The Knox Brothers

The holiday expeditions continued, but now with much wider range, with the advent of bicycles. A Coventry firm presented a machine to the Bishop; Mrs K., although as a horsewoman she mistrusted the contraption, learned quicker than her portly husband, who was, he said, “an ardent devotee, until, one day, the bar snapped and let me down”; the children all followed, teaching themselves on Raleighs paid for by old Mrs Knox. Eddie and Dilly were soon rapidly skimming through the Birmingham traffic, the girls pedalling gamely along in hats and white cotton gloves, the little boys doing the best they could, before the days of freewheel, their short legs turning rapidly. Rules were immediately invented, and it became a point of honour among the four brothers never to get off even up the steepest hill. Pale with fatigue, Wilfred and Ronnie toiled upward, Eddie describing wide circles around them, until he brought them to a halt by the wayside, with the words THIS MUST STOP.

Ronnie sometimes stayed behind. He had become fascinated with dictionaries. He threatened, in spite of a rule that no one must speak a language that the others did not understand, to learn Sanskrit and Welsh. “I can still see Ronnie,” Winnie wrote, “on the seat by the Welsh driver of the waggonette which conveyed us all to church, making out a Welsh Bible with the aid of this friend, while the horse wandered along unnoticed, and my father predicted we should all be late for the service.”

At home, Eddie took charge of the family newspaper, The Bolliday Bango. It was the voice of Scholesia—their name for the world of the shabby schoolroom. Eddie levied the contributions, sometimes by force, copied them out in ink, and did the illustrations. There are action pictures of the bicycles, of a peculiar form of football played in the tiny yard, and, more fancifully, of a synod of bishops playing billiards with their crosiers, and hanging up their mitres on the pegs. It was Eddie’s first venture into journalism, and in its handwritten pages Dilly produced his first document in cipher (though the editor refused further instalments), and Ronnie, at the age of eight, his first Latin play.

In time, however, the editor and sub-editor became interested in other things. Developing a keenly critical spirit, they detected a number of inaccuracies, even downright contradictions, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and sent a list of them to Conan Doyle in an envelope with five dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Eddie acquired photographs of a number of music-hall actresses who had appeared, or were appearing, on the Birmingham stage. Then he and Dilly acquired pipes and tins of Tortoiseshell Mixture. Clouds of smoke began to float round Scholesia, already frequently plunged in darkness while Wilfred tried to develop his photographic plates. Mrs K. heroically avoided noticing the haunting whiffs of tobacco. The Bolliday Bango ceased publication, and Ronnie, still in his sanctum underneath the table, tried to produce a magazine on his own, but the impetus was gone as he became the last one left in childhood.

His consolation was a book—not one of the borrowed dictionaries, but the first book that had ever been truly his own, not to be touched by any of the others without his permission. It was a present, and the pencil mark inside showed that it had cost five shillings: Natural History, by the Rev. J. C. Wood.

The influence of this book, which gave him his first glimpse of independence, was disproportionate. From the first picture (of a man raising a bottle to his lips, contrasted with a noble lion, and titled: “Between man and brutes there is an impassable barrier, over which man can never fall, or beasts hope to climb”), Ronnie was as if hypnotized. When, sixty years later, he went to Africa, he judged both flora and fauna by the steel engravings in Wood. He knew the whole book by heart, and professed to believe it all; the animals were all graded by their usefulness to man, which meant that the Labrador came top (“many must have perished but for its timely aid”). Yet, as he said himself, in spite of the years at Edmundthorpe, outside the book he could not tell a bullfinch from a chaffinch.

Absurd though it may seem, Wood had an even deeper effect on Ronnie; this was because of his praise of reason. “It were an easy task to prove the unity of mankind by scriptural proofs,” Wood wrote in his introduction, “but I thought it better to use rational arguments.” This went deep. Ronnie told Eddie that there were “rational arguments” why he should be allowed to join the brothers’ inner group—the St Philip’s Pioneering and Military Tramway Society; they were not accepted, he had to pass the set tests, but Ronnie remained convinced of the supreme saving power of reason.

Ronnie could not help knowing that he was clever for his age, and that much was expected of him, and he hoped not to disappoint anybody. Meanwhile his elders, the fixed stars of his firmament, sometimes praised him, and sometimes took him to a football match; for sheer quality of happiness, he did not think one could beat the moments when Aston Villa won at home, and his brothers allowed him to wave a flag.

The Bishop’s tasks multiplied. Queen Victoria did not take kindly to Evangelicals, and tried to exclude them from high responsibilities until they were too old to give trouble. Knox was an exception. Rejecting, to the relief of his family, the offer of the bishopric of Madras, he fought on until “dignified Worcester and placid Coventry began to look upon Birmingham as something more than a rather heathen shopping town.” In 1896 the last of the lovely Burne-Jones windows were installed at St Philip’s, and the church was worthy of becoming what it now is, the Cathedral of Birmingham.

