Edmund, the industrious second son, who was to be the father of the four Knox brothers, was a stoutly built boy, with a native cheerfulness which was difficult to subdue. Of all the family he was the most profoundly influenced by the spiritual life of his mother. Her Quaker gift of prayer remained with him as he was gradually drawn towards the Evangelicals; what that meant, he has explained himself. First and foremost, the conviction that God loved him, “as an actual fact, that must take first place in my life.” There was no real division between the unseen and the seen. Secondly, to look at the Bible as a personal message from God to the individual soul, “and to read it daily with a resolve to hear what God had to say to me that day—I must find words that were meant for me.” Thirdly, to value the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which was celebrated by the Evangelicals only rarely, perhaps once a month. This faith survived even the natural doubting-time of adolescence. “When the testing came, and when I heard the question put to my soul, ‘Wilt thou also go away?’ I was able to see that unfaith could not satisfy my deepest needs.”
Meanwhile, Edmund was determined not to be a “burden”. He was justifiably proud of the fact that (apart from the railway fares and the indestructible clothing) his education cost his father only one shilling. This was for the tip traditionally given to the porter by a new boy at St Paul’s School. Once this shilling was paid, scholarships covered everything. In later years he became a stout supporter of free education.
Edmund, entering in 1857, was an excellent classical scholar, but although the discipline at St Paul’s was considered mild—largely owing to the absent-mindedness of the High Master—every boy had to expect to be beaten every day. The beatings were administered on both moral and social grounds: the “old Adam” had to be driven out of them, and they had to be “hardened” to face a competitive world. For the same reason, Latin and Greek were made doubly difficult because the grammar-books themselves were printed in Latin. At St Paul’s there were no organized games, no “team spirit” to assist in the hardening process. The boys’ free time was spent in the streets or on the muddy foreshore of the Thames.
After “hardening” came “forming”, when the University was supposed to give a young man’s character its final shape. When, in 1865, Edmund went up to Corpus, Oxford was spiritually in low water. The loss of Newman was still felt, and the aftermath of Tractarianism lingered. “Several other combatants of the great fray,” he recalled, “were familiar in the street and at University sermons—the ferret-like Dr Hawkins, the elephantine Ben Symons, the statuesque Plumtree, the dapper Wynter, the caustic and ingenious Mark Pattison.” But even these alarming figures, even Pusey himself, seemed weary; and the vacuum created was in danger of being filled by a liberal spirit of anti-clericalism, determined to remove power, once and for all, from the hands of the Church. This did not frighten young Edmund. If the new spirit meant that fellowships would be open to everyone, if it blew into musty corners, then he welcomed it. If it denied God, he would fight it.
Corpus itself was a pious and respectable college. It was nothing for the men to study, as Edmund often did, from four in the afternoon till two in the morning, sustained by cups of strong tea, and be ready, after a cold bath, for chapel at seven-thirty. On Sunday they put on black coats and top hats for their walk in the country. At first, to be sure, Edmund felt somewhat lonely, sitting, uncouth and penniless, in his room, hearing the steps of visitors go up the stairs, never for him. But, being naturally sociable, he looked out, and made friends. The company of his mother and sisters he certainly missed, and he went so far as to give up a course of lectures on the Greek Testament to go every week after evening service to a professor’s drawing room where he could spend a precious hour “in the society of ladies”. But he had much to do, and had found a firm ally in F. J. Chavasse (later the great Bishop of Liverpool), “a little man, almost deformed”, but full of inward fire. With Chavasse, he could make headway, in the name of Evangelicalism, against the indifference of the University. “A dull life, do you say?” he wrote. “Well, we did not find it so.” In his second year he told his father that he wished to be ordained.
George Knox had not forgotten how he fought this battle on his own account, but his concern for his children’s success, as well as their salvation, by now amounted to a mania. If Edmund was to enter the Church, he must start as something better than a curate; he must either get first-class honours, which would lead to a University appointment, or renounce the idea, and go into the Indian Civil Service.
