The Knox Brothers Read online

  Despite all this, or because of it, Wilfred finally became a Doctor of Divinity, a Fellow of the British Academy and an influential wartime university chaplain at Cambridge. He proved a natural pastor among the young. ‘The attendance in chapel, which a priest watches as carefully as an editor watches the circulation, went steadily higher.’ His demeanour, ‘a curious mixture of briskness and spirituality’, was so striking that one undergraduate recalled that the very sight of Wilfred silently wheeling an old bicycle through the Pembroke College gate, ‘helped me grow in the Christian faith.’ (p. 238)

  So Penelope Fitzgerald builds a memorably rich, composite portrait of these four brilliant and unusual brothers, which is both moving and compelling. We are left with the tantalizing question: which one of the brothers was Penelope Fitzgerald’s favourite? It cannot be assumed that it was her own father, Edmund. It might, for example, have been Dillwyn. For beneath her bright, witty narrative, the biography allows for large areas of shadow, leaving deliberate zones of mystery, and moments of discretion. For instance, we only discover in passing asides, that Ronnie was actually disinherited by his father the Bishop; that Dillwyn’s marriage was unhappy; and that Edmund became ‘haunted’ and depressed by having to write his weekly article for Punch.

  We are told that among the characteristics that they all shared, was the terrible ‘Knox Temper’. But perhaps we are slightly shielded from the causes of this, and how exactly it manifested itself – shouting? sulking? silent furies? It was known to terrify colleagues (Dillwyn’s), alarm fellow priests (Wilfred’s), and even drive the family dog out of the sitting room (Eddie’s). The reader can usefully consult the Index under ‘Knox Brothers: Collective Characteristics’, which also included love of pipe-smoking, Greek poetry, and steam-trains.

  We never learn much of the two Knox sisters, Ethel and Winnie, though Winnie in particular clearly played a vital part in her brothers’ emotional lives. This reminds us that it is essentially the picture of a male world, and among Penelope Fitzgerald’s imaginative triumphs are the evocation of particular closed, long-lost, masculine societies: the Edwardian Cambridge of MR James, Housman and Lytton Strachey; the boisterous Fleet Street of the 1930s; the tense, cocoa-drinking, war-time nightlife of Bletchley Park. (p. 229)

  In fact it is now clear how the Knox biography seemed to open the door directly into Fitzgerald’s own imaginative world, taking her from history to fiction. In the same year of its publication came her first novel, a murder mystery, The Golden Child (1977), followed almost immediately by The Bookshop (1978, using the Suffolk experience, including a poltergeist that she always claimed was genuine); and then Offshore (1979, using the Thames barge) which won the Booker Prize; and then Human Voices (1980, using the wartime BBC). In five years she had established herself as a major fiction writer. Afterwards, she only once returned to biography, in an intriguing life of the reclusive Victorian poet Charlotte Mew (1984).

  Over a decade later, in her last two novels, Penelope Fitzgerald seemed to return to fictional versions of her Knox inheritance. The Gate of Angels (1990) is set precisely in an Edwardian Cambridge like Dillwyn’s, and begins with the incident of a bicycle accident that is close to a ‘romantic encounter’ described there by Ronnie. (p. 77–8) Moreover, its theme of the battle between intellect and emotions, one very close to Fitzgerald’s heart, is central to her picture of the Knox family. There are similar echoes in The Blue Flower (1995) – her wonderful last novel about Frederick von Hardenberg, the Romantic poet Novalis. The picture of the close-knit, brilliantly clever family of the Von Hardenbergs, although they are late-eighteenth-century members of the German aristocracy, bears considerable resemblance to the Knoxes.

  It was this last book that bore an epigraph from Novalis himself, which Penelope Fitzgerald said she had come to love. ‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.’ But perhaps it could also be said, that novels sometimes arise out of the impulses of biography.

  Foreword

  IN THIS BOOK I HAVE DONE MY BEST to tell the story of my father and his three brothers. All four of them were characteristically reticent about themselves, but, at the same time, most unwilling to let any statement pass without question. I have tried to take into account both their modesty and their love of truth, and to arrive at the kind of biography of which they would have approved.

