In her 2012 Christmas broadcast, the Queen looked back on a year of celebration and reflected on the importance of public service.
Commencing with the National Anthem, played in the Ballroom at Buckingham Palace by the British Paraorchestra, Her Majesty proceeded to congratulate those who participated in the Olympic and Paralympic games and for the inspiration they had given to our young people. She also mentioned those who were serving the country on Christmas day, including those in the armed forces and working in our hospitals before quoting a verse from Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. The broadcast concluded with the Military Wives Choir singing a further two verses of the poem to a setting by Harold Darke. We were made aware that the Queen intended the Darke setting to be used in the short programme some two weeks prior to transmission, but were sworn to secrecy.
Voted as the most popular carol by fifty choirmasters and choral experts across the UK and the USA in a survey conducted by the BBC Music Magazine in 2008, the setting, written in 1909, was also used in the famous Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge where Darke was organist during the Second World War.
The Queen’s 2012 recorded Christmas TV broadcast was unique, being the first to be filmed in 3D and the first by Sky rather than alternating between the BBC and ITV, but it was her grandfather, King George V who was the first monarch to broadcast to the Empire in 1932, albeit on the wireless. The text was written by Rudyard Kipling and began ‘I speak now from my home and my heart to you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert or the sea, that only voices from the air can reach them’.
The King’s broadcast was live and was scheduled to be aired at 3pm which was deemed the best time to reach most of the Empire by short wave transmitters in Britain. In the event, the broadcast began at five past three (twenty-five minutes to four Sandringham time since the King insisted that all clocks were set half an hour fast) and lasted two and a half minutes. An hour-long programme preceded the broadcast bearing greetings from all over the Empire.
The King’s last Christmas broadcast in 1935 was made less than a month before his death. His son, Edward VIII, never made a Christmas speech to the nation, having abdicated on 11th December 1936, and no Christmas message was broadcast that year. King George VI’s first Christmas broadcast was in the following year, overcoming, to a large extent, his stammer as shown in the film ‘The King’s Speech’.
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s first Christmas broadcast was in 1952. The Queen used the same desk and chair as her father and grandfather had done. ‘Each Christmas, at this time, my beloved father broadcast a message to his people in all parts of the world . . . As he used to do, I am speaking to you from my own home, where I am spending Christmas with my family’. The first televised broadcast was in 1957 and since 1960 the speech was recorded in advance so that tapes could be sent around the Commonwealth for showing at the most convenient time. Most recordings have been made in Buckingham Palace, but Sandringham and Windsor have also been used.
The Queen has broadcast to the nation every year of her reign save in 1969 when a repeat of a documentary on the Royal Family was already scheduled.
In the Bleak Midwinter — words by Christina Rossetti, music by Harold Darke
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