In the winter evenings muffin-men and lamp-lighters came on their rounds, and Eddie and Christina often had to make their way down into foggy London, since Eddie was now doing a good deal of theatre criticism. Theatre-going in the Twenties was of quite another dimension; Owen Seaman went to The Immortal Hour twenty-five times; people lost count of how often they had seen the Lovat Fraser Beggar’s Opera; for Shaw’s Back to Methuselah one had to go to the Royal Court every night for a week, Christina bravely adapting the same diamanté dress with scarves and necklaces. Flecker’s Hassan in 1923, with its intoxicating orientalized language, was also long, though the intervals were short, so that, as Eddie put it in his review, “the barrier of Procrastination tended to sever the whisky-and-soda from the lips of Desire.” Sometimes there was a show with Ivor Novello in the cast; Ivor, loyal through the passing years, came gliding thick with greasepaint into the audience if Christina or her brother Ned were there, to greet them with his reverberating “Darlings! you came!”
Neither Ronnie nor Wilfred ever went to the theatre after they were ordained priest, but both of them retained the Victorian notion of “standing treat” to their nephews and niece. It was a memorable experience to go to Gunter’s teashop with Ronnie and Eddie. Ronnie’s shy courtesy made it difficult for him to attract attention from the waitresses, and his insistence on “doing the most difficult thing” led him to tackle his meringue with a fork only. While doing this he began to talk enthusiastically to Eddie about Henry Vaughan’s “Peace”:
My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a wingèd sentry
All skilful in the wars …
Ronnie, chasing the crumbs, objected to the half-rhyme, country and sentry, and to the unlikeliness of one sentry guarding a whole boundary. The text must be wrong. Mightn’t Vaughan have written
My soul, there is a fortress
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a wingèd porteress …
Eddie immediately rejected the fortress; it was too menacing; why not a tea shop?
My soul, there is a caterer’s
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a Gunter’s waitress …
At the false rhyme, Ronnie half-rose from his chair in agony. The tea was brought, the band played on unnoticed. Other customers stared in amazement. So much did the words and assonances of the English language mean to the Knox brothers.
Wilfred came to Well Walk every Christmas without fail, on the afternoon of the 25th, when the great ceremonies of the Church were over. In 1922 he left Cambridge for two years to help a hard-pressed friend, Stephen Langton, in the East End parish of St Saviour’s, Hoxton. The Bishop of London had refused to allow a curate because of the extreme Anglo-Catholicism of the services, and Wilfred served without pay.
He arrived on Christmas Day 1922 in a state of mild satisfaction; as he left the church in his cassock and overcoat a man had shouted at him from a public house: “Them ain’t the clothes Our Lord used to wear!” Wilfred had paused, and told him that his remark, as a piece of logic, was based on four false assumptions. He always got on excellently with drunks and small children, because he treated them exactly as he treated rational adults.
In 1923 Wilfred brought with him, attached to the end of a long piece of string, as though he disclaimed all connection with it, a villainous-looking mongrel. The dog had come into church during his sermon, he explained, and “almost in a spirit of criticism, quietly proceeded to die.” He had revived it with a saucer of sweet tea. Of course, as he serenely assumed, 34 Well Walk would be its new home, and there it systematically destroyed everything, devouring Eddie’s leather gloves, his briefcase, and a new collar which had been purchased for it. Then it escaped, and ran away back to Hoxton.
No other Christmas guest could replace Wilfred Knox. He spoke of what was uppermost in his mind, disregarding the inessential. Chocolates, bought as a practical joke from Hamley’s, each one filled with soap and sawdust, were eaten by Wilfred without comment, and indeed without noticing. When the crackers were pulled he accepted his paper hat with interest, but soon forgot it and sat there crowned as an Emperor or a jolly jester, while his conversation drifted away to the commentaries of Philo of Alexandria. What recalled him to worldly matters for a moment was the appearance of the “hard sauce”, or brandy butter. This was a matter of close interest to all four brothers. Only one way of making it was acceptable, and that was the Merton College recipe; but then, even Merton had lost the art of doing it, and only old Alice, at Beckenham Grove, could get it quite right. If any one of the brothers had been greedy, if any of them had been discourteous enough to express disappointment, people would not have tried so hard to please them; as it was, the perfect hard sauce became a memory only. Perhaps perfection should be left where it belongs, in childhood.
