The Knox Brothers. Richard Holmes
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II 1891–1901 The Sterner Realities of Life
EDMUND KNOX HAD TAKEN ORDERS because he felt God called him to do so. But to enter the mid-Victorian Church meant both more and less than this. “The plain fact is,” his son Ronnie wrote, half a century later, “that while England led the world, and the Church of England was the expression of its national life, there was a monumental quality about the partnership which, do what you would, laid hold of the imagination. Anglicanism fitted into the landscape, was part of the body politic.”
To become one of its ministers was to join a legal establishment which influenced those who governed, to take responsibility for the souls of a great empire, and to make effective judgments in peace and war. That might mean a disputed loyalty. Knox, the scholarship boy whose education had cost one shilling, was a passionate supporter of free education, but a stout opponent of the government’s long-drawn-out attack on the Church schools. Again, when he became rector of Kibworth, it was assumed that, as a mild Tory, he would settle down comfortably in that heavy clay country and become a squire’s parson. But nothing of the kind happened.
Edmund’s heart sank when he saw the farm-labourers, in their smocks and tall hats, waiting outside the church so that “the quality” could go in first. He did not feel at ease with such a system, and longed for a wider scope, if not abroad, then in one of the great industrial cities. In 1891 he received from the Trustees of Aston-juxta-Birmingham (who were mostly Evangelicals) an offer of preferment. Aston was a huge, built-over, crowded industrial district, known to the world only through its football team, Aston Villa.
On a preliminary visit he found the vicarage, after making a number of inquiries, “in a dark and narrow street, set in a maze of smoke-begrimed small houses.” Edmund was more than doubtful about what the effect of the “air”, to which nineteenth-century doctors and patients attached so much importance, would be on his wife’s health. She had never quite recovered from the birth of Ronnie, when she had had a long and difficult labour. But Ellen was not afraid of the sulphur-laden air of Birmingham. She was her father’s daughter, and his last lonely mission had inspired her to do something, no matter how little, that would be worthy of him. She herself had never been to India, and had followed all his wanderings through his frequent letters to her. In the very last of them, written from Muscat two weeks before his death, he had congratulated them both on their resolution to take on the new difficult work. His only sorrow was that “I shall never be able again to offer to take a Sunday for you and set you free for needed rest.” “Your children will miss the beautiful lawn and the pleasant strolls in the country,” he added; “they have to enter on the sterner realities of life.”
If forty-two thousand souls of Birmingham’s workforce could live in the smoke and darkness of Aston parish, so, obviously enough, could their priest. Edmund threw himself into organization and visiting, Ellen into work for the schools—Sunday schools, reading classes for adults, and what were still called the Ragged Schools. They were full of confidence. When they left Kibworth a well-wisher, looking at Edmund’s solid form, had said: “Those shoulders are broad enough for anything.”
The six children had arrived at Aston with the girls in tears at parting with Doctor and at the sight of the tiny, soot-blackened garden. The boys, however, were stopped in their tracks by the sight of a new and instantly attractive form of transport, trams. “I was early fascinated by those gigantic steam-kettles in two sections, which used to ply between Aston and Birmingham,” Ronnie wrote. The cable past Snow Hill, where you could peer down a slit at the endless cable, gave the brothers the concept of perpetual motion. The trams were kings of the road; in Lancashire they were known as “cars”. Bicycles skidded on the lines, one breakdown held up the whole system, and old ladies were marooned in the middle of the street and had to be rescued. The years to come were never to bring any form of transport that they loved quite so well. They became trammers from that first day.
One advantage of Aston was the schools. By tram the girls could go to Edgbaston Ladies’ College, and Eddie and Dilly to day school. Edmund Knox did not like boarding schools, which he considered unnatural, and he wanted to undertake the family religious instruction himself, at home. Here a certain unevenness of response had already appeared. The girls were devout, so were the little boys, Ronnie in particular; dressed in Ethel’s pinafore for a surplice, he conducted the funerals of pet birds in the grimy flower-beds. On Eddie, as he put it himself, “Church did not seem to rub off properly,” though he conformed for his mother’s sake. Dilly held his counsel.
Leaving the question of doctrine aside, all the instruction they received from their parents was positive and humanitarian—not so, however, the grim warnings of Nurse and Cook, whose villain was that horror-figure, the Pope, “always laying snares,” Winnie remembered, “in far-off Italy to entrap our nursery in especial, and in general, into the evil lures of his superstition.” Old Nurse said she could smell a Papist a mile off, and was much preoccupied with the imminence of the Last Trump, which she hoped might come when they were all at prayer, and if possible in clean underclothes. But the children were born with the power of discrimination. Even the girls were able to discount Old Nurse, and “in such homes as ours,” Winnie thought, “we surely experienced something of the clear light crystal world of the earlier ages of Faith.”
The vast parish was responding well, and Aston was now divided into seven districts, with willing helpers in each of them. But a few days after Christmas 1891, in the thick of the Christmas work, Ellen Knox caught influenza. She did not seem to be able to pick up. For the next eight months she had to be sent to one nursing home after another, the last one being at Brighton, “for the air”. Aunt Emily, Edmund’s kind, but harassed and ineffective, sister, came to keep house. She had no imagination, was not used to children, and had no idea what to do. There was an atmosphere, so frightening to children, of things not being quite right, and of discussions behind closed doors. The news from Brighton was worse. They were sent for, and although on this occasion their mother recovered, they never forgot that Aunt Emily had refused to let them travel, because it was Sunday. The immediate danger was said to have passed. Then, at the end of August a letter came from their father, addressed to all of them: “My dear, dear children.” Their mother had died that morning.
The blow to Eddie was such that in the course of a very long life, he, like his grandfather before him, never quite recovered from it. It gave him, at twelve years old, a spartan endurance and a determination not to risk himself too easily to life’s blows, which might, at times, have been mistaken for coldness.
For a year he remained alone at Aston with his father and Aunt Emily, while the others were distributed among relations. Edmund Knox could find relief from his misery only by working all day and half the night, so that the small boy was intensely lonely. He was old enough now to go to King Edward’s School; during the long miserable evenings he went up by himself to the box room and comforted himself by devising his own tramway system. It had to be horse-drawn, because he could not think how to represent the steam engines.
There was a large kitchen table in the box-room [Eddie wrote]; I cut the tramlines with a penknife and burnt them out to make them deeper with a knitting needle heated on a candle. The system was fairly accurate and I bought some little tin engines and Stöllwerk chocolate horses to pull them. These were very cheap, and lasted till they melted. The grown-ups found out, of course; they didn’t punish me, nor did they praise my industry.
Winnie, Ethel and Dilly were packed off to Eastbourne. Their broken-hearted father hardly knew which way to turn, and was prepared to accept any reasonable offer. The relative at Eastbourne was a widowed great-aunt, a sister of George Knox’s, who made it clear that by offering them a home (she was in fact being paid for their board and lodging) she was exceeding herself in Christian charity. Her Protestantism was of the “black” variety. When Dilly, shy and unmanageable, was told to kneel down and “give himself to Jesus” he took refuge in the coal hole. He had to go to an uncongenial preparatory school where he too rapidly learned all that they could teach him, and he was suffering the frustration of a natural athlete—there was no one at school who could play his spin bowling—and what sort of practice can you get in a coal hole? His sister describes