Carols at Christmas: " All broad and bright rises th' Eternal Morning Star"

King's College Chapel Window, Cambridge

Music by Charles Gounod, lyrics by Henry F.. Chorley

"Though poor be the chamber
Come here, come and adore:
Lo the Lord of Heaven
Hath to mortals given,
Life for evermore…life for evermore…life for evermore.

Wind to the cedars proclaim the joyful story:
Wave of the sea, the tidings bear afar;
The Night is gone! behold in all its glory,
All broad and bright rises th' Eternal Morning Star."

I first came across this Victorian carol in an old children's novel , The Gentle Shadows by Kathleen Wallace.  Published in 1947, it tells how Vicky, a lonely eleven year old, is befriended by an ebullient unconventional family, just returned from overseas, moving into an old Dutch-style house* in time for the first postwar Christmas of 1945.

Dutch-gabled houses, Topsham, Devon

 She joins the Marshalls hunting for furniture in sale-rooms and junk shops, and making home-made decorations and presents, when shop goods are still scarce and everything was rationed.

"Bunches of holly hung in the greengrocers' doors, Christmas-trees leaned against the windows from the pavements outside, and there was a brave attempt with cotton-wool and some tinsel and red paper, to make the shop windows look decorated.  There were no turkeys dangling from hooks at the butchers' shops and only very makeshift toys in the shops where you might expect to find them;…"  but there were still carol singers and plenty of music.

Carol Singers, collage, Shadwell Local History Society 

When the family join the carol singers, they include another Victorian composition, "Like Silver Lamps in a distant shrine, The Stars are sparkling bright",  as well as regular favourites such as "I saw Three Ships come Sailing by , The Holly and the Ivy, and The Twelve Days of Christmas.  The story concludes through Christmas Day  and homecoming celebrations for their soldier son returned from Burma, with his wife and new baby, all shared with friends and neighbours, and some "gentle shadows" from the past.

"Like silver lamps"

Kathleen Wallace (1890-1958) is little remembered now, but was a popular poet and novelist in the 1930s and '40s.  Daughter of  William Montgomery Coates*, Bursar of Queens' College, she grew up in Cambridge and graduated from Girton in 1914. Her twin sister died as a baby, and her brother was killed in action in 1915; she  expressed her grief in her war poems, Lost City Verses, published in 1918.  She married Major James H. Wallace of the Canadian Mounted Rifles in 1917 and brought up their four sons. The family lived in China for seven years, and she only began writing novels after they returned in 1927, setting her first novel  in China.

Through the '30s and '40s she wrote many novels and children's stories, including  fictional  studies of Mary Kingsley and the Brontes: (in The Prize Essay, two schoolgirls find themselves visiting the Haworth household, just as the "gentle shadows" are welcomed by the Marshall family). Although out of fashion now, elements of her writing have been praised as 'masterly', and her poems are included in Cambridge Poets of the Great War, Michael Copp's anthology, of 2001.

 "The shadows that people this house are very gentle ones."  Charlotte Yonge, 1860

*(see millroadcemetery.org.uk/coates-aileen-montgomery)