A meeting between Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1904 was crucial to the history of the carol in the 20th century. Without that meeting, Vaughan Williams wouldn’t have been engaged as musical editor of the English Hymnal, and without the success of that venture Vaughan Williams wouldn’t have later worked on the Oxford Book of Carols. So it’s all the more surprising that Vaughan Williams initially turned down the offer to work on the English Hymnal. But Dearmer knew exactly how to goad Vaughan Williams into accepting the assignment: Dearmer told Vaughan Williams that if he didn’t take the job, then Henry Walford Davies would jump at the chance.

Although Walford Davies was three years older than Vaughan Williams, the young men had entered the Royal College of Music (RCM) together as students in 1890. After two years Vaughan Williams had left to study in Cambridge where Charles Wood (Organist of Gonville and Caius College) had been convinced that Vaughan Williams would never make it as a composer. Undeterred, Vaughan Williams returned to the RCM in 1895 to study with Parry and Stanford, only to find that the star pupil – Walford Davies – had been given the job of teacher of counterpoint at the institution. This was the raw nerve that Dearmer knowingly prodded nine years later. In 1904, Walford Davies (later Sir Henry Walford Davies, and later still Master of the King’s Music) was organist of London’s Temple Church. He would have seemed the more obvious choice to co-edit a hymnal. But the freshness that Vaughan Williams brought to the project through his love of folk song and his dislike of Victoriana opened a door on to a new world of carolling that Walford Davies could never have unlocked. And while Walford Davies may have bagged the job as teacher of counterpoint at the Royal College of Music in 1895, Vaughan Williams was commissioned to write the article on Fugue in the prestigious Grove’s Dictionary of Music in 1906. The score had been settled.

Published in 1928, the Oxford Book of Carols was designed to fit snugly in choir stalls and its internal layout was unusual. OBC was divided into five sections, the first of which accounted for over half of the collection and covered traditional carols with their proper tunes. Here were the Latin carols Angelus ad Virginem, Quem Pastores, Personent Hodie (prefaced by Gustav Holst’s quirky seven-note descending natural minor scale), and the macaronic In Dulci Jubilo. Continental European interests were served by the French Patapan, the German Es ist ein Ros entsprungen and Joseph dearest, Joseph mine, and the sublime Czech melody Hajej nynjej in its guise as Rocking (making its first published appearance in an English carol anthology). The old-school English carols were there too: The First Nowell; To-morrow shall be my dancing day; Joys Seven; The Truth from Above (with its entrancing Herefordshire tune, impeccably harmonised by Vaughan Williams); The Cherry Tree Carol; The Holly and the Ivy; I saw Three Ships; The Sans Day Carol; Sussex Carol; Coventry Carol; Wassail Song; Gloucestershire Wassail; Boar’s Head Carol; and The old year now away is fled to the tune Greensleeves. God rest you merry, Gentlemen was given with both its London tune and its Cornish one. And the editors grudgingly included the hymn While Shepherds Watched, but only out of perversity so that they could attach it to the major-key version of the London tune – while admitting that Winchester Old was the more commonly sung melody (as indeed it is in most parts of Britain, excluding Yorkshire, today).

The second section of the Oxford Book of Carols (traditional carol tunes set to other traditional texts) is, frankly, disappointing. The only item we generally recognise now is Angels from the realms of glory, with its 1816 words by the poet James Montgomery. In OBC, Martin Shaw (one of the musical editors) chose to set Montgomery’s hymn to the 18th-century French Christmas tune Les anges dans nos campagnes (‘Angels in our fields’), and it has stuck ever since. The first (and far less successful) attempt to use this graceful French tune had been in Richard Chope’s large collection of Carols for Use in Church of 1875. Set to the words ‘When the crimson sun had set’, by Rev George Grantham, rhymes such as ‘Low behind the wintry sea, bursts a sound of heavenly glee’ have fallen out of fashion.

The third section of OBC – traditional tunes with modern words – is almost as ineffectual as the second. The act of making a new set of words stick to a pre-existent tune is a hit and miss affair. OBC tried to make the tune Quelle est cette odeur agréable go with the words ‘Praise we the Lord’ by the singer Steuart Wilson, but with no success. Similarly, the tune of This joyful Eastertide (from the Piae Cantiones) didn’t lie well with Percy Dearmer’s bespoke words ‘How great the harvest is’. More successful and long-lasting was the matching of the attractive 16th-century French tune Noël nouvelet (‘Christmas news’) to the Easter words ‘Now the green blade riseth’ by John Crum, a Canon of Canterbury Cathedral.

Similarly effective was the marriage of the tune of a folk song collected by Cecil Sharp in the village of Stowey in Somerset to the children’s poem How far is it to Bethlehem? by Frances Chesterton (wife of the writer G K Chesterton). OBC reinforced the marriage arranged by Vaughan Williams in the English Hymnal between Bishop Phillips Brooks’s O little town of Bethlehem and the tune of the ballad The Ploughboy’s Dream, which Vaughan Williams had collected in the Surrey village of Forest Green. And in an embarrassingly self-defeating act, OBC further strengthened the popularity of Good King Wenceslas by calling for its demise: ‘We have printed the tune here, with the suggestion that it should be sung as a Spring carol and that Good King Wenceslas might gradually be dropped’.

Part Four of the Oxford Book of Carols featured traditional words set to modern tunes. Whether the deceased Thomas Arne, Richard Stevens, or Johannes Brahms should have been billed as ‘modern’ composers in 1928 is a moot point. But anyway, none of their carols, or those by Rutland Boughton, Sydney Nicholson, Edmund Rubbra, Armstrong Gibbs, and Arthur Brown, has become a classic of the genre. By far the most successful have been the beautiful setting of the Wither’s Rocking Hymn (‘Sweet baby sleep! What ails my dear?’) by Vaughan Williams, and Gustav Holst’s quietly optimistic First World War setting of the 15th-century carol text Lullay, my liking. Also notable are the three carols by Peter Warlock, not least because OBC chose to include three of them – the largest number by any composer that wasn’t on the editorial team. Adam lay ybounden is a simple song with piano accompaniment of a 15th-century text composed by Warlock in 1922. In the following year, Warlock published Three Carols for Chorus and Orchestra, the first two of which had begun life in 1919 as solo songs with piano. These two carols were earmarked for inclusion in OBC. Tyrley, Tyrlow opens the set in youthfully buoyant manner, and Balulalow, with its lush bed of muted strings, is one of Warlock’s most sensitively honed creations.

The fifth part of the Oxford Book of Carols comprised carols whose words and music were modern. Again, one might quibble with the terminology ‘modern’ since the most successful pieces are Three Kings from Persian lands afar by the German composer Peter Cornelius (who had died in 1874), We three kings of Orient are by the American clergyman John Hopkins (who had died in 1891), and When Jesus Christ was yet a child by the Russian composer Tchaikovsky (who had died in 1893). The other notable carol in the final part of the collection is Gustav Holst’s lovely setting of Christina Rossetti’s In the bleak midwinter. And while Holst was very much alive in 1928 (he was in his mid-fifties), he had composed the music for In the bleak midwinter over 20 years before. But to criticise the terminology and organisation of the Oxford Book of Carols is churlish. OBC was a groundbreaking publication, and though only about one eighth of its contents has passed into the canon, it paved the way for the modern era of the choir carol.

Jeremy Summerly is director of music at St Luke’s Church, Chelsea in London and a Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music