The Knox Brothers. Penelope Fitzgerald
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of unpublished material collected by the late Evelyn Waugh for his biography of Ronald Knox; to that brilliantly discreet work, and to the collection itself, I owe a very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 A. N. L. Munby and the staff of King’s College Library, who let me read the unpublished autobiography of Nathaniel Wedd; to Mr.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 Mead (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 Counterpoint edition I should like to thank Christopher Carduff for his energy, inspiration and patience.
Penelope Fitzgerald
15 March 2000
The Knox Brothers
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 practicing. 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-gray 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