  When I was very young I took my uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else in the world was not like them. Later on I found that this was not so, and eventually I began to want to make some kind of record of their distinctive attitude to life, which made it seem as though, in spite of their differences, they shared one sense of humour and one mind. They gave their working lives to journalism, cryptography, classical scholarship, the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church. Since I wrote this book twenty-three years ago all these professions, all these worlds, have changed. If the four of them could be reborn into the twenty-first century, how would it treat them? I can only be certain that they would stand by the (sometimes unexpected) things they said. Evoe, my father, muttered to me, on the way to my wedding, “The only thing I want is for everyone, as far as possible, to be happy.” Dillwyn: “Nothing is impossible.” Wilfred: “Get on with it”—also “Why should we not go on, through all eternity, growing in love and in our power to love?” Ronnie: “Do the most difficult thing.” I miss them all more than I can say.

  I should never have got any way at all without the help and encouragement of my family, and the notes, letters and photographs which they lent me. I should like to begin by thanking my stepmother, Mary Knox, for all that she did, my brother, Rawle Knox, and my cousins Christopher and Oliver Knox, Tony Peck and Julian Peck.

  Lord Oxford and Asquith most kindly let me use the large collection of unpublished material collected by the late Evelyn Waugh for his biography of Ronald Knox; to that brilliantly discreet work, and to the collection itself, I owe a very great deal. The bibliography of Ronald Knox’s published works, which he believed had grown too complicated even for the Recording Angel, has now been undertaken by Miss Patricia Cowan, who was good enough to lend me her copy.

  I feel very real gratitude to Dr Alec Vidler, who found time to answer all my inquiries about Wilfred Knox, and to Professor Henry Chadwick, for his most helpful letter about Wilfred and The Sources of the Synoptic Gospels; to the late General Gustave Bertrand, who explained to me the early stages in the solving of Enigma; to Professor Gilbert Waterhouse and Professor W. H. Bruford, who told me about Room 40; to Mavis Batey, Helen Morris, Margaret Rock, and Peter Twinn, who most kindly and patiently re-created for me the strange world of Bletchley Park; to Richard Price, the historian of Punch; to Professor W. G. Arnott of Leeds University, and to Mr I. C. Cunningham, the most recent editor of Herodas; to the late Rev. Meredith Dewey, Dean of Pembroke; to David Kahn, the authority on codes and ciphers; to Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew all four of the brothers and was able to give me a detached opinion; to the late Dr A. N. L. Munby and the staff of King’s College Library, who let me read the unpublished autobiography of Nathaniel Wedd; to Mr P. J. Law, the librarian of Corpus, who showed me Dr Fowler’s letter-book, and to Dr John Lake, who made mathematics seem simple.

  I should also like to take the opportunity to thank the following people, who, simply out of their affectionate memories of one or other of the Knoxes, wrote to me and helped me in many different ways: Canon Jack Bagley, O.G.S., Mr Ian Bailey (Manchester Grammar School), the Hon. Mrs Vera Birch, Canon Henry Brandreth, O.G.S., Mrs Susan Brooksbank, Mrs Patricia Chambers, Mrs Dorothy Collins, Mr John Cooper (Trinity College Library), Mr J. J. Creaven, the Very Rev. Horace Dammers, Dean of Bristol, Mr Robin Denniston, Mr Humphrey Ellis, Mr Laurence Elvin (Lincolnshire History and Tennyson Collection), Professor Herbert Farmer, the Rev. John Gillings, Mr Harry Golombek, Mrs Bridget Grant, Mr J. Green (Borough Librarian of Newham), Canon George Handisyde, Professor and Mrs Edgar Lobel, Canon Murray Macdonald, Mr Iain Mackenzie, Mr Leslie Marsh, Mr Hugh Me
ad (Librarian of St. Paul’s School), Miss Dionys Moore, Mrs Elsie Moseley (who remembers being chased round the lawn at Edmundthorpe by my uncles when they were all very small children), Dr Joseph Needham, the Rev. J. C. Neil-Smith, Mr Bernard Palmer (editor of the Church Times), Mr Pepys-Whiteley (Deputy Keeper, Magdalene College Library), the Rev. Richard Rawstorne, Mr Gilbert Spencer, R.A., Canon Robert Symonds, O.G.S., Canon George Tibbatts, O.G.S., Mr George Wansbrough, Mr Auberon Waugh, Mr Patrick Wilkinson. I am most grateful to Richard Garnett of Macmillan, who helped me through so many difficulties.