At the Punch office Eddie had now carved his initials, according to tradition, on the famous Table, where every Wednesday the editor presides, and management is only a guest. At the Table, during the post-war years, there was an awkward mixture of nostalgia and impatience. The younger ones back from the front, Eddie, A. P. Herbert, Ernest Shepard, had quick wits, felt the new world coming, were prepared to regret the old, but found the discrepancies funny. Owen Seaman was entirely loyal to the past. He had dispensed with A. A. Milne, an incurable dissident, and remained in the editorial chair, monolithic, refusing change. The cinema and the paintings of the Twenties must not be reviewed seriously, they were a foolish craze; socialism he regarded as active treason. The circulation fell, and Punch was becoming a byword for what was old-fashioned and genteel. In 1925 the first issue of The New Yorker threatened a new kind of joke, understated and biting, and Ross, the editor, told his staff that he believed Punch had some kind of tea party every Wednesday; but Seaman could not yield; Punch was an institution, and while institutions remained, the structure of the nation would hold. His staff respected the gallant obsession, but began to wonder whether he had any sense of humour left at all. E.V. Lucas, as the senior assistant editor, thought this might be tested. Why not hide under the table, and, as soon as Owen came in, jump out and surprise him? This was enterprising of Lucas, who was no longer agile; difficult, too, for Bernard Partridge, the senior cartoonist, who, though always genial and obliging, was nearly sixty.
Surprise is one of the only six jokes in the world. Seaman came in, looked round, signalled to the waiter to pull out his chair, sat down, and unfolded his napkin. After a little while the Punch staff crawled out, and also took their places. The editor said nothing, and no one ever knew what he thought.
Although he seemed quite impervious to the first hints dropped by the proprietors, Owen might, in time, resign. Meanwhile the staff served him with the protective loyalty of the old Fleet Street. The loyalty was counterbalanced by a guarded cynicism towards the sources of power.
They were touched by the wonderful reassurance which Owen drew from the great Wembley Empire Exhibition of 1924. This, as might be expected, he wanted covered as elaborately as possible. Eddie was sent as reporter, and as illustrator a very good black-and-white artist, the junior cartoonist Raven Hill.
Raven Hill was a friend of Kipling’s, though with none of Kipling’s subtlety. When Eddie went down to his weekend cottage to discuss the assignment, he was distressed to find the fire being lit with Kipling manuscripts. But Raven was heart and soul in the imperial theme, and, like Seaman, had to be persuaded that there was no disrespect in finding some aspects of it funny.
On 5 March 1924, the two of them splashed through the unfinished streets of the Exhibition. Eddie had never seen such mud since Flanders; some of it was being hastily painted black to represent a Welsh coal mine. In the West African Tropical Village the cutting northeast wind left him almost numb. By May (Seaman wanted every single dominion and colony covered) the weather had changed and was exceedingly hot. Journalists tended to concentrate in Jamaica (which consisted of one bar, serving rum), and
later at the Fountain of Eno’s Fruit Salts. But Raven Hill was tireless. The world press grew accustomed to the sight of the Punch team, both of them in straw hats, Evoe slight and elegant, Raven short and round, pressing on a few steps ahead. The House of War was showing naval battles several hours in length. Then there was the reconstructed Tomb of Tutankhamen to be described, although, as Eddie pointed out, Howard Carter himself had said that words “failed him at the sight”. But Owen wanted many thousands of words.
Eddie began to feel the parts of speech float away from him. We wemble. We shall have wembled. Having wembled. Ronnie announced, in the Daily Mail, that he intended to be the only man in England who hadn’t been to the Exhibition. In August, at the great Pageant of Empire, followed by the Creatures of Shakespeare’s Brain (“the Master himself passes by”), Eddie allowed himself to realize that he had almost wembled. Fellow journalists came up to congratulate him. But at the beginning of May 1926 Owen sent for him again. Wembley was to reopen. They could report the whole Exhibition once more.