All turned on the final examinations, Greats in 1868, Law and Modern History in 1869. While he waited for the results, he wrote to his sister Emily, “visions of every conceivable class came before me, and I was absolutely wretched.” The results came, and Chavasse wrote: “Thank God, thank God, dear old boy, that you have got a First—the sight of the class list took a load off my heart. I was dreaming all night that you had got a Third. I feel now how faithless I had been to mistrust God … I am glad for your father’s sake—above all I am glad for the sake of Evangelical religion in Oxford. No answer is needed: I should not expect a letter—nay I shall be vexed if I get one.” The President of Corpus offered Edmund the Cobbe Prize of £3 5s, “if I cared to take it, which of course I was not loth to do.” It enabled him to buy “a new suit of clothing” to receive his honours.
Edmund was ordained in 1870, by which time he had already been elected a Fellow of Merton. He was assured of three hundred pounds a year for the rest of his life, as long as he did not acquire extensive landed property (a very remote contingency), and as long as he did not marry.
Hard work, academic success, faith, endurance—these were the keys to the future. But Edmund had inherited from the Reynolds family something quite beyond his father’s capacity—the ability to enjoy himself. With his round parson’s hat at the mercy of the winds, he took to tricycling and spun across the Christ Church Meadows; on vacation in Scotland he learned to love the Highland scenery, never, as far as he could remember, having seen mountains before; “croquet,” he wrote, “had but a passing hold on me; it came in while I was still a boy,” but he introduced jeu de paume and lawn tennis, both of which he played pretty badly, into the quadrangle at Merton. On weekdays, too, he began to read novels—Jane Austen and Trollope. And he was living in one of the oldest and most picturesque colleges in Oxford, “its Common-room panelled with oak, lit by candles in silver candlesticks, heated by a noble fire.” These things were luxury, but he could not avoid the feeling that it was wrong for a man to have them at the start of his life. They should be earned and worked for, and nothing that he had done so far seemed enough. As Tutor, and later Dean, of Merton, he threw his considerable weight into the battle for sobriety and wholesome religious instruction. For example it had become, as he put it, “the habit of the idle to smash the windows of the new buildings with stones or with small loaves left over from meals.” From his method of dealing with this and other problems he became known as Hard Knocks. At the same time, he took on an unpaid curacy in the poorest parish in Oxford. He was in sole charge there, one long hot summer, when smallpox raged through the district. He improvised as best he could. There were no hospitals in Oxford then for infectious diseases.
But what about “the society of ladies”? The young Tutor who was not permitted, by statute, to marry, and who had contemplated, though not taken, a vow of celibacy, found that he had fallen in love. A new rector had come to the church of St Ebbe’s, near Christ Church Meadows—a missionary who was recuperating, somewhat unwillingly, in England from illness and over-fatigue on his Indian journeys. His name was Thomas French, and Edmund had met him before, when he had come for a time to Croydon. The eldest daughter, Ellen Penelope, was twenty years old, delicate in health and appearance, with elegant straight features. She was well educated, musical, seemed never to think of herself—but then, nor did anyone else in Dr French’s household. Almost at once Edmund “formed an attachment”.
He was re
turning from a summer parish outing. There were roses for sale on the Oxford station platform. On an impulse he bought one, and offered it to Ellen. If she accepted it, he would try his fate. Ellen took it. He did not know that on her first morning in Oxford she had felt a premonition when she had seen him, quite by chance, walking up Keble Terrace. She had thought, “That is my future husband.”
Thomas Valpy French was a saint, holy in the noblest sense of the word, and as exasperating as all saints. A poor judge of character, he always believed the best of everyone, in spite of repeated disappointments, and was so generous that his friends did not dare mention their wants, for fear of his ruining himself. Edmund Knox, in those Oxford days, “would gladly have sat at his feet”. His wife yearned to have him at home more often, but could never regret his calling.
