The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Once again, this did not mean that he had any idea of compromise, which would have been false to his character, and totally false to his vocation. There is only one truth, but he believed it was the business of scholars to preserve it and defend it.

  In the summer vacations, Eddie and Wilfred still met in the Welsh Border country, but now they fished not the Arrow, but another tributary of the Wye, the Lug. They shared (unequally) the rent of a thatched cottage in the very small village of Knill.

  Knill is at the bottom of a valley, and memory associates it always with summer heat, sheep standing stuffily in the high bracken, the fumes of cider apples, and a haze of warmth at the farm where the enormous featherbed, in the room sometimes let out to visitors, almost suffocated them. A team of cart horses stood ready for the fields or to pull an unwary motorist out of the ford, which ran across the road to join the stream. Mr Davies, the farmer, was of course not idyllic but practical. As the years passed he sold the team, inspected the sheep from a Ford van, and replaced the thatch on the cottage with slates. But in the 1930s the thick straw still projected over the eaves, raucous with birds and insects. In Wilfred’s small room, known as the “prophet’s chamber”, the chirping and rustling were deafening. Downstairs, magpies’ nests fell down the chimney, and rabbits invaded the vegetable garden which Wilfred had carefully laid out.

  It was felt that he needed looking after when Eddie and Christina were not there, and this was undertaken by Mrs Moses, the wife of the water-bailiff on the Lug. George Wozencroft, the head gardener from the big house, Knill Place, came to work at the cottage in his spare time, not without some clashes with Wilfred over the direction of affairs in the tiny garden. They understood each other perfectly. When Wilfred’s unmanageable dog Tim flew at Wozencroft, fastening his teeth on his old stained moleskin breeches, Wilfred watched dispassionately. “Your dog’s chewing the seat of my trousers, Canon.” “So I see; I don’t feel tempted to follow his example.” In fact, no dog would have been a match for Wozencroft’s moleskins.

  In the tiny village church, cared for by Mrs Davies, Wilfred took duty for the incumbent, who had a scattered parish. His sermons are still remembered there, although they were not always well adapted to their listeners. Once, when he was ill, the sermon was entrusted to a lay reader, who had to begin, in the soft Herefordshire accent: “We read in Plotinus …”

  In the 1920s Eddie had been asked by a reporter what he would like to be. He had replied—a Prince Archbishop (enjoy yourself in this world, absolve yourself for the next), or a Tartar, riding thirty horses a day, and making butter by swinging milk in a goatskin bag at the saddle, or, perhaps, a potboy at the Mermaid Tavern with a good memory. But in 1931 he became an editor; he was offered the editorship of Punch.

  The hints to Sir Owen Seaman that it might be time to quit the stage had at last been understood. For some time he had apparently thought that the Company Chairman must be talking of himself—“Surely you’re not thinking of retiring, Lawrence?” This was his mind’s defence against the unacceptable truth that his twenty-six years’ pastoral care of the paper and of the Conservative Party must draw to a close. His sense of loss was a measure of the standing of Punch. In spite of recent criticisms, to be editor of Punch was still to be “King of Fleet Street”.

  Certainly Seaman could never have wandered round the office, as Ross did round The New Yorker after the markets crashed, asking: “Are we important?” and demanding the answer: “No, we’re only a fifteen-cent magazine!” As the day of his retirement drew closer, Seaman published a depressing poem (15 July 1931) to “Mr. Punch on His Ninetieth Birthday”, addressing Punch as “Master and Friend”, and praising him as “changing not his style” and holding fast to standards proven long ago, no matter

  If we grow old and go our ways

  For you will still be there

  With other service at your call.

  Eddie was to be the “other service”, receiving the formidable bequest of a paper which had apparently become a semi-religious institution. In November 1932, when Seaman presided at the Table for the last time, he prepared a Valete card giving his apostolic blessing to “the friend and colleague who succeeds me.” Jokes were neither mentioned nor thought of. Still, Eddie, at the age of fifty-two, could feel that he had reached the top of his profession. He had reversed his father’s bitter disappointment when he had failed to take his degree, and he had justified the confidence of Christina.

