‘God Save the King’ – ‘Official peace version, 1919’ by Percy Dearmer (1867-1936)

 



God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King. 

Thy choicest gifts in store 
On him be pleased to pour,
Long may he reign. 
May he defend our laws,
And ever give us cause,
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the King.

This is one of those ‘Well, I never knew that!’ posts.

 


St Peter’s Church, Budleigh Salterton

Along with many Budleigh residents I attended the Special Commemoration Service for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in St Peter’s Church on Sunday 18 September. The service concluded with the singing of the two above verses of the traditional National Anthem, followed by this third verse which I did not recognise:

Not in this land alone,
But be God's mercies known
From shore to shore:
Lord make the nations see
That men should brothers be,
And form one family
The wide world o'er.

From the ever-helpful Wikipedia I learnt that this third verse was sung after the traditional first verse of the National Anthem at Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee National Service of Thanksgiving in 2002.

Later, it was used during the raising of the Union Flag during the 2008 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, in which London took the baton from Beijing to host the 2012 Summer Olympics.

It is also currently used as the third verse by the Church of Scotland.

The official Royal UK website states: ‘There is no authorised version of the National Anthem as the words are a matter of tradition.’

The verse that we sang on 18 September sounds modern with its theme of ‘diversity’ in 23rd century Britain but in fact it was largely composed by the Victorian educational writer William Edward Hickson who died in 1870 aged 67.  

Here it is in full:

God bless our native land!
May Heav'n's protecting hand
Still guard our shore:
May peace her power extend,
Foe be transformed to friend,
And Britain's rights depend
On war no more.

O Lord, our monarch bless
With strength and righteousness:
Long may she reign:
Her heart inspire and move
With wisdom from above;
And in a nation's love
Her throne maintain.

May just and righteous laws
Uphold the public cause,
And bless our Isle:
Home of the brave and free,
Thou land of Liberty,
We pray that still on thee
Kind Heav'n may smile.

Not in this land alone,
But be God's mercies known
From shore to shore:
Lord make the nations see
That men should brothers be,
And form one family
The wide world o'er.

For people like the human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell Hickson's version was the best of such alternative National Anthems. ‘Although it maintains an appeal to divine intervention,’ he wrote in a Guardian article of August 2008, it ‘at least exalts more noble ideals than the elitism of monarchy and the gore of imperial bloodlust’.  

Hickson’s pacifist idealism – his desire that ‘men should brothers be’ – is evident from a letter dated 8 July 1840 that he wrote from London to the American anti-slavery social reformer William Lloyd Garrison.

He had composed a song entitled ‘God speed the right’ which he believed was ‘calculated to sustain moral courage’ and help Garrison's ‘own peculiar cause, the cause of the extinction of slavery’. Music, he told the American, was ‘one of the most powerful levers by which the masses have ever been moved’.   
The following modified version of Hickson’s second verse was written by the Very Reverend Samuel Reynolds Hole, Dean of Rochester, to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria on 22 June 1897:

O Lord Our God Arise,
Scatter her enemies,
Make wars to cease;
Keep us from plague and dearth,
Turn thou our woes to mirth;
And over all the earth
Let there be peace.

At the time, some commentators reacted in fury. It was ‘worthy of the severest reprobation’, having ‘too much of a Peace Society flavour about it,’ wrote one critic. ‘If we go about pleading for peace, other nations will get it into their heads that we are afraid of fighting.’

And then, some twenty years later came WW1. Universal horror at the slaughter of millions inspired an official peace version of the National Anthem. It expressed sentiments similar to Hickson’s version, and was actually approved by the Privy Council in 1919 and given the title of ‘Official peace version, 1919’. Such was the strength of anti-war feeling in the aftermath of WW1, reflected especially in the third verse with its call for 'universal peace':

God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious
Happy and glorious
Long to reign over us
God save the King!

One realm of races four
Blest more and ever more
God save our land!
Home of the brave and free
Set in the silver sea
True nurse of chivalry
God save our land!

Kinsfolk in love and birth
From utmost ends of earth
God save us all!
Bid strife and hatred cease
Bid hope and joy increase
Spread universal peace
God save us all!


 

And yet, even after WW1, there may have been those who felt that this new version of the National Anthem had ‘too much of a Peace Society flavour about it’. 

In Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, for example, this printed programme of the Peace Celebrations which took place in the town on 16 July 1919 explained that its last two verses had been ‘tentatively substituted’ in the National Anthem not so much to promote pacifism as ‘to give it an Empire character’!  

The programme pointed out that they had been sung with the original first verse outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London ten days previously, on 6 July.  

Authorship of the 1919 official peace version remains unclear.


 

A portrait of Percy Dearmer in around 1890 by the English photographer Frederick Hollyer (1837-1933). Image credit: Wikipedia

Following such tentative efforts to promote it, the peace version of the National Anthem was first published in 1925, in the hymn book Songs of Praise. Percy Dearmer, the English priest who was its editor, evidently hoped that this peace version would become widely accepted. Best known today the author of The Parson's Handbook, a liturgical manual for Anglican clergy, and as editor of The English Hymnal, he was a lifelong socialist.




Mabel Dearmer, pictured in 1890 at the age of 18. Image credit: Wikipedia

In 1882 he married Mabel née White, an English novelist, dramatist and children's book author and illustrator. A committed pacifist, she died in 1915 while caring for the war wounded in Serbia where her husband was serving alongside her in an ambulance unit. It has been said that the Dearmer marriage rested on shared ideals of socialism, pacifism, and feminism.

Despite being reproduced in some other hymn books, the 1919 peace version of the National Anthem is largely unknown today, as is, apparently, its author.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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