Preoccupied as he often was, deep in church affairs to the exclusion of all others, he remained a family man, confident of his children’s support. He could be, and often was, exceedingly angry with them, and sometimes cuffed the elder boys all the way round his study, but he was perfectly tolerant of their jokes at the expense of his dignity. One Sunday his private chapel was mysteriously full of the scent of Popish incense; once, when he was on a visitation, he found that his hostess had been told (by Eddie) to be sure to supply him with a bottle of whisky—“the Bishop could not do with less”—and with a pair of black silk stockings, in case he had forgotten his own. Once a representative of the press called at their holiday rectory, and since there were no servants and Mrs K. felt that the family might be considered too informal, Winnie and Ethel obligingly did duty as cook and parlour maid; only Eddie told the reporter that both of them were deaf and dumb, and could be addressed only in sign language; this caused Winnie to drop the soup. The Bishop marvelled, thinking of his own industrious and obedient boyhood, at where such ideas could come from.

St Philip’s Rectory never became completely settled territory. There was always an unpredictable element. But the boys were going ahead unchecked, maintaining their early promise. All were winning prizes and scholarships, and their father was accustomed to measure progress by such things. As soon as it was dark, wherever they were, there was a cry, as though from the Inferno, for lamps and candles, so that the children could get down to their studies. Beyond his knowledge, however, there were stirrings, intimations of nature and poetry and human weakness, which could never be confided either in him or in Mrs K., who, in Eddie’s phrase, in spite of her sterling qualities, seemed to them “rather drawing-roomy”. There were certain aspects of sea and cloud and open country that brought to them, as it did to Housman’s Shropshire Lad, “into my heart an air that kills”—certain poetry, too, that would always have the power to bring them together, Sylvie and Bruno, Catullus, Matthew Arnold, Housman himself, Cory’s epitaph:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,

They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.

I wept when I remembered how often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;

For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

They knew that this was nothing more than an inaccurate translation from the Greek, made by an Eton schoolmaster to help out his class; later, they knew that the schoolmaster had had to leave Eton under a cloud, and take a different name. But the power of the two verses to remind them of each other, across time and space, was beyond this, and indeed beyond “rational argument”.

Still, every morning, at family prayers, the whole household knelt down together, while the ancient coffee-machine simmered ferociously in the background, and the unity and peace, like that of England itself, seemed unlikely to be broken.

III 1901–1907 “We imagined other people might think we were peculiar” (#ulink_fbaff556-9aa5-5eb5-957e-b801cf2d3b91)

ON THEIR SUMMER HOLIDAY OF 1900, the last year of Queen Victoria’s reign, the Knoxes lost their holdall, containing all their waterproofs, umbrellas, fishing rods and tweed coats. Mrs K. believed, with a serene optimism which the years never dimmed, that it would turn up, perhaps on the next train. The boys, with their inborn melancholy and natural relish for disaster, declared that it would not, and it did not.

The holiday that year was in a large house on the desolate fringe of Dartmoor. “We should have been warned,” Winnie wrote, “by the low rent demanded, but this my father held was due to its being in so remote a spot, so far from any railway station.” They arrived in two open waggonettes through the Devonshire lanes thick with honeysuckle, all of them drenched with rain, Ronnie with a pitiful cough on which he had decided to write a treatise. In the damp house itself, mice ran over the girls as they knelt at their evening prayers, and Ronnie, still coughing, had to meow like a cat (he had a talent for animal imitations) to keep them at bay. In the morning spirits revived, and Eddie and Wilfred went down to the rushing stream to fish, but there was a sensation, not to be shaken off, of something coming to an end. The family was dividing into children and those whose childhood was past.

Eddie was nineteen, Dilly seventeen, two pipe-smoking, Norfolk-jacketed young men. The sight of them, both unattached, was maddening to local hostesses in this remote district; “calls” had to be paid and returned. But Ronnie at twelve still clung to childhood, while Wilfred, fourteen, imperturbably arranged his Bits of Old Churches. These were souvenirs, stones and chippings which must genuinely have fallen off and been honestly picked up, otherwise they did not “count”, though Eddie and Dilly sometimes assisted with a good hard blow at the church wall which Wilfred never suspected. Dilly handed over to Ronnie his collection of 231 railway tickets; they no longer interested him.