  The details had been settled on a weekend at Littlecourt, the Agnews’ country home; Eddie was to get £3,000 a year, inclusive of his contributions as “Evoe”, with thirty guineas extra for the Summer Number and the Christmas Almanack. The position would be reviewed in ten years, and, for the first time in the history of Punch, there would be an editorial pension. He was not offered, neither did he expect, any travel or entertainment allowances, a car, a flat, or a staff of copy editors to do the day-to-day work. An editor in 1932 went straight to his desk, dealt personally with the contributors and the printers, and put the paper to bed himself.

  There had been other aspirants, not to say disappointed claimants, for the job. One of the first to write, with his usual good grace, was A. A. Milne (“I am indeed very glad”)—then, when paragraphs appeared about the new appointment, an astonishing number of congratulations, and of jokes about a new Seaman at the helm, came in from England, Europe and America. Old Uncle Lindsey struck a warning note. “I fear that there may be a great deal of extra work, and going into and receiving society.” To a true Evangelical, such things were perilous. Rudyard Kipling wrote:

  As to Punch—I’ve seen him … in all sorts of out-of-the-way places where he represents England in all its varieties to men who, because they are far removed, see and remember it more keenly … it is perfectly true that he has become urbane, which he was not, even as late as the sixties (see files), or thirty years back, when he used to whack me on the head on general principles. But he can bite quite hard enough when he likes … only give us subscribers every shade and detail of our queer facing-both-ways national outlook on all things; and when the wind changes, as it will in the next few years, stand by to allay the panic. To which you will justly answer: ‘Who the deuce made you an Editor?’ But I never was. I was only a sub-editor and, of course, in that capacity, thought I knew more than my Chief. You may have noticed that all subordinates do.

  This was good advice and Eddie tried to follow it. Most tributes, including his election to the Athenaeum under the alarming Rule B, for people of special eminence, he took “simply as something due to the position of the paper, nothing to do with me.”

  The new Punch offices, built in 1930, were still in the narrow canyon of Bouverie Street, but were now seven floors tall, with lifts and red carpets. The statue of Mr Punch looked down from its niche above the world of the Press. Eddie, as well as several of the artists, had warned the management that the figure was not correctly scaled to be seen from below, but it went up, the stomach looked far too prominent, and the building became known as the Paunch Office. In Eddie’s view, the whole place was rather too grand and serious.

  He had a staunch friend in the enormous ex-sergeant-major who presided in the entrance hall. On the third floor was Advertising, where Jean Lyon, Raven Hill’s wife, reigned undisputed. The income from space had long since exceeded the revenue from sales, and the third floor was a place of fierce, puritanical power. Miss Lyon charged high, but it was a long while before she would allow advertisements for alcohol in Punch, even though the paper kept its original 1841 cover design, which showed the red-nosed hunchback decidedly the worse for drink. Any editor had to begin by standing up to Jean Lyon, and Eddie, in his courteous way, did so successfully.

  The fourth floor was Editorial, with windows looking straight across the street into the News of the World, so that you could watch the “Rape Committee”, a group of solemn-looking executives bending over the sex-outrage stories for next Sunday. The Punch furnishings were also solemn, of g
ood quality, like those of the Queen Mary. Eddie occupied the traditional swivel chair. The handsome wastepaper basket, however, caught fire so often in the first few weeks (he smoked cigarettes now instead of a pipe) that the sergeant-major replaced it with a metal one.

