The Queen's Sandringham Christmas and Her Message
The Queen's annual Christmas message to The Realm and Commonwealth is broadcast on Christmas Day at 3.00PM GMT. Most people in England will have just finished their turkey and plum pudding Christmas Dinner then and settled down in front of the TV or turned on the radio to listen to the Queen. This is an annual ritual that has been an integral part of an English Christmas Day since before I was born in the 1930s.
The Sovereign's Christmas message is a 69 year old tradition. It was started by The Queen's grandfather King George V, who spoke live on the "wireless" to the Empire for the first time on Christmas Day in 1932; a short personal speech, written with the help of author Rudyard Kipling.
In this first Christmas broadcast the King spoke from a makeshift studio under the stairs at Sandringham House, the stately home built in 1870 by his father and mother, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, when they were Prince and Princess of Wales. It has been the favoured winter retreat for the Royal Family since the turn of the 20th century. George V was happiest there. 'Dear old Sandringham, the place I love better than anywhere else in the world', he once wrote.
The 1932 tabloids invented a story that the microphone used by the King for his first Christmas broadcast from Sandringham was specially gold-plated by the BBC for the occasion. In words that are strikingly apt today for those serving in the bleak terrain of Afgahnistan he said: "I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all...to men and women so cut off by snows, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them." The broadcast, spoken into an ungold-plated mike and transmitted on shortwave radio, caused immense worldwide interest and the delighted King made this an annual event for the rest of his life.
King George V died in January 1936 at Sandringham. There was no broadcast that following Christmas. Edward VIII had shocked the world just two weeks before with his abdication broadcast of 11 December from Windsor Castle. There was no broadcast either in 1937 and 1938 from Edward's successor to the throne, the shy King George VI. In 1939 however, as Commander-in-Chief and the Nation's leader, he broadcast a stirring Christmas message that was a rallying call to a Nation and Commonwealth facing the terrible onslaught of Hitler's war machine.
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