Eddie, of course, was proud to be a reliable reporter. On the rare occasions when Christina persuaded him to take a holiday in France, he gave “journalist”, not “writer”, as his occupation on the passport. He keenly appreciated the Fleet Street of the Twenties, still a great power in the land, wilder and more diversified than he had ever known, with sudden mad swoops into respectability. Beaverbrook and Rothermere were in the ascendant; the unemployed, a silent warning, slept out on the Embankment, wrapped in free posters from the Express and Mail. Beaverbrook took the inspired risk of running a left-wing cartoon alongside a right-wing editorial. There was no chance of Punch doing this. Eddie much regretted that they never printed anything by Strube or by David Low.
His own week turned round his regular article. Writers’ families, in small houses, suffer greatly. Lack of the right subject sometimes darkened Monday, difficulty in finishing it always haunted Thursday. Like Dilly, Eddie composed well in the bath, and could do nothing without tobacco. At three o’clock the printer’s boy came up from the works for the copy (there was no need to type it in those days). Eddie never kept a stock of standing jokes or poems. His pieces, however elaborately worked out, reflected the passing minute. He envied Ronnie’s file of sermons, used again and again until they were reluctantly sent for publication. Ronnie replied that ethics were a better investment than culture or politics; they lasted longer.
Ronnie was, perhaps, not quite interested enough in politics; or at least in the social realities behind them. This appeared to be so in January 1926, when he broadcast a comic eyewitness’s account of a revolutionary march by the unemployed. The crowd were supposed to be actually attacking Westminster, roasting one of the ministers alive, proceeding to the B.B.C.’s Savoy Hill station and there being lulled to rest by reading the Radio Times.
Unemployment was not a very good subject for satire, but alarmism was, and so was the B.B.C. manner of presenting news, which Ronnie, always a good mimic, did well. As soon as he finished, inquiries began to pour in to Savoy Hill, and the B.B.C. was kept hard at work issuing retractions to soothe “widespread discussion and alarm”. The Lord Mayor of Newcastle had been challenged to say “what Newcastle was doing in the emergency”. Only Scotland stood firm. Newsmen caught up with Ronnie in Birmingham, where he had gone on to preach. He could only say that he had not meant to deceive anyone. He did not dare to add that he had meant to be funny. Humour, as Eddie could have told him, is relentless.
Cardinal Bourne deeply regretted the broadcast. He related it to the struggle against Communism, and the dethroned and persecuted Church of Soviet Russia. It was difficult for him to descend to lesser things. The panic caused by Ronnie’s broadcast would, he thought, encourage the Reds. The Tablet of 23 January reproved Ronnie for misusing his “sense of fun”. The word “facile” was used. “We are sure,” the editorial added, “that Father Knox will take our words in good part.”
They were remembered against Ronnie, however, when a chance at last presented itself to get away from St Edmund’s. The University Chaplaincy of Oxford was about to fall vacant.
When in 1897 the Hierarchy had cautiously allowed Roman Catholic boys to enter the English universities they appointed chaplains to instruct and maintain them in the faith. That was the foundation of the job, which offered great opportunities for the spiritual care of young men, independence of a kind, and privacy for study in the atmosphere Ronnie loved. It was one of the posts which Newman had dreamed of, but which, to his grievous disappointment, had been refused him. It was a chance, too, to work with Father Martindale (just back from leading a delegation of the unemployed to the Vatican), who would be a colleague at Campion Hall.
But would Ronnie’s name be considered? Would he remain the victim of the fatal association between cleverness and unsoundness? He knew that some at least of the Universities’ Catholic Education Board considered him quite unsuitable. “The Board thinks of me as a radio maniac let loose on Oxford,” he wrote, and, to his old friend Francis Urquhart, of Balliol, “Nothing can make me acceptable or business-like. That is a fact which I can’t conceal from myself or anybody else … if I am really going to be turned down, it would be a kindness to let me know … I am trying to be pious about it, but I can’t achieve anything better than a sort of Stoical fanaticism.”