  Eddie settled down to edit his paper. As soon as possible he selected his own young assistant staff, finding the most loyal of assistant editors, Humphrey Ellis, who had come to the job from school teaching, and was the author of Assistant Masters: Are They Insane? Among the old hands, Eddie was most at home with the artists, who made an agreeable link with the past. Bernard Partridge, still the senior cartoonist, had acted with Henry Irving, and had been Bernard Shaw’s original Sergius in Arms and the Man. He never said much, and yet half an hour’s conversation with him was enough to show how vain it is for modern actors to attempt Shaw or Wilde. George Stampa, the artist of London’s street life, had helped the boozy Phil May in and out of his cabs. Ernest Shepard, whose airy, graceful drawings seemed to blow across the pages, had been trained at the Royal Academy Schools in 1896. W. Bird, the Irish artist, who could give, within the tiny oblong of an ass-and-cart joke, the whole atmosphere and the distant horizons of County Sligo, was in fact Jack Yeats, the poet’s brother. Eddie appreciated these links with the past, the paper’s and his own, knowing that human beings, like wines, have their vintages. He loved Punch’s history, and, quite deliberately, was the last editor on Fleet Street to call the illustrations “cuts”, a reminiscence of the old days of wood engraving. But Eddie was also an accessible editor, anxious to find and encourage new talent.

  An early reaction to his appointment was a wild rush of aspiring contributors and illustrators. They were desperate, times being hard. The seasons, for free-lance humorous artists, were divided into spring (courting couples), summer (misadventures of campers and hikers, bathers attacked by crabs), autumn (jokes about fog and slipping on fallen leaves), winter (people falling through the ice). A rumour had also gone round that the new editor would consider rather broader jokes; portfolios never before opened in the Punch office were furtively brought out. All these callers were dealt with patiently. The overmatter was already an accumulation, left by Seaman, of hiking and skating jokes. As to sex jokes, Eddie, like his contemporary Ross of The New Yorker, decided that the time would come, but was not yet.

  He was, however, as has been said, a seeker and finder, particularly on his own chosen ground of fantasy and poetry. He pleaded with Ernest Rhys, the editor of Everyman editions, to support modern poets, having discovered at the Poetry Bookshop that “only Eliot is bought at all.” He sought out, with some difficulty, the short-story writer A. E. Coppard, whose indefinable moonlight oddness appealed to him, as though reality had slipped one notch or more, or, as Coppard put it, “some essential part had been detached from the obviously vital part.” Rowland Emmett, whose drawings showed the latent poetry of old engines and old steamboats, he put under contract for as long as he could. The reviewing of cinema, books and theatre, and the Parliamentary Reports, all came to life for the first time under the new editor.

  The effect of this kind of thing on the readership is best illustrated by the matter of the Hippo Joke. In July 1937 Punch printed a drawing by Paul Crum, which showed, in a few lines, two hippos almost submerged in an open swamp, miles away from anywhere; one is saying to the other: “I keep thinking it’s Tuesday.” This joke proved a breaking point for many subscribers, while it rallied others. “We are told that a sense of humour is the greatest gift of all,” Eddie wrote in What Life Has Taught Me, “yet I find that everybody has it.” “Sir, I flatter myself on my sense of humour,” he quoted from the Hippo correspondence, “but neither I nor any of my friends can see the point of the joke at the bottom of page 173. We are still trying hard, but if we do not succeed in a few days, we shall give up the attempt.” Another says, “DEAR SIR—I can boast that I know a good joke when I see one, and as soon as I looked at the bottom of page 173 I burst into such a roar of merriment that the whole house shook. When my friends had seen it we made such a noise that the neighbours threatened us with violence, and the police were called in.” Nevertheless, the total circulation of the paper continued, as it did throughout his editorship, to rise.

  Eddie brought Punch forward, gently, apparently casually, into the twentieth century. He saw competitors rise, and sometimes fall; The Humorist, which, when Punch still sold at a shilling, boldly advertised itself as “is worth of humour for 6d”; The New Yorker, with which friendly relations were always maintained; the short-lived Night and Day, started in imitation of The New Yorker, shipwrecked over a libel case brought by the employers of Shirley Temple. Punch was a survivor. Eddie loved the paper, understood it, worried over it, stayed up half the night at the Mount Pleasant works arguing with the head printer, Mr Goby; ideas for it came to him at any time, often in the middle of the night. Praise or blame, although he might not show it, affected him deeply.

  When you employed one of the four Knox brothers, you got absolute integrity. No one was printed in Eddie’s Punch because they were a friend or relation or because they had tried to offer him a favour. On the other hand, beginners were sure of his attention. Impossible to forget his own early days, when it was an anxious matter to lay out money for a cab to the Punch office. It was this quality of true politeness which struck D. H. Barber, a hopeful contributor, who in 1933 was a young man of twenty-five, living over a fried-fish shop and “at the lowest ebb of my fortunes”.

