The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Wilfred was struck by the East Enders’ sense of life as a spectacle. They knew it would be a struggle, and had the measure of it. When a woman told him that she didn’t so much mind being knocked down with a flatiron, but “drew the line” at a wooden leg, she showed the West Ham instinct for comic drama. As to missions, everyone was used to them. The Salvation Army took their stand on the corner, the secularists attacked all religion from the Cromwell Club. The very name “settlement” suggested dwellers in an alien land, and “mission” was worse, implying that the missioners had been sent from a better place, and would return there. Wilfred objected, too, to the notion that they were “doing good”. Doing good, like saving one’s soul, ought to be the by-product of activity, not the reason for it.

  Eddie recalled that what the Stratford boys really wanted to know was what brought anyone down there at all. “You’re not doing this for nothing. What are you getting out of it? Are you writing a book about it?” They respected only those who could keep order. The Rev. Pombo Legge, who had done a bit of heavyweight boxing, sometimes bestirred himself to knock their heads together. Wilfred was too slightly built for this. He remembered that, to quieten the unruly Sunday school at Aston, his father had employed a curate who was “something of a mesmerist”, but he did not believe the East End boys could be mesmerized. At football matches, he said, he made it a principle to send somebody off in the first five minutes, to assert authority. But the survival test was to go swimming with them in “The Bricks”, a murky pool on Wanstead Flats which they much preferred to the new Municipal Baths. This was rough, but no rougher than his first term at Rugby, and much less so than a seaside holiday with Eddie and Dilly.

  To his father, he tried to explain in what way he had become a convinced supporter of Labour. At Oxford, Ronnie and he and Charles Lister had founded the Orthodox Club, which pretended to be socialist and printed its invitations on red cards, but it was time now to put away childish things. West Ham was one of the classic training grounds of the Labour movement, and the corner of Beckton Road was one of its first schools of oratory. Wilfred believed that Christianity could work with it and through it. In 1910, when the unions were restrained from contributing to the party funds, he invited his father to give something to the expenses of George Lansbury, who was standing for Bow and Bromley. The Bishop replied that by socialism he understood the exaltation of “society” at the expense of the individual, both body and soul. Had Wilfred considered this?

  In 1911 and 1912 the shipbuilding company at Canning Town closed down, and there was unemployment all over the East End; the National Insurance Bill seemed to come only just in time. Ronnie felt that “The Bill is the best we can do, but we can’t expect to like it.” Eddie was prepared to rejoice with Wilfred, but added: “How are we going to pay the salaries of all the officials?”

  Wilfred’s moral guides at this time were Billy Temple, now President of the Workers’ Educational Association, and Lansbury. Temple’s fearless idealism has been described as comic, but church history should be judged, not by whether it is successful, but by whether it is right or wrong. George Lansbury was an Anglo-Catholic, whose attitude in 1909 was defined in his The End of Pauperism: “Kneeling with others at the altar of the sacraments will and can bring no real peace unless those who so kneel spend their lives as brothers and sisters, and this is quite impossible within a system of life which depends on the ability of the children of God to dispute, quarrel and fight for their daily bread.” Both Temple and Lansbury saw that society must be unified before it could be healed, or, in Lansbury’s frighteningly simple words, “a poor man or woman must be held of equal social value with a rich man or woman.” Both dreaded, however, the idea of the state as a vast soup kitchen, believing, as Wilfred most consistently did, that the only valuable help is what we give each other. But to preserve the ethos of the old Friendly Societies and coal clubs in large-scale politics would, as he foresaw, require a miracle.

  If the concept of wholeness drew Wilfred towards the sacramental church, for Ronnie it was the ideal of authority. All four brothers had brought impatience to a fine art. Ronnie felt something like despair at the English genius for irreligion—the comfortable feeling that there is a good deal of truth in all religions, but not enough to affect practical conduct. This seemed to him the legacy of Protestantism. “If you have a sloppy religion you get a sloppy atheism.” If truth existed, then there must be one truth and one only, handed down in an unbroken line, a truth about which “theorising is forbidden and speculation unnecessary”. It was as a champion of authority that Ronnie prepared for the priesthood.

