The First Royal Christmas Broadcast

With a hoarse voice as if roughened by weather, King George V delivered the first Royal Christmas Broadcast - written by author and poet Rudyard Kipling - from a study at Sandringham House, Norfolk, on Christmas Day 1932.

The text, of timeless simplicity, bore the hallmark of the master: "I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them."

In emphatic tones and the accent of an Edwardian country gentleman, it sufficed to carry his words to world-wide acclaim. With its very first delivery, the Christmas broadcast from Sandringham had become an institution.

Legend has it that the King used a gold microphone. It was in fact a standard one encased in Australian walnut. A thick cloth covered the table to deaden the sound of rustling paper, for the King's hands were known to tremble with nervousness. He spoke from a little room under the stairs: "I broadcast a short message of 251 words to the whole Empire from Francis' room."

Although moved by its reception, the King had no wish to repeat his triumph. It was an ordeal, he complained, which spoilt his Christmas. Some of his courtiers also thought (correctly, as it turns out) that an annual broadcast would lose its impact through familiarity. The politicians were of course encouraging, even if the King was unimpressed.

He agreed to continue only when shown a batch of appreciative letters throughout the Empire. The broadcasts of 1933, 1934 and 1935 never quite achieved the sublime appeal of 1932; perhaps the replacement of Kipling by Archbishop Lang as the principal draftsman exchanged magic for mere eloquence. Yet all who gathered year after year for the King's Christmas message awaited the voice of a friend.

Source: King George V, by biographer Kenneth Rose.

Photo © Press Association

Read the full article >>

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew...

A copybook was an exercise book used by school children to practice their handwriting in. The pages were blank except for horizontal rulings and a printed specimen of perfect handwriting at the top that students were supposed to copy all down the page. The specimens were proverbs or quotations, or little commonplace sayings designed to inculcate the young with the wisdom and truth of the ages. These were the copybook headings.

Kipling's poem, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, talks of the enduring nature of those old wise sayings, and the cruel lessons they instill when the march of progress falters and the marketplace of trends and fads and fashionable thinking fails to heed the gospel of old fashioned common sense.

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place.
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

* * * * *

AS IT WILL BE in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

— Rudyard Kipling, October 1919

Read the full article >>

"Not this tide"

The ruined face of David Haig remains with you long after the end of My Boy Jack, a dramatization of the death of John Kipling, his famous father's only son, now playing on TVO. Haig's Kipling is not the bellicose bigot of legend, but a courteous, gentle, even sometimes prim story teller and father. Children flock to hear him, and he always greets them warmly. He adores his son Jack, with an overbearing zeal that easily overshadows Daniel Radcliffe's (Harry Potter himself) smaller figure. The British patriot par excellent, he warns of the dangers of German military aggression in the years before 1914, bemoaning, in a strident speech near the film's beginning, Britain's small profession force and the Kaiser's million man army. Haig conjures up Kipling the orator, powerful and stark in his projections; rape and murder to follow in the Huns' wake. In the film's opening scene Kipling is asked by George V, on behalf of the then Liberal government, to tone down his anti-German rhetoric. Kipling politely refuses and the King is delighted. The relationship between Kipling and his sovereign is more than an illustration that the poet lived up to one of his most famous lines - "walk with kings -- nor lose the common touch" - but also a parallel between two fathers. The King's youngest son, Prince John, was a sickly child who died at 14 from "seizures."

The two men's pride and grief book-end the film and the 1997 play, both written by David Haig, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Kipling. The moral center of the play rests not Kipling's grief but his perceived guilt. The great poet is keen to see English manhood do its duty against the German menace, even his short-sighted, seventeen year old son. The boy's mother, played with matronly grace by the very unlikely Kim Cattrall, and sister are horrified at the prospect of young Jack in combat, both, at different points in the drama even call Kipling a murderer. The composed and courteous Haig / Kipling unhinges himself only twice in the film, when he receives the fateful telegram, and when the word murderer at last flies from his wife across the Tudor great room of Bateman's, the family's home. "I've considered the possibility" is his angry and weeping response. The film condenses time considerably, the Kiplings are shown frantically searching for their son, declared MIA at the Battle of Loos in 1915. They exhaustedly review photographs of captured Tommies from the Red Cross, Cattrall's Caroline snapping that her husband's influence had gotten the unfit boy into the army, his influence would find him now. Closure is given in the film, at least, to the Kiplings in the form of an inarticulate private's sobbing description of their son's last moments. Popular with his men, Lieutenant Kipling dies before a machine gun position, Radcliffe's flinching and contortions, as the bullets strike him, is interspersed with the private's story.

The guilt Kipling carries until his death in 1936, two days before that of George V, drives his later work in the Imperial War Graves Commission, something not mentioned in the film. It also flowed into his work. The Gardener, a short story Kipling wrote, recalls a mother's searching for her son's grave (the story is well analyzed in Stephen Cox's The New Testament and Literature, which highlights its latent Christian themes). Most famously, Kipling's grief is shown in the poem My Boy Jack, which closed both the play and film.

“Have you news of my boy Jack?"

Not this tide.

“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”

Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”

Not this tide.

For what is sunk will hardly swim,

Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”

None this tide,

Nor any tide,

Except he did not shame his kind—

Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,

This tide,

And every tide;

Because he was the son you bore,

And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

Read the full article >>