The familiar tunes never fail to get us in the festive mood – but many of them have remarkably un-Christmassy roots, writes Mark Forsyth.
The Christmas carol service was invented in Truro in 1880 by a chap called Edward WhiteBenson. The story goes that on Christmas Eve everybody in Truro would get disgustingly drunk, and that the Bishop of Truro (Benson) was so disgusted that he decided to lure everybody out of the pub and into the church with his new service.
The problem with this story is that there’s no evidence that that’s what motivated Benson. And we do know a lot about him. He later became Archbishop of Canterbury and his whole family had something of a mania for writing. His wife had 39 lesbian lovers. How do we know that? Because she kept a diary, and numbered them. One of his sons was the eminent gay novelist EF Benson. Another was the eminent gay poet Arthur Benson.
GettyArthur wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory. He also wrote a diary of four million words, which is often reckoned to be the longest ever. His daughter Margaret was an eminent lesbian Egyptologist. His daughter Nellie actually stole one of her own mother’s girlfriends and died of TB.
Astoundingly, there were no grandchildren.
Anyway, in 1880 this family, or rather this hive of oversexed logomania, was in the brand‐new diocese of Truro. It was so brand new that they didn’t even have a cathedral, just a large shed, and Edward White Benson decided to invent the carol service, perhaps not to get the people out of the pubs, but to get the carols out. You see, before this, Christmas carols hadn’t been sung in the church, they’d been sung in the pub. Carols were folk songs; originally they were folk dances (that’s what ‘carol’ meant: ‘a dance in a ring’).
Why would you see three ships come sailing by? The answer is that nobody knows.