O Little Town of Bethlehem

O Little Town of Bethlehem (NOBC 101) was written as a poem in 1868 by American Rev. Phillips Brooks¹ when he was rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Boston, Philadelphia. He was apparently a great preacher and had studied at Harvard University before seeking ordination. He was inspired by a visit to Jerusalem in 1865 and it is said that he wrote the poem for his Sunday school children.

His organist Lewis Redner then added the music (see extract below in modern notation). The carol text was first printed in the Sunday School Service and Hymn Book (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1870) and with Redner’s tune in William Huntington’s The Church Porch: A Service Book and Hymnal for Sunday Schools (New York: E.P. Dutton 1874). Naturally this is the tune which is sung today in America.

The carol (words only) was published in Britain in W.Garrett Horder’s book Treasury of American Sacred Song (London: Frowde, 1896 pp197, 356), but Redner’s tune was not adopted and other tunes were substituted.² However, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who had been tasked in 1904 with editing what became The English Hymnal, had recently come across a good folk tune that he thought fitted the text well. This was ‘The Ploughboy’s Dream’, which he had collected in December 1903 from Mr Henry Garman, an agricultural labourer.³ The ploughboy in the song has a frightening dream wherein he is visited by an Angel, who upbraids him for abusing and flogging his horses when they refused to plough the hard-baked ground. He learned his lesson and explained: ‘Now since the dream has done me good, I put it down in rhyme that other boys might read and sing whenever they have time’. This combination of animal mistreatment and divine retribution gave it some popular appeal at the time, and it appeared on several broadsides.⁴ The important thing is that the tune fitted the carol and it is what we sing today. Vaughan Williams called the new tune ‘Forest Green’ which is a hamlet a mile or so outside Ockley. Here is Mr Garman’s tune (in Vaughan William’s own handwriting):

Folk Footnote: Vaughan Williams wrote in his field notes: Mr Garman used to sing to the Rev. John Broadwood who “would give half-a-crown to hear the Ploughboy’s Dream”. Broadwood had moved back to Lyne House – his family home since 1799 – on the death of his father in 1851. It was a grand house, befitting the successful piano-making family, just outside the village of Capel, south of Dorking. According to the 1861 census, Garman was living at nearby Ockley village, four miles away, so we should assume the two men met at this time.⁵ John Broadwood died in 1864, so it was a small window of opportunity.

Broadwood was known as a lover of folksongs and his book Old English Songs (privately printed in 1847) contained 16 songs (not including The Ploughboy’s Dream), collected by him in and around the local Surrey/Sussex border area. The songs were learned by him as a child when visited by wassailers and country singers. Broadwood claimed that ‘the airs are set to music exactly as they are now sung…’ and he asked organist George Dusart to harmonise the songs in 1843.⁶ By the time Garman met Broadwood, therefore, the latter was no longer collecting new material for publication, but he still had a genuine love of the songs.

You may want to know how it was that John Broadwood found Henry Garman in the first place - Henry may have had a reputation as a singer (we don’t know), but it so happens that a relative of Henry’s (Maria Garman) was a servant at Lyne. In the 1861 census Maria was aged 23, a ‘housemaid’ at ‘Lyne mansion’; she was the daughter of Henry Garman’s cousin Michael Garman. Maria was a local girl, born at Ewhurst, 2 miles west of Forest Green! Perhaps she provided the original introductions.

As to how Vaughan Williams found Mr Garman 40 years later, perhaps John Broadwood’s niece Lucy Broadwood had something to do with it. She herself had lived as a child at Lyne House in the late 1860s, knew her uncle’s folksong work and helped to re-edit many of her uncle’s songs in the book Sussex Songs (1890)⁷ in collaboration with H.F. Birch Reynardson. Indeed, she might have known Henry Garman in person, as he never left the area, working always as a labourer on local farms, while she moved between Lyne and her house in London. Garman did not die until 1905. Perhaps she felt that ‘The Ploughboy’s Dream’ was ‘unfinished business’ and invited Vaughan Williams to seek out Henry Garman. Who knows? She had certainly already met the promising composer and given him encouragement in folk song collecting. By such convoluted circumstances has one of our best-loved carols come down to us!