The Frenches were a family of Norman descent, originally the de Freynes, and Thomas’s father, the Rev. Peter French, inexplicably known as “Goosefair” French, was a comfortable clergyman with good connections. His mother had been a Dillwyn from Wales, and he had married the daughter of Dr Richard Valpy, the headmaster of Reading School. The Frenches lived in the spacious vicarage of Holy Trinity, Burton-on-Trent, with a prosperous brewery round the corner. How did their son, with easy prospects in front of him, come to end his life in a lonely sand-strewn grave at Muscat, “on the edge of nowhere”?
At Rugby, Thomas French was a fine classical scholar, who had had “much to bear” during his schooldays because of his lack of guile. There was in fact a terrible simplicity about him. The urgent command of Christ, at the end of St Matthew, to “preach the truth to all nations”, came to him first at Oxford; then, like his contemporaries, he had to pray for a right choice between Africa, India and the new industrial cities. He went to India. From then onward his life was a reckless sacrifice of the body and a broadening of the mind. “The Padri Sahib,” said the Punjabis pityingly, “wears himself out and leaves no water in the well.”
French arrived in Calcutta in 1850, and began the intensive study of Indian languages which made him known as the “seven-tongued Padri”. But the swarming poverty struck him like a blow. He gave away his stipend, cut down his meals to a handful of rice, and “set his face” against being dressed by a bearer.
His first appointment from the Church Missionary Society was to St John’s College, Agra, a Christian school which he founded himself. He knew perfectly well that his unruly Hindu pupils only attended in the hope of getting Government jobs, and at first was pained by the “power of repulsion” they showed, but gradually their minds opened to him. They found that their headmaster was a fakir—like St Paul, as he pointed out—who could be seen after school in the marketplace, seated on a heap of melons, taking part in disputes and preaching contests, or reading the Bible among lepers. After a while, he was admitted without opposition wherever he went. He was a holy man.
In 1851 his betrothed, Miss Mary Anne Jansen, courageously came out to Calcutta to marry him. She was the daughter of a merchant of Dutch origin who had married one of the Quaker Lloyds of Birmingham, the faithful friends of Charles Lamb. The Jansens were wealthy, which of course was of no importance at all to Mary Anne’s husband, but, since he was never likely to save a penny, it was just as well. Their first children were born in India, the fourth one in the garrison at Agra during the Mutiny. Mrs French watched the furniture of the British community floating downstream by the light of their burning houses; the Professor of English Literature was shot, and his horse and carriage flung into the compound. Thomas French, however, refused to enter the fort unless he had permission to bring his native Christians in with him. When this was granted he appeared carrying a large bag, which contained, not valuables, but his Arabic dictionary.
It was the end of his work in Agra, but in 1862 he returned to India, shrunken, ill, leaving his wife and children behind him, but unable to feel at peace in England. “The more I am borne away from you, the more my thoughts travel towards you,” he wrote to Mary Anne as his train left London Bridge, but there were more tongues to learn and untold millions to reach, even though in the Moslem regions to which he was bound he was lucky to make five converts in a year. His appointment was now as Principal of the college at Lahore, but in the vacations he travelled tirelessly over the mountains, first to the wild districts of the North-West Frontier, then to Kashmir, studying Hebrew and Pushtu on muleback, arriving with his shabby books and luggage, often too weak to wind up his own watch. He had become deeply interested in both Hindu and Moslem asceticism, his ambition now being to understand the mind of Indian religion and to present Christianity “without losing a grain, yet measuredly and gradually as the people can bear it.” At the same time, he had become increasingly impatient of the doctrinal quarrels within the Church itself. Small wonder that the Church Missionary Society were growing somewhat doubtful of their broad-minded servant.
Why did he do it? The Jansens pressed him to come home to his family, and “I must feel the objections of my father-in-law,” he wrote, “but I could not abandon the work without a farther trial of it.” Today he would certainly be asked: why not leave these people to their own beliefs? Why press on them something they did not ask for and do not want? To this his reply would be: “The viewing of the unseen world instead of the visible things of time—this cannot be a shallow matter; it must be deep or not at all—no halves in such a business.”