Urquhart was largely instrumental in persuading the Board that in spite of the broadcast, and in spite of a lack of formal theological training, Ronnie was the right man. Everything seemed set fair. Lady Lovat offered to supervise the move to Oxford, and even to supply a housekeeper. The only trouble seemed to be that the stipend was very low. But Ronnie had already decided what to do about this. He would make ends meet by writing detective stories.
On the subject of the Red revolution and of hireling Communists, if on no other, Cardinal Bourne and Owen Seaman were in absolute agreement. The General Strike he took simply as a war of class loyalties. Raven Hill, always good at sea-pieces, drew Baldwin as a pilot quietly sticking to his job and being congratulated by John Bull as he emerged from a stormy sea marked GENERAL STRIKE, though the rocks of COAL CRISIS lay ahead. Eddie took an oblique approach, and wrote not in criticism of the Government or the Unions, but about the consumers’ strikes of the distant future, when, he thought, the blacklegs would be filmgoers, lured into the cinema to see newsreels of themselves going on strike.
Punch never missed an issue, and the paper was distributed, in holiday spirit, in vans marked FOODSTUFFS. Wilfred wrote from Cambridge to say that although anyone of sense must support the miners’ claims, he felt a certain envy of one of the Oratory members who had volunteered as an engine driver. None of the Knox brothers, to whom the railways had meant so much, were ever likely to have such a good chance of driving a train.
The political connotations of the General Strike, which Stalin regarded as an important test for the new grand strategy of the United Front, were not the business of the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office. Part of their work, however, was to assist in watching the Russian activities in this country, as suggested by their signals and correspondence.
Neither in the Twenties nor at any other time did Dilly ever give his family a hint as to what he was doing at the office. His work on the Soviet ciphers is a matter of inference, nothing more.
The Twenties were a successful time for Soviet diplomacy in Europe, and in the establishment of Russian commercial delegations, who claimed diplomatic privileges, at least for their senior officers. In New York the delegation was called AMTORG, in London it was ARCOS, which stood for All-Russian Co-operative Society. The capital was provided by the Moscow Bank for Foreign Trade, and the organization did a brisk import-export business. ARCOS ran a banking corporation of its own, had an agency for Crossley Motors, and published a weekly trade magazine. It was subject to frequent unexplained changes of address; from Coleman Street it moved to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and from there to Southampton Buildings. Like all commercial delegations o
f every nation, ARCOS was engaged in spying. The only questions were, how dangerously, and how much?
The publication of the Zinoviev Letter, whether or not it was a forgery, was followed in April 1925 by the seizure of the entire contents of the British Embassy in Leningrad, which the Soviet Government offered to swap for their “properties” (i.e., confiscated monasteries) in Palestine. This unsuccessful bargaining set the tone of what followed. In May 1926, when Izvestia declared that it was watching the General Strike with delight and wonder, at the same time bitterly attacking the British Labour Party, and complaining about British activities in Persia, “where even the water-carriers are not deceived”, it was clear that the information war was being intensified. Every section of the Soviet intelligence abroad had its own ciphers and code; all were sent by post or cable, since Russia was far behind in short-wave radio technique. Every Western country intercepted the signals and hoped to break the code. According to David Kahn’s The Codebreakers, the United States committee which subpoenaed three thousand AMTORG telegrams was unable to get a single word of them deciphered.
Dilly at this period was almost unapproachable, and showed every sign of being at work on an elusive, but closed, problem. The beauty of decipherment is the limitation of the field. There are after all, only twenty-six letters in the alphabet (or, in the post-Tsarist Russian alphabet, thirty-two). Dilly was thinking entirely in letter values. Asked for a good crossword clue to GHANDI he replied quite casually, “seven, eight, nine” (G and H I). That was all the word meant to him at the moment.
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