffering, not peace and goodwill.<\/p>\n
The story of Nine Lessons and Carols begins with an Anglican clergyman. Eric Milner-White was the \u201d\u02dcvery shy, but tremendously kind\u2019 young man appointed chaplain of King\u2019s in 1912. Quick to volunteer when war broke out in 1914, he traded the quiet life of Cambridge for the squalor and violence of the French front line. Most of his letters home are gone, destroyed by Milner-White himself. But the few that remain paint a vivid picture of his experience, caught between banality (\u201d\u02dcOn days when too many tragedies aren\u2019t happening there are many elements of the picnic about it\u2019) and horror (\u201d\u02dcMost of life is at night, and the nights are filled with prolonged terror \u201d\u201d a horrid, weird, furtive existence\u2019).<\/p>\n
Returning to Cambridge in 1918 after \u201d\u02dca battle of special horror\u2019, Milner-White was appointed dean of King\u2019s and immediately set about reforming a liturgy his experience convinced him was not just inadequate but irrelevant to the needs of a community so damaged and disillusioned. \u201d\u02dcColour, warmth and delight\u2019 were to be the focus, offering aesthetic as well as spiritual consolation in only the simplest and most direct language. Wanting to create a special service for Christmas, Milner-White took inspiration from Edward White Benson \u201d\u201d the first bishop of the new diocese of Truro.<\/p>\n