The Knox Brothers. Richard Holmes
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skilful in the wars …
But the book which moved him most at this time was a present from his sister Winnie, a volume of unashamedly sentimental short stories, Hugh Benson’s The Light Invisible, a book abounding in wise, tobacco-stained old priests, one of whom tries and fails to save a child in danger of being crushed by a cart: an angel appears and gently guides the child, not away from, but underneath the wheels. This story particularly struck Ronnie. We have no idea what God intends for us; we have no right to ask for safety, perhaps we do not even know what it is. A lifelong enthusiasm for unpopular causes awoke in him. He borrowed a history of the Tractarian Movement, and, as he put it, “trembled for Newman, mourned for him as lost to the Church, and rose with the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the circles I moved in, there was a cause for which clergymen had been sent to prison and noble lives spent; a cause which could be mine.” To his father, to all the Evangelical homes of his childhood, the Tractarians were traitors from which English Christianity must be rescued. Ronnie’s changing views were “known at home, and doubtless regretted”, but he was only sixteen, the favourite child, the youngest, and these notions of his would surely pass.
Meantime the Bishop’s field of activity grew even wider when he was appointed, in the autumn of 1903, to the see of Manchester. He accepted by return of post, knowing that Balfour’s ministry might fall and the offer might not be repeated by a new Prime Minister less favourable to the Evangelicals. The bishopric had been constituted only fifty years earlier, and covered a huge district of east and central Lancashire, caring for three million souls. The great Lancashire battle to keep its own religious education, of which the Bishop was to be a staunch champion, had only just begun. There were unshepherded multitudes in Blackpool, where in Wakes Week the landladies let their beds for half the night, then put in a new relay of holidaymakers while the first lot were turned out in the backyard. Manchester, with God’s help, would be a worthy opportunity for his energy and splendid powers of organization.
Ronnie, who had rather expected “fatal opulence”, as though the Knoxes were entering a new chapter of Barchester Towers, was a little dashed to be told by Mrs K. that “it wouldn’t make much difference; it would make much more if we all got scholarships.” Perhaps even she was disconcerted by a moving day of such formidable proportions—it was during this move that Wilfred’s Bits of Old Churches were finally dispersed—and still more by the sight of Bishopscourt, the family’s new home in Manchester.
Dear Father [Ronnie wrote],
I told you that I didn’t want us to be better off, but only not worse off, so I am quite happy. Besides, you speak as if keeping a carriage was a necessary expense without any remuneration; but if we have a carriage we save cab-fares. Again, if we keep a garden, no more (or at any rate a little less) need to buy vegetables; even extra hospitality always has its remains; with charity the gain is purely moral. So we are practically better off.
About the house sounds more serious. But I am quite ready to
… let my childish eyes
Distort it into paradise …
(this is not a quotation but a thing I have just made up à propos). Anyway there is a walled garden which has a small dogs’ graveyard in it. And whatever it’s like, I shall be ready to be happy there.
Bishopscourt, behind its forbidding gateway and under its mask of soot, was about two miles north of the Cathedral; an electric tram passed within about thirty yards, but you had to be adept—as all the boys were by this time—at jumping off at the right place. There were three acres of garden, “the soil of which,” the Bishop recalled, “was, on the whole, waterlogged, and the surface blackened with coal-dust and fog.” The rooms were ill-arranged, and the butler, who “went” with the house, was offended to find the chaplain working next door to his pantry in a kind of cupboard. “My Lord,” he said, “what is to become of my dignity?” There was, however, plenty of room to entertain visitors on a large scale, from the Ragged School children to the justices of Assize, and to put up ordination candidates; the Bishop was satisfied. Two bathrooms were put in, and the drainage improved, and although the curtains were still being hung in the front rooms as the first Examining Chaplain appeared in the drive, Mrs K. was immediately her charming, welcoming self. Alice, the grumbling cook, and Richmond, the parlour maid, retreated into the cavernous kitchen, and the Bishop entered upon a further twenty years of selfless hospitality.
“What one chiefly remembers of Manchester,” Eddie wrote, “is the great dray-horses bringing loads of cotton to be bleached; they made a tremendous noise, and struck sparks, because of the stone setts.” When they were not at large in the roaring city, the boys took possession of a darkish, dampish study on the ground floor. If they wanted to smoke, they climbed up on to the roof and sat on the top of the glass dome of the entrance hall, where a false step meant a broken neck. The Bishop was unaware of this, and also of some of the scurrilous and wide-ranging discussions in the “boys’ room”. where the brothers could disagree just as fiercely as in the days when they had punched one another in the wind. “In polite and educated circles,” Dr Fowler of Corpus had written, “physical blows are replaced by sarcasm and innuendo, but this refined mode of warfare may give an equal amount of pain.” The brothers, who loved each other, could not resist the temptation to hurt each other at times. Dilly, when roused, was particularly arrogant, always taking, in argument, the extreme position.
The Bishop had understandably determined not to send his second son to Corpus, or even to Oxford. Dillwyn, who seemed equally attracted to classics and mathematics, should try for Cambridge, and sit for a scholarship to Eton’s sister foundation, King’s.
In the December of 1902 the Bishop had received a letter from Canon Bowlby, at Eton, which began: “I cannot imagine a better Christmas present than the report on your two boys.” But the delight and astonishment in young Ronald’s progress became somewhat clouded when he turned to the perplexing Dillwyn, who in his Cambridge exam had done two brilliant papers, one in maths and the other in Greek verse, and had left all the others unfinished. “It is not known whether he has any taste for philosophy or archaeology.” Perhaps Dilly had been asked, but had not replied. The Canon’s letter now takes on the tone of a racehorse trainer as he adds: “As to the Newcastle [scholarship] one can never be sure what D. will do. Only two boys are left who might beat him in classics, Swithinbank and Daniel Macmillan. They are a dangerous pair, no doubt, as they have been improving at the same time as he has.” One feels he might go on to recommend more oats and regular exercise, as, indeed, an Edwardian schoolmaster would not hesitate to do. But Dilly would not compete where he was not interested. His friend Maynard Keynes, who had beaten him the year before in the Tomline Prize, wrote to his father that Knox showed up his work “in a most loathsomely untidy, unintelligible, illegible condition,” forgetting to write down the most necessary steps, and “even in conversation he is wholly incapable of expressing the meaning he intends to convey.” Yet he respected Dilly as a mathematician, and perhaps, as Sir Roy Harrod suggests in his biography of Keynes, “it was precisely the shower of irrelevant ideas impinging on a brain of the very highest quality that produced such successful results.” We recognize the description of genius. So, too, did Nathaniel Wedd, the King’s admissions tutor in classics; he recommended Dillwyn for a scholarship, and said that he “appeared to be capable of indefinite improvement”. This was fortunate for Dilly.
In a certain sense, he had left home already. During his last half at Eton, Dilly had become a ferocious agnostic. He had postponed a confrontation with his father for the familiar reason—not fear, but the fear of giving pain. God once dismissed, Dilly and Maynard Keynes had calmly undertaken experiments, intellectual and sexual, to resolve the question of what things are necessary to life. Pleasure, like morality and duty, was a psychological necessity which must therefore be accepted, but without too much fuss; and just as Dilly had eaten cold porridge at Aston, because the pleasure of eating consisted of the pleasure of filling your belly, so now he declared that one should drink only to get drunk, and that women (to whom he was always timidly and scrupulously polite) existed only for sex. True pleasure came from solving problems: “nothing is impossible”. Happiness was a different matter; it was suspect, as being too static.
Dilly’s Cambridge was liberating