He had been organist since 1876-he was seventy-eight at the first broadcast-and was respected and much loved. The Director of Music for that first broadcast had been A H Mann, ‘Daddy’ Mann as he was universally known. So instead of men varying in age from their twenties to their seventies perhaps, such as one found in most cathedral and college choirs in England, the King’s singers in the back row now were all aged between eighteen and twenty-two. The last lay clerk, grey-haired old Mr Collins, had died in office in 1928, just before the first broadcast. In 1880 the governing body had agreed to establish choral scholarships and very gradually since then the lay clerks had been replaced by members of the College, nearly all of them undergraduates. There had never been singing quite like this. It was not just that the singing was very good, nor even just the astonishing acoustic of the Chapel. Not only were carols much loved, but the singing was of a very high standard. Soon the College annual report was telling old members that ‘our carol service was again broadcast to all parts of the world’, and in 1936 that ‘we had a large congregation for the carol service this year. The service quickly became very popular in Cambridge, and after the broadcasts began in 1928 it became famous. Money from the collection at the service was not to be retained just for the work of the College and the Chapel, but it was also to be shared with the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society and the Cambridge Children’s Convalescent Home.
Milner-White invited a member of the Free Churches in Cambridge to read one of the lessons and the Chaplain to the Mayor of Cambridge another at that first Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1918. Between the readings were sung carols by the choir and congregational hymns. The service consisted of a sequence of nine lessons-as was the custom at the greatest feasts in the Middle Ages-that were read by officers of the church from the most junior (a chorister) to the most senior: at Truro, the Bishop at King’s, the Provost. It had first been used on Christmas Eve in 1880 in the wooden shed that was used while the Cathedral at Truro was being built.
He took as his model the service that had been devised by the first Bishop of Truro, E W Benson. The carol service would be primarily a gift to the City of Cambridge. This would be outside term, of course, so there would be very few students about. They did, and before the year was out he had devised a carol service for Christmas Eve. He need not burden the members of the governing body with all the details he had in mind perhaps they would allow him to use his discretion. Milner-White wanted more ‘colour, warmth and delight’ in the services. He also wished for a ‘richer provision for the church seasons’. He wanted to introduce a short service of admission for each new chorister. Among his suggestions to the College were a number of ‘occasional services’, such as an annual memorial service for College men who had fallen in the war, with a special setting of three sonnets by a Kingsman, Rupert Brooke, who himself had died. Milner-White was fired by his love for this place by the horror he had experienced in the trenches by the disillusion and cynicism of the young men who surrounded him. Being a private chapel, and so ‘free from the ecclesiastical authority which governs even the most “live” cathedrals’, it could take a lead in liturgical reform and make experiments. The architecture, the musical resources and the unending stream of young men passing through the University gave King’s ‘extraordinary potentialities for the whole religious life of England’. This was not merely a college chapel, he reminded them. As he himself confessed, Milner-White provided the governing body not so much with a discussion paper as with a vision of what the worship at King’s might be.
On his appointment as Dean at King’s in 1918 the College asked him to set out his thoughts on the services in the Chapel. It seems that he had led stretcher-bearers over the top again and again to bring back the wounded from no man’s land. Of his distinguished war service as an army padre Milner-White never spoke. He served in parishes in south London and then in 1912 he returned to King’s as Chaplain. After he graduated he was ordained, rather against the expectations and hopes of his family. Eric Milner-White was the son of a lawyer and a businessman. In 1903 a shy, awkward, clever undergraduate arrived at King’s College with a scholarship to read History.