For nearly a century now, the nation’s musical highlight on Christmas Eve has been the BBC Radio broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge.

In 1933, however, the focus of attention on Cambridge was shared with Winchester when the BBC did what, in those days, was an almost daring radio link-up across three countries.

The Winchester Cathedral choristers, led by their distinguished Director of Music, Dr Harold Rhodes, became the principal singers in a ‘live’ Christmas Eve broadcast, along with a transatlantic choir in New York, all connected by BBC engineers to Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.

It was a worldwide broadcast on the BBC’s Home Service and fledgling ‘Empire Service’, later to become ‘World Service’. 

READ MORE: Winchester Cathedral Lantern Parade: All you need to know

Winchester Cathedral Winchester Cathedral (Image: Winchester Cathedral) As Winchester’s Dean, Gordon Selwyn, wrote at the time: “Among our many impressive services, none has been more memorable than the broadcast service on Christmas Eve, when we heard the Bells of Bethlehem peal within our cathedral walls, our choir singing ‘O come, all ye faithful’ before and after the bells, all of it in conjunction with a choir across the Atlantic.” 

Dean Selwyn also noted that the cathedral was ‘filled throughout’ with letters afterwards, received from ‘distant parts of the Empire, which showed how many former citizens of Winchester were part of the huge congregation that night’. For the packed congregation, able to hear the Bells of Bethlehem ringing out ‘live’ within the walls of Winchester Cathedral, it must have been a truly memorable moment. 

The Bethlehem Bells transmission wasn’t the end of it, though. That same Christmas Eve, a full service with an address by the Bishop of Winchester, Cyril Garbett (later to be Archbishop of York), was also broadcast worldwide from Winchester. In the BBC’s official Annual Report for 1933, the Christmas Eve transmissions from Winchester were highlighted as: “World Broadcast of The Bells of Bethlehem, the story of the First Christmas told in relays from London, New York, Winchester Cathedral with the Bells of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem.”

Such was the national interest in the broadcast that The Times carried a half-page photograph of the choir practising a few days before the event.

Putting it into context in terms of broadcasting history, only a year earlier, in 1932, King George V had made the very first Christmas Day Royal Message on ‘the wireless’ from Sandringham. In the speech, actually written by Rudyard Kipling, the King talked about “the marvels of modern science that enables me this Christmas Day to speak to all my people”. 

Those ‘marvels of modern science' sent radio signals all over the world from Winchester in 1933. Today, modern science means that, in addition to the cathedral itself being filled for its carol services, hundreds more are able to watch them live-streamed anywhere in the world and at any time they choose.

The first Winchester Cathedral carol service of the season is on December 18 but is a thank you to cathedral volunteers, staff, choir families and Friends of Winchester Cathedral and not open to the general public but can be watched online.

No booking is required for the two services at 6.30pm on December 20 and 21 but as the services are hugely popular, a queue will form outside the cathedral, prior to doors opening at 5pm.

This article was written by Bruce Parker