  Finally, for this new edition I should like to thank Christopher Carduff for his energy, inspiration and patience.

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  15 March 2000

  I

  Beginnings

  THIS IS THE STORY OF FOUR BROTHERS who were born into the family of a Victorian vicarage. When, seventy years later, the eldest was asked to consider writing his life, he declined, but suggested the title: Must We Have Lives? If we must, and if we want to understand them, we need to go back two or three generations.

  The family was descended from landed settlers in Ulster, the Knoxes of Edentrellick, Rathmullen, Moneymore and Prehen. At the end of the eighteenth century the head of the Edentrellick branch, Alexander Knox, surrounded by his twenty-six children, set his face firmly against change. Although he and his descendants were Presbyterians, and suffered from the same political disabilities as the Catholics, he disapproved profoundly of the United Irishmen, who were hoping, by means of a somewhat amateurish rebellion, to establish a republic. Several of the family were implicated in the rising, and were wounded, disgraced, disowned, or, as the old man put it, “lived to be hanged”. But one of the sons, George, steered clear of trouble altogether, and went to try his fortune in the West Indies. This George was to become the great-grandfather of the four Knox brothers.

  Having a hardheaded Ulster business sense, George acquired a sugar plantation and later recommended himself to the Governor, General Nugent, who was of illegitimate birth and always ready to help those who helped themselves. He returned to Ireland only once in the next ten years, to marry Laetitia Greenfield, the daughter of Angel Atkinson, of the Moneymore branch. Angel, who wrote that she was “waiting till it was God’s pleasure to dismiss her soul from its frail habitation”, was sickly, and George no doubt hoped, when she died, to inherit some more of the Knox property. Back in London, he set up as a merchant in Henrietta Street. The next prospects were to be the begetting of a numerous family, and the Moneymore inheritance. But everything went amiss: the property passed to a cousin, and Laetitia proved as delicate as her mother. She bore two sons—George in 1814, Alexander in 1818—then died, a few days later, of childbed fever.

  To the four-year-old elder son it was a cruel shock. One of his books survives, a little leather-bound Tasso from his schooldays, with a Latin inscription: “This book was my mother’s, my loved, my long-lost mother’s.” The words come as something of a surprise in the history of the shrewd and so far dislikeable family. With poor Laetitia, the Knoxes acquired the beginnings of tenderheartedness.

  Against all expectation, young George’s father turned away from him and lavished all his affection on the second son, who had innocently caused his mother’s death. What was left of the West Indian properties was settled on Alexander; everything was for Alexander.

  Tempers blazed high when George refused to sit under a Presbyterian minister. His mother had been an Anglican, and so would he be. He went on to read for Holy Orders, and in 1837 was a totally penniless curate when General Nugent kindly intervened once again, and offered him a chaplaincy in the service of the East India Company. Once arrived in India, George asked for no further patronage or “interest”. Even though the great John and Henry Lawrence were his cousins—their mother was a Laetitia Knox from Prehen—he never applied to them, believing, in the words of John Bunyan, that “every tub should stand on its own bottom”.

  His calling in Madras was not that of a missionary, but of chaplain to the English community. At first he inspired fear, a “black” Ulsterman, forceful as a soldier, whose heart was kept hidden. It was thought that he was more than fortunate to meet and win his future wife, Frances Reynolds.

  Frances was of Quaker descent. The Reynolds family were reputable linen-bleachers at Beddington in Surrey, pious, discreet and thriving; but her father, Thomas Reynolds, was not a successful business man. He was drawn to impracticable schemes. As a very young man he had been sent to Paris by George IV to fetch back a mysterious “Miss Jones”, supposedly the daughter of Mrs Fitzherbert, who spoke much of her “rights”, and bequeathed to the Reynoldses a tiny pair of “royal” scissors. Later on Thomas eloped to Gretna Green with his bride, Sophia Daniell, after bribing her maid with the present of a workbox. After his marriage he gave up the bleaching business altogether and went to Cambridge to study medicine, though with no intention of practising. The result of all this airy dreaming was that his two daughters felt obliged to go out as governesses. To avert this fate the Curzons, who were distant connections, offered to take them to India, but the girls refused, “fearing the worldliness of the society into which they would be thrown.” “There were very tender consciences,” Frances’s son wrote, “in the borderland where Quakerism and Evangelicalism met.” Eventually the Daniells paid for the passages to India, and Frances and Mary Ann set off, their boxes full of dove-grey and sober brown dresses. They took with them, also, a copy of Keble’s Christian Year, something more intensely and romantically devotional than the Meeting House could offer.