  He was indulged—or so, at any rate, his brothers thought—in not being required to enter a theological college or to do a year’s parish work as a deacon. He had been offered the chaplaincy of Trinity, and he was to tutor in logic, divinity and classics while he prepared himself for ordination by meditation and study, in his own way.

  Even as a schoolboy, long before his vocation was clear, he had seen that close human relationships might be an impediment to his service of God. Deeply attached to his friends, and “conscious for the first time how much my nature craved for human sympathy and support, I thought it my obvious duty to deny myself that tenderest sympathy and support which a happy marriage would bring.” His intimation was justified in 1912, when, as an English Catholic priest, he took a vow of celibacy.

  The feeling among Anglo-Catholics was one of ferment and hope, a determination to defy the Establishment and press their cause. The campaign had its advance guard of young curates, committed—with a public still keenly interested in church affairs—to set their world on fire. Certain churches, at strategic points throughout England, were felt to be advance posts, which must be held at all costs. One of them was St Mary’s in Graham Street (now Graham Terrace). Ronnie had no connections there, but the Vicar, J. C. Howell, was an understanding friend, and it was here that he said his first mass, in September 1912.

  His father, of course, could not possibly lend countenance to such a ceremony by attending it. He had prayed since Ronnie’s nursery days that this favourite youngest son, this naturally religious young soul, should one day enter the Church, but Ronnie’s ordination, when it came, was the culmination of years of bitter argument. At home in Manchester Winnie tried to take the brunt of it, to help the hard-pressed Mrs K. By now she had taken a degree in history and was beginning, in the intervals of parish work, to write her own books. But she worked on her Life of St. Louis with her ear open for disputes, ready to fly down from her room to act as peacemaker, and dreading Sundays, which Dilly, if he was there, persisted in treating exactly like any other day, while Wilfred and Ronnie bicycled round Manchester to find a church which observed the Seven Points of Ritual. At first the Bishop showed open bewilderment. “Between ourselves, Winnie, I cannot understand what it is that the dear boys see in the Blessed Virgin Mary.” He conceded point after point. He said nothing about Ronnie’s rosary, which could be heard clicking in the intervals of the daily family prayers. Alice and Richmond exchanged glances; Eddie’s terrier, which was accustomed to wake up only at the familiar intonation of “And now to God the Father”, growled ominously. As a deacon, Ronnie wore, even at home, a version of the priests’ dress which he had seen on holiday visits to Oberammergau and Bruges. “Someone said,” he told Winnie, “I can’t remember who, that there are only three cities in the world, Paris (I think, or maybe Rome), Oxford and Bruges.” He had acquired a cassock, knee breeches, black silk stockings and buckled shoes. The Bishop, who had to wear silk stockings himself on public occasions, could not imagine why anyone should want to. Ronnie’s clothes were looked after by Winnie, who dared not entrust them to the outspoken Richmond. At a much deeper level, the Bishop never forbade his sons to go to confession, which was not forbidden in the Prayer Book. He desired to leave every possible way open by which Ronnie might come back to him.

  Certainly, Ronnie never concealed anything. All his new “Romanizing” friends
were asked to Bishopscourt, and, in spite of everything, his heart was high. “It was almost a part of ‘rags’ and shocking the elders,” Winnie thought, “coming back in soutanes and buckles after huge meetings of the Christian Students’ Union to uproarious meetings in the Bishopscourt smoking-room. I was very flattered that Ronnie insisted that I must be at home to make things go! And Wilfred talking about equal distribution of means of production and profits.” They drank cocoa (which Wilfred recalled as the great conspiratorial drink of the early twentieth century; trade union meetings in West Ham were usually held at cocoa-rooms). Over the cocoa Ronnie and his circle planned “outrages”—looking back at his younger self, he called it “snapping at all the gaiters in a cloud of dust.” In his study the Bishop heard the laughter, and marvelled at it.