French’s only vanity was in the management of his tea-things on his journeys; when his mule fell and broke the cup, he taught himself to drink out of the spout. The study of languages was not vanity, but a way of bearing witness. It was his ambition to revise the Urdu and Hindustani Prayer Books, and to translate the Scriptures into Pushtu. This work was in hand when, after a terrible attack of fever, he returned to England and to Oxford in the spring of 1874. In June, Edmund Knox offered the rose he had bought on the station platform to Ellen.
No one among his Ulster forebears would have offered the rose, which was a measure of how much sentiment and heart could now find expression in the Knox family. It must have been with some misgivings that Ellen, with her sister as chaperon, went to pay her first visit to Edmund’s parents, but this, fortunately, was less formidable than it would have been a few years earlier. George and Frances Knox, with their four unmarried daughters, had moved to the vicarage of Exton, in Rutland. Although the children of the parish were told “always to think what Mr Knox told me not to do”, his habitual fires had sunk, and Frances had quite reverted to the easy ways of her girlhood. She sat in her room, the Lavender Room, still dressed in Quaker grey, but wrapped in Indian shawls, serene, and much loved by the neighbourhood. Edmund and Ellen were allowed to walk in the garden by themselves, and, according to Edmund’s diary, “had a profitable talk in the summer-house”.
Two years later, in 1876, Merton amended its statutes to allow four married fellows, and the wedding took place in the spring of 1878. Dr French, though with much regret, could not be present; he had been appointed Bishop of Lahore, a diocese of some twenty million souls, with only a thousand native Christians. Letters arrived from snowy hills and mud huts, from the famine area, from the battlefront of the Afghan War, where he refused to call the Afghans God’s enemies, and aroused criticism after our defeat at Maiwand by praying for “friends, lovers, orphans and widows”. “I did strike out ‘lovers,’ ” he said, “but put it in again.” But it was not till he received a telegram in April 1879, telling him of the birth of his first grandchild, Ethel Knox, that he began, for the first time, to feel old.
In 1884 Edmund and Ellen left Oxford for their first parish, Kibworth in Leicestershire. By that time they had four children, and two more were born to them there. Ethel was followed by Edmund George Valpy (1881); Winifred Frances (1882); Alfred Dillwyn (1884); Wilfred Lawrence (1886); and Ronald Arbuthnott (1888). Family affection dictated all the names. Dillwyn was the name of Frances’s grandmother, Lawrence was Bishop French’s younger brother, Arbuthnott recalled the sister from wh
om Frances had been so cruelly divided when she joined the Church of Rome.
Kibworth Rectory might have been designed and built to bring up a large family. All the children were so happy there that in later years they could cure themselves of sleeplessness simply by imagining that they were back at Kibworth. They had their own cow in the pasture, their own rookery in the elms, and, best of all, the railway ran past the bottom of the garden, and the dark red engines of the Midland line could be observed five times daily. The Knoxes were passionate railway children. True, people said that the drains were bad at Kibworth, but who cared? They were completely safe in the large nursery at the top of the back stairs, looking down into the kitchen garden, where in memory it was always summer, with the victoria plums ripening on the south wall. Their father mounted his stout horse, Doctor, to set off on his parish visits, and their dearly loved mother waved from an upper window.
The pack of children fell into distinct groups: the girls, said by their brothers to be an inferior species, but holding their own; the elder boys, dark, charming, dangerous-looking, with a disposition to fight each other to the death under the nursery table on some point of honour; the “little ones”, fair, Quakerish and much more manageable. All, except poor Ethel, who was somewhat slow and stunted, were clever. All were tenderhearted, but, after babyhood, only Winnie was able to express her feelings with no inhibitions at all. “Enter Winnie, and kisses everybody” was a sardonic stage direction in one of Eddie’s first plays.
The Knox Brothers Page 3