In the autumn Eddie would be going to Corpus and Ronnie to Eton. In this family which breathed the air of scholarship, but had constant difficulty in making ends meet, education was the key to the future, and the Bishop believed that he could look forward with sober confidence. Although it was clear that Ethel, increasingly deaf and much slower than the others, would never leave home, Winnie was destined for University and, surely, for a brilliant clerical marriage, the three elder boys for the Civil Service, Ronnie for the Evangelical ministry. The Bishop was exceedingly busy, both with his pastorate and with the immense task of raising £100,000 for church extension. It is probable that he did not notice certain disturbing undercurrents, and that Mrs K. did not like to mention them. Neither Eddie nor Dilly felt certain any longer about the truth of Christianity. Their bookboxes contained not only classical texts but also The Golden Bough, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and George Moore’s Esther Waters. On the other hand Winnie, dreamily adolescent when she was not energetically bicycling, escaped into Malory, into William Morris and the stained-glass colouring of the Ages of Faith, and, safe in the airing cupboard, read aloud to Ronnie from the poems of Christina Rossetti.

The family were still conscious, if threatened, of a solid front against intruders. “We imagined other people might think we were peculiar, and yet we were quite sure that our family standpoint on almost any question was absolutely and unanswerably right.” No passage of time would ever destroy this feeling, but neither would it ever bring back the unity of 1900.

For the dimensions of earthly happiness, Ronnie always had to turn back to his childhood, and in particular to Eton. From the moment he arrived in College, was gowned and told “Sis bonus puer”, he gave the school his wholehearted devotion, and it offered him in return the certainty, the sense of belonging, and the discreet respect for brilliance which he so much needed. This was so in spite of the early days of bewilderment, which were not made much easier by Dilly, descending, when he remembered, like a vaguely amiable god, from his room to see how his “minor” was doing.

Sept 23 1900

Dear Mother,

I don’t quite understand the way the forms go, but Dilly says I am in the bottom division of Fifth Form as a matter of course. I hope this letter will reach you early, but I am only writing at 18 3/4 minutes past 8 p.m.… Yesterday I played in a game of Eton field game. I was put to hold a person up on one side, then someone threw the ball in among us, and by the time we were all sitting on top of one another the ball was far away.

We won apparently by three to none. I am very happy here. My love to Winnie,

your very sleepy son,

R. A. Knox

P.S. Floreat Etona.

He was possessed by a kind of pleasurable anxiety to do the right thing, and yet not to waste money at home, asking diffidently for a Liberty’s armchair for his room “to get something in accordance with the rules of taste. Mr Goodhart [the Master in College] is always calling chairs ‘horrible!’, because he makes little expeditions into one’s room just as one is getting into bed, and remarks on pictures and things. He told me the picture of Rembrandt was the sort of thing you could look at for hours. I’ve never tried.” But if Ronnie was eager to conform, he felt free to be happy at Eton. The romantic in him, the inconvenient love of mystery and beauty—inconvenient, that is, to one who thought he mistrusted enthusiasm and only valued a reasonable faith—began to spread its wings. He felt a devotion to Henry VI, the Sorrowful King, the Founder of Eton, which merged, in his thirteenth year, with his feeling for the poetry of the Rossettis and for the splendour of the west window at St Philip’s, the Burne-Jones window through whose ruby-red glass the light streamed in at evensong.

To outward appearances he was still the brilliant, dutiful and rather delicate prizewinner, petted by the Matron in College and still kept firmly in order by his brothers. As the cold of winter approached, Wilfred had “borrowed” his gloves, Dillwyn his cherished new overcoat, which he had christened Alitat, the name of a goddess in Herodotus. Alitat was returned, but Ronnie was often in the sickroom. He meditated anxiously on his resources. “I have bought all my birthday presents, expending 10/- on the whole lot,” he wrote home in June 1902. “I shall have to send Eddie his to-morrow; I have got him a knife-sharpener and strop combined, and also a little pendant for his watch chain.”

Eddie’s departure to Oxford meant that the first of the Bishop’s sons was at University, and he could not help recalling his own achievements there and Bishop Chavasse’s letter to him: “Thank God, thank God, dear old boy, that you have got a First.” Might not this very real triumph be repeated, in four years’ time? Corpus was the Bishop’s own college, and the President, Dr Thomas Fowler, was an old friend. Fowler was one of the great men of the University, a grammar-school boy from Lincolnshire who had become Professor of Logic, but valued philosophy principally as a means of training character; in his famous “private hours” he drew out his young men, and made them apply thought to conduct. To parents he made the terrifying observation, that if they failed to give their children a good education they were no better than the parents in primitive societies, who were permitted to put their children to death. He was both conscientious and sympathetic, and the terrible responsibility of choosing undergraduates for commissions for the Boer Wars was said to have shortened his life.