  It would have mattered less if they had loved each other less, or, indeed, if they had had less ability to love. Both of them would have given anything earthly—anything their consciences would allow them to give—to make the other happy. To the end of his life Ronnie tenderly gave credit, whenever he could, to his father’s work, and in particular to his gallant fight for the independence of the Church schools. Nevertheless, they were destined to lose each other.

  Oxford was Ronnie’s chosen ground, and, like Newman before him, he expected that it always would be. In his rooms in Trinity, always open to anyone who called in for “teas” or “wines”, he had begun to take up his characteristic position, sitting on the fender, the “warmest place” which his elder brothers had never allowed him at St Philip’s. Now he talked, smoked, listened and advised from this point of vantage. Some of his circle might take a more extreme course. His old and true friend Vernon Johnson, always seen before in a correct bowler, suddenly appeared “in an unbecoming brown habit, with a stiff hood looking like an extinguisher, his hair cropped quite close, wearing rough boots like a workman’s.” He had joined an Anglican community under strict Franciscan rule. This was not Ronnie’s way. He was the sparkling preacher of the hour, the irresistible apologist of the English Catholics.

  His high spirits seemed to overflow, so that his daily life, even his life of prayer, seemed not enough to contain them. The Oxford Union has probably never had such a brilliant speaker as this fragile, seemingly insignificant figure, trembling from head to foot with sheer love of controversy, supporting himself casually against the table and speaking, as all the brothers did, apparently without moving his lips. The whole House listened and listened, spellbound by the power of mind. Ronnie read his speeches, but allowed himself sometimes to mime. Memorable, to give one example, was a passage on the disadvantages of clerical dress—beggars single you out, waiters know that you cannot lose your temper and serve you last, people try not to sit in your carriage in the train, except spinsters—and each situation was given simply by a slight change of expression. The things he wrote at this time give the delightful impression simply of being young. Some of these were papers and addresses to University clubs. In 1911 he expanded the letter with the dried orange pips, which the four brothers had sent to Conan Doyle, into his Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes. This was intended as a satire, not so much, as has been suggested, upon the Higher Criticism of the Bible, but upon all higher scholarship—including the work which Dilly was now embarking on, the recension of Headlam’s Herodas. Dilly was engaged in correspondence with Professors Bilabel and Greeneboom; Ronnie invented, as his opponents, Professors Ratzegger and Sauwosch. He set out to show, strictly from internal evidence, that the Return stories are clumsy inventions by Watson, who had taken to drink. This would account, for instance, for his neglect of his practice, and the ludicrous errors he makes in the colour of Holmes’s dressing gown.

  Conan Doyle, to the brothers’ disappointment, had not answered the letter with the five orange pips, but he did write to Ronnie when the Studies were published in 1912:

  I cannot help writing to you to tell you of the amusement—and also the amazement—with which I read your article on Sherlock Holmes. That anyone should spend such pains on such material was what surprised me. Certainly you know a great deal more about it than I do, for the stories have been written in a disconnected (and careless) way, without referring back to what had gone before. I am only pleased that you have not found more discrepancies, especially as to dates. Of course, as you seem to have observed, Holmes changed entirely as the stories went on. In the first one, the ‘Study in Scarlet’, he was a mere calculating machine, but I had to make him more of an educated human being as I went on with him. He never shows heart save in the play—which one of your learned commentators condemned truly as a false note.

  One point which has not been remarked by the learned Sauwosch … is that in a considerable proportion of the stories—I daresay a quarter—no legal crime has been committed at all. Another point —one of the few in which I feel satisfaction but which I have never seen mentioned—is that Watson never for one instant as chorus and chronicler transcends his own limitations. Never once does a flash of wit or wisdom come from him. All is remorselessly eliminated so that he may be Watson.