  When two more little articles had been accepted I bought a new suit at the Fifty-shilling Tailors and a ninepenny cigar, and frittered away another ninepence on a taxicab from Ludgate Circus to Bouverie Street to call on the Editor. In those days I thought it gave a man a wealthy and aristocratic air to arrive in a taxicab. All this vast expenditure, of course, was quite unnecessary, for there never lived a more unsnobbish or unvulgar man than ‘Evoe’, or a man who placed less value on externals.

  The Punch office seemed to me unnervingly palatial. I tottered across a marble vestibule to a graceful wide staircase, up which I marched in nervous bravado, cigar in mouth (it had of course long gone out). Large paintings of past editors in great gilt frames glared down at me. I knocked tremblingly at the Editorial door, and a quiet voice bade me enter. The room seemed as big as St Paul’s Cathedral, and a thinnish man sat behind an enormous table-desk.

  I sank, perspiring freely, into the chair to which he waved me, and blurted out gruffly:

  ‘Meeting you, sir, is rather like meeting God!’

  He smiled gently.

  ‘Any resemblance,’ he said, ‘is purely coincidental.’

  He was no doubt very busy, and had I been self-assured and dressed by Savile Row he would probably have given me five minutes, but because I was gauche and poor and nervous he gave me forty, and gently led me on to talk about myself, which is everybody’s best subject … He gave me tips about the best length to write, and suggested some ideas. I think he liked me, and personally I left him feeling that I now really knew how gentlemen behaved on business occasions.

  Barber also perceived that his editor was at heart a poet, and “poets think in terms of centuries, not of years or even decades,” but, as a wit, Eddie was politically minded. On two issues of the Thirties, the paper was adamant. When the economic situation showed a hint of improvement, Punch urged the case of the unemployed, and steadily, remorselessly, and at one time unfashionably, it attacked the dictators. In the April of 1933, when he was still settling into the editorial chair, Eddie’s senior cartoon showed Hitler as a fool on All Fools’ Day, smashing the windows of Jewish shops, and in May Bernard Partridge produced a fine design of Hitler treading the Jews underfoot, although the management, who liked everything made very clear, thought the words ANTI-JEWISH CAMPAIGN ought to be written across the sky.

  Sometimes, sitting in El Vino’s with a friend of long standing, Johnny Morton, “Beachcomber” of the Express, Eddie would agree that humour had had its day, because the state
of the world was such that nothing was too absurd or too unpleasant to come true.

  The atmosphere of the Punch office had radically changed.

  It became casual, deliberately rather slapdash [says Richard Price in his History of Punch], a place for long conversations on any subject under the sun, for a good deal of snoozing and reading and daydreaming. Sometimes there would be nobody in it, everyone being at a club or a pub or away in the country. Press night became an agony. Week after week it seemed impossible that the Editor would ever get down to the proofs. A lengthy dinner was given by a small dining-circle collected in order to prevent Evoe from disappearing altogether. Then suddenly he would get down to work and the paper would appear for another week …

  Casual as he was, Eddie had the quality without which an editor is nothing: flair. He was able to find new contributors, and having found them, to give them their heads. The convenient modern practice of commissioning nearly the whole paper in advance would have been as unacceptable to him as canned wine. A good deal of Punch was still dead, and he knew it; he had to consider the older readership. But he created a new climate in which good jokes could arise spontaneously.

  Evoe’s strength was in creating this atmosphere among his immediate colleagues, the younger men who loved him, appreciated his gentleness and kindness, found his company stimulating and enjoyed his odd, oblique humour. He was often infuriating: the urgent article was hidden under a pile of papers, the decision required a month ahead was given when it was really too late so that a solution to the problem had to be fudged, and the major issue was left undiscussed while some fascinating by-way was explored at great length. As an Editor, Evoe had the defects of his qualities … But on looking back one can see beside the old growths, new growths, something Punch had not seen for many years …