Eddie went up to Corpus not only as a good classical scholar, but as an Edwardian elegant. He had never bought any clothes for himself before he was sixteen. Mrs K. made large orders at the drapers and outfitters as required, while in the “girls’ room” Winnie pinned and sewed, with Dilly intervening to adapt the sewing-machine to steam power. But the Bishop, who had suffered himself from reach-me-down clothes and “boots heeled, and, I think, tipped with iron—in vain did I attempt to deaden the hateful noises that attended my movements”—was sympathetic to his own boys, all of whom, except the lounging Dilly, had the instincts of a dandy. Eddie was made an allowance of a hundred pounds per annum, to be deducted from his share of the money left in trust by their mother. To the awe of the younger ones, he opened an account with a Birmingham tailor and a cigar merchant, and indulged his good taste in eau-de-Cologne and silk handkerchiefs.

The Oxford to which he went up, on the other hand, was still a slumbrous place where the old eccentrics, whom Lewis Carroll had compared to caterpillars and fantastic birds, emerged from the “sets” which they had occupied for some forty years, complaining at the disturbance of young bloods. The University was still slowly digesting the Commission of 1877, aimed at diverting wealth from the colleges, to expanding the sciences and giving increased chances to poorer students. In 1893 the mighty Jowett had died, glad to have lived to interpret the ideas of Plato to the world, and Corpus itself, which up to 1850 had never had more than twenty undergraduates, had cautiously followed the times, and had expanded into Merton Street. The college remained small, all the members could be gathered at once on the secluded green lawn under the old mulberry tree, and the record of scholarship, as always, stood high.

The idea that a son of Bishop Knox could be “frivolous and extravagant” did not cross Dr Fowler’s mind. But the President’s regulations, even by the standards which Edwardian Oxford tried to impose, were strict to excess. He had a horror of even the mildest forms of gambling, and imposed penalties on the undergraduates for playing the dreaded new game of “Bridge” and for attending the theatre in gowns “on the pretext that they thought the play was by Shakespeare”. Eddie could not conform. He stayed out late. The most difficult route for climbing in at night was across the wall from Merton, where the less agile were sometimes impaled on revolving iron spikes; he became an expert, only damaging his wrists during the last few feet when his friends dragged his light weight across the windowsill.

With these friends, and in particular with Alan Barlow, later Secretary of the Treasury and Trustee of the National Gallery, Eddie passed golden hours. He was the unobtrusive wit of the dining clubs, organized races in hansom cabs, and introduced Miss Mabel Love, a music-hall performer, into the college. But he was aware of a document headed Communication to Mr E.V. Knox, Scholar, after complaints by the Tutors on his Idleness, and of the bitter disappointment that this was likely to cause at home. The summer of 1901 was spent at Glencrippsdale, where in the course of damp picnics and fishing expeditions Eddie fell into the melancholy which lay in wait for all the brothers. In an elegant version of the Greek Anthology, not the less true because it was a commonplace, he wrote,

Leaf and bud, ah quick, how quick returning

Here is visaged immortality;

Freshly from the dark soil sunward yearning

Lifts the ageless green; and must I die?

The natural confidante for these moods would be a young woman, in this case a girl called Evelyn Stevenson, who was also staying at Glencrippsdale, a spirited creature who played billiards and tramped over the heather in an “artistically simple” outfit from Liberty’s. “Do you know, I actually read your letter right through?” she wrote to him. “Awfully good of me, wasn’t it? I hope you are taking a generally less gloomy view of life and things in general … it’s really easier than one thinks to go on living—at least it seems to me to be so.” She also advised him “not to get too clever”. But on his return to Oxford Dr Fowler informed him, in a spirit of anxious justice, that his scholarship had been suspended.

To retrieve himself he must come back in September and take an examination on the whole of Herodotus and the whole of Plato’s Republic, with a fine to be paid if he did not pass, “which I fear would fall on your father rather than on yourself”—and Dr Fowler would be unable to supply him with testimonials of any kind. As a threat this would have had no effect on Eddie, but as an appeal to his affection it could and did. He gave up his “habitually late hours” (the records by now refer to him as “Mr Knox’s case”), spent only eightpence a week on bread and beer in Hall, and he passed his Honour Mods. A further letter from the Doctor recalls the pastoral atmosphere of Edwardian Oxford:

Dear Mr Knox,

I sincerely hope that our relations may be more pleasant in future, and that the discipline you have been under, and will continue to be under, in a modified form, this term, may turn out to be for your good, not only by teaching you the useful lessons of obedience and submission to authorities, but also by procuring for you more opportunities of reading undisturbed by callers, during the solitary hours in your rooms, as well as by leading you to reflect on, and I trust to repent of, the folly of some part of your conduct in the past.