  Conan Doyle also explained the vexed point about the impressions of the bicycle tracks. Holmes was “too indolent” to explain that one can only tell which way a bicycle is going if marks are left on a steep uphill or downhill track. And this, he felt, “with many thanks and renewed amazement,” was quite enough on the subject of Sherlock Holmes.

  With the same deceptively easy-looking agile brilliance, Ronnie entered the field of theological controversy. In 1912 he had been asked to join a group of eight Oxford Fellows who met in each other’s rooms each Friday. The object was to work out a minimum doctrine which would be acceptable to all Christians. Ronnie was there to represent the extreme young High Church position. There was an idea of preparation against the future, when Christianity would have to struggle for a hearing in a world where most would regard it not as untrue or even as unthinkable, but simply irrelevant. Was it possible to arrive at the “foundations”—the minimum of doctrine with which those who could not accept miracles, or the Resurrection of the body, could still feel themselves Christians? Surely it was neither weakness nor compromise to try to reach this kind of unity, with millions of the half-persuaded and the scientifically minded not far from the brink of belief? The moving spirit of the group was Billy Temple.

  This open frame of mind was known in the early twentieth century as modernism, and it soon became clear that Ronnie was quite out of place on the committee. Modernism was explained to him, he said, by a member of the group while they were walking along the track of the new electric railway from Rossall to Blackpool, and he felt an actual sense of physical revulsion. To him it sounded like treachery. All compromise in religion was treachery. Faith was a gift, but also a force, which must be exercised by difficulties, the more the better. The committee were like a crazy, leaky vessel, throwing out Authority with trembling hands to lighten ship, while they should be plugging the leaks and throwing out the bilge. When their joint book, Foundations, by Seven Oxford Men, was due for publication, Ronnie went joyously to the attack with a verse satire in the manner of Dryden, “Absolute and Abitofhell”. He himself felt proudly absolute; the modernists were timidly retreating towards a bit of doctrine and a bit of faith.

  When on his throne at Lambeth Solomon

  Uneasy murmur’d Something must be done;

  When suave politeness, temp’ring bigot Zeal,

  Corrected I believe to One does feel. …

  Published in the Oxford Magazine for October 1913, which sold out in consequence in one day, “Absolute and Abitofhell” became immediately a collector’s item. “I went to the author’s rooms,” wrote Eric Hamilton, later Dean of Windsor, “in case he had a spare copy to give me. Instead he handed me his own corrected proof, which I have ever since treasured. For all his brilliance, Ronnie was never overwhelming.” It was reprinted, in the correct seventeenth-century format, by the Anglo-Catholic Society of St Peter and St Paul,
who had begun as a small church-furnishing shop, part of the Medici Society, and now had an elegant private press and offices of their own.

  Billy Temple did not resent the pamphlet, he was the last person in the world to do so. Nevertheless, Ronnie was aware of suggestions that he was frivolous, or did not dare to put his views seriously. In 1913, therefore, he wrote Some Loose Stones—loose stones, that is, that would bring down the Foundations.

  Some Loose Stones is perhaps the best book he ever wrote—it is so fresh, so earnest, so full of light and shadow, each dependent on the other. He has, he tells us, the utmost sympathy with those who have no belief, “because I can give no clear explanation of how I came by it myself.” But he cannot think that the Church’s main concern should be, “How much can Jones swallow?” Unbelievers want answers: “Why does God allow cancer?” They want definition, not accommodation. “The modern church is like a cosy doctor saying: ‘Tell us what you want to believe, and we will see about it.’ ” How half-hearted, how useless, to concede that the miracles of Jesus are exceptions to the laws of nature! “You only mean by that that things do work by a law, but you haven’t found the law.” Foundations had said that where a natural explanation of an event can be suggested “there must be very special reasons for falling back on explanations of a supernatural character.” Ronnie calls this a disastrous piece of bad logic. “Miracles cannot be probable or improbable. They can only be possible or impossible.”