  Mary Ann might have been supposed to do the better of the two, for she eventually married the Hon. David Arbuthnott; but in later years she horrified her family by announcing that she and all her children were to be received as Roman Catholics. This meant that the sisters could never meet or communicate again, and both of them accepted this, in spite of the intense grief it caused. It was a division sharper than the sword.

  In 1844 Frances Reynolds was a girl of twenty, short, slight and dignified, with fair hair and complexion and a sweet smile of a kind unknown among the gloomy Ulster farms and linen-sheds, a smile which she bequeathed to her descendants. George Knox, on the other hand, was the kind of Irishman who, like Samuel Beckett’s Watt, “had never smiled, but thought that he knew how it was done.” They were married that winter, in the church at Cuddalore, a handsome couple whose charm and influence were long remembered in Madras. In 1855 they returned to England, bringing with them a “fine family” of four sons and three daughters.

  George had no intention of returning to Edentrellick, and for a while they were travellers, passing from one curacy to another. York was the place the children remembered best, and how their father, preaching at St John’s by candlelight, put all the candles out, during a flight of eloquence, with a sweep of his pudding-bag sleeve, so that the church was left in darkness. In 1857 he was appointed Association Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, and they settled at Waddon, then a village, near Croydon. The house was not really large enough. The three elder boys slept together, the youngest, Lindsey, downstairs in the pantry. Edmund, the second son, who showed early scholastic promise, had to “get up” his lessons in the corner of his mother’s room, and witnessed, in fear and reverence, his mother’s daily prayers, as she struggled out loud to submit her will to God. But if there was overcrowding, nobody had time to worry about it. Everyone was hard at it, family and servants alike; if nothing else offered, there was sewing and poultry-keeping, though half the eggs had to be set aside to sell for the Missions. “There was no talk of slavery,” Edmund wrote. “Industry was the normal condition of rational beings, and idleness a dangerous sin. That principle ruled throughout the household.”

  After her eighth confinement, it is true, Frances took to the life of a semi-invalid, but from her sofa she supervised every detail of the housekeeping. Between Ulster thrift and Quaker sobriety the economy was amazingly narrow. Only one piece of bread-and
-butter was allowed—after that, dry bread only. Clothes were the subject of the deepest embarrassment. The boys were dressed in tartan tunics of seemingly indestructible material, handed down from one to another, or “a shapeless garment intended to represent a lounge coat.” The girls could only pray that fashion would come round full circle so that people would not laugh at their appearance in the street. Fortunately, perhaps, they went out very little, and at the neighbours’ parties they had to leave before the dancing, passing, with glances of acute regret, the loaded supper-table. The Knoxes, who for years had led the spacious social life of mid-Victorian India, now “kept no company”. Neither did they take seaside holidays, or, indeed, any holidays at all. Books were severely restricted, novels forbidden, and the father, who chose all his sons’ school prizes, would not hear of Ruskin, who tended to unmanly self-pity.

  If George was becoming as tyrannous as his own father before him, it was out of an obsession which his whole family understood. At all costs, he must save them from hell-fire, and keep them on the narrow path of Low Church Anglicanism where he himself walked. Parents in those days did not dispute in public, and whatever Frances suffered when she heard, at a distance, the savage discipline and floggings that went on behind the study door, she was never seen to disagree with him. The boys, in time, made their own protest. Frederick, the third son, bit his father through the hand during a whipping, whereupon George, the eldest, threatened to run away unless the punishment stopped. But hardship never destroys a family if the parents share it, and all the children did well. The girls, it is true, never had much opportunity to meet any company and never married, but Ellen, without opposition from her father, won her way to Oxford and became Principal of Havergal College, Toronto. And as their parents grew old the children, as a natural thing, and without resentment for their hard upbringing, helped to support them.