By Marguerite Schumann, '44
Post-Crescent, December 13, 1964
A charming bit of Christmas has come to Lawrence University with the treasures of tradition and artifacts from Milwaukee-Downer College.
According to Downer historians, the popular English Christmas carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas" was given its American premiere at Downer in 1910 through the good offices of a faculty member, Emily Frances Brown. Over the years, no one has challenged Downer on this Yuletide "first."
Miss Brown was a specialist in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature, but for more than four decades she was the official spirit of Christmas at Downer as well.
An indefatigable playwriter, she "loved to make figures of history and literature come alive for her students by celebrating their anniversaries with play or pageant, with lovely little-known music, and with all the colorful staging for which she had such a flair," it is stated in an official history.
She created three Christmas plays repeated on a regular basis but refurbished with new lines and sometimes new situations right up to the opening curtain. Oldest of her plays was an Elizabethan revel; in it, during the Christmas season of 1910, "The Twelve Days of Christmas" was first sung in this country. Miss Brown discovered the carol, arranged by Frederic Austin, while browsing in an Oxford, England, bookshop the summer before.
So popular was the tune that "it spread throughout the country," according to the Milwaukee Journal, and it was incorporated in a second Brown play, "Fezziwig Swarry," which used characters from Charles Dickens.
Only in the third traditional pageant, the story of the nativity itself, titled "The Little Sanctuary," was the song not considered appropriate.
"No one in the school escaped Miss Brown's all-pervasive influence," it is recorded, "for just as the good burghers of Oberammergau are shaped by their participation in their Passion Play, so college students, in the months before Christmas, finding themselves in the atmosphere of an old English manor house, lived the role of Lord or Lady, Butler or Jester, St. George or Christmas Rose."
Miss Brown spent the whole fall casting her Yuletide extravaganzas, and it is said that she would rush up to a new freshman face in the hall and announce, "Ah-ha, you are Martin Chessiwick" (for the Dickens work), or "You will make an excellent Bard" (for the Elizabethan revels). It is told that the abstracted authoress, searching the undergraduate faces during a season in which the nativity was scheduled, muttered, "There isn't a Virgin at Downer this year."
She had a high sense of drama offstage as well as on. She delayed announcing her play cast until the first November day that brought a trace of snow. Then she would appear in chapel, a sprig of holly at her shoulder and an enormous book in her hand, from which depended two red ribbons. The standing ovation that greeted her appearance intensified as she announced her cast -- made up of students, alumnae, husbands and children of staff members. Certain roles were greatly coveted as undergraduate honors.
The Christmas play was no homemade job of writing. Miss Brown used the words of Charles Dickens, or the words of Elizabethan authors, and she considered the enterprise a legitimate extension of classroom work in literature.
Miss Brown came naturally to a life of school teaching, for her mother and grandparents were teachers, and her father was a Methodist minister. She was educated at Wellesley, got her master's degree at Columbia, and did further study at Oxford University and Harvard. She joined the faculty of Downer College when it was still located in Fox Lake in 1891; when Downer merged with Milwaukee College and moved into the city, there was a period of five years that Miss Brown was away doing graduate work, but in 1900 she returned, to remain until her retirement in 1945.