He had agreed to stay on as editor of Punch until the war was over and a younger man could be found. He was now most happily remarried, to the daughter of his friend Ernest Shepard. Mary and he were living in a flat in St John’s Wood; when the first bombs fell there Eddie was opening a bottle of claret for his guests, and the blast was close enough to make the cork jump straight out of the bottle. Eddie stood among the débris, corkscrew in hand, quietly interested: “If one could rely on its happening regularly …” London itself, absorbed in air-raid precautions, he saw as
A city of painstaking pupils and earnest instructors
(And everyone’s craters the largest of all in the land),
A lemonless onionless city with female conductors
On Manchester buses half lost in the wilds of the Strand …
The suburbs, however, were transformed, with gaping open spaces, and wild flowers growing out of the rubble. Mary kept hens and grew marrows in the derelict garden behind the Air Raid Wardens’ Post. E. S. P. Haynes, who also lived in St John’s Wood, and whose house in 1941 was the only one left standing in his road, could be seen every morning, defiantly swimming naked in the emergency water-tank. Rose Macaulay, an old friend of all the Knoxes, drove briskly about, fascinated by the ruins, comparing them to Babylon and Pompeii. Foxes appeared among the rubble, and kestrels soared overhead; it was more difficult than ever to get to the office by half past nine, or even by ten.
Eddie caught exactly the Londoner’s characteristic reaction of enjoyable gloom, the conviction that those at the top were perfectly safe and doing very nicely, the perverse determination on business as usual, even if there was very little business to do. He had been to the same barber for twenty-eight years, and the barber’s shop was still open to cut his hair. Then there was his old friend and tailor, Dodson, who wrote to him in October 1940:
Dear Sir—No doubt you are wondering what has happened to your two suits, I had them well in hand last week and the coats and waistcoats are ready for fitting, but the two pairs of trousers are somewhere in a heap of rubble, the remains of my trousermaker’s workshop. The result of a Hun Souvenir which arrived last Saturday morning. The workman and his helpers escaped by a miracle with not bad injuries but are all in hospital.
Part of my trouble is that there is not enough material now available for another pair of trousers and for either of the suits. There is just a chance that the trousers may be saved. I hope also that you will be indulgent for the delay, your obedient servant, William Briston Dodson.
An Edwardian by temperament, Eddie created an Edwardian loyalty. The suits, with two pairs of trousers each, were ready by November. And, of course, Dodson and his philosophic trousermaker, who recovered in hospital, were right; imperturbable daily work meant sanity.
The proprietors of Punch, like many others on Fleet Street, had planned to evacuate if things got much worse. The Round Table was sent down to the country to be kept safe. An emergency office had been acquired in Manchester, or, failing that, the United States offered hospitality. One American well-wisher was ready to print Punch at his own expense, but, in the event, the paper stayed in Bouverie Street. Eddie arrived one morning after a fire raid to find that the offices had been smouldering all night, but were still intact. “A cord was drawn across the top of the street, with little paper notices attached showing the new addresses of the periodicals which had been bombed out. They ranged from The Economist to Little Dot’s Playbox.” He would have liked to smoke, but it was not allowed, too much gas was escaping from the broken mains. He had to go straight up to the editorial floor to sort out the week’s jokes.
The senior cartoon remained as the paper’s serious comment on the progress of the war, and Bernard Partridge was on duty, drawing as meticulously as ever, but with even fewer ideas. “It falls to the lot of the Editor to suggest the subject, and when the staff of the paper is greatly depleted and printing arrangements more difficult, there are not as a rule many other ideas.” And Punch still had to gamble with destiny. The paper had, as always, to be locked up for the printers by Saturday morning, and by Monday a new country might have declared war, or an Empire might have fallen. Mobile warfare is the nightmare of weekly editors.
Uncertainty as to what was going to happen in North Africa, and afterwards, perplexed our cartoonists every week, and at last I was forced to have a Lion ready, a Lion reproduced and plated, a Lion in mid-air, a Lion without attachments, in the act of leaping upon Europe, and ready to be run into the paper at the last moment, whenever and wheresoever it might happen to spring. It ought to have been accompanied by the Eagle and by the Canadians too, but this we could not guess or judge until the full news of the attack on Sicily was made known. As it was, after wavering about Pantelleria, I was obliged to telephone at the last moment (a Saturday morning as far as I remember)—‘Release the Lion.’
Eddie did not drop the cartoon for the simple reason that the readership liked it and wanted it. In the irrecoverably strange atmosphere of June 1940 countless letters of the simplest kind of appreciation came in response to Punch’s picture of a single aircraft, flying out to the attack into a darkened sky. Even at this point of danger, it mattered very much that Punch should appear every week.
In the article which is quoted above, Eddie says nothing about his personal commitments; it would never have occurred to him to do so. In 1942 Mary’s brother was killed in action on convoy duty, and his own son disappeared, for four years, into a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Eddie, in W. S. Gilbert’s bitter words, was “paid to be funny”; that was his business, and he never regretted it, but it was a difficult business at times.
Eddie knew that Dilly was tired, and suspected that he was ill. He suggested a holiday at the cottage at Knill, but Dilly had to refuse; he was bound to his trance-like alternations between Bletchley and Naphill.
Early in 1941, he had a new idea. It was not, apparently, the result of calculation, but came into his mind like a visitor, as ideas had come to him at Cambridge, making him stand absolutely still in the middle of passing traffic. Like everyone who does this kind of work, he had been concentrating on one problem at a time, then relaxing by changing to another one. At the moment he had returned to the question of the order of the letters on the Enigma keyboard, which, of course, had been changed completely on the new model. Now it struck him that perhaps he had been looking at things the wrong way round. Enigma was usually described as being “like a typewriter”. Suppose, on the contrary, a typewriter was like Enigma? The typewriter keyboard reads QWERTYUIOP … Out of the many millions of millions of ways of arranging the alphabet, mightn’t this be the right one?
It was. He had hit on the first significant “way in” to the Spy Variation. Once the keyboard was known, it was possible to work out the displacements so rapidly that in February the shift workers, sitting round a model many times larger than the real machine, and using material several months old, knew that they had a breakthrough. Dilly was not there when the first deciphered text began to come through in clear. It was his day off, and he was at Courn’s Wood. This first signal read: “The garden wall is broken down”—evidently a code message, and “typical romantic rubbish” from the point of view of the Department, whose attitude to all Secret Services, whether German or Allied, was one of tolerant paternalism. Nor was Dilly at all distressed at missing the occasion. What mattered was that his idea had proved useful.
How useful? It has been estimated that it cut short the search for a solution by six months; no one can estimate the value of six months in 1941. The solution, in turn, is thought to have played an important part in at least three crises:
1. The battle of Matapan (March 1941), when Admiral Cunningham had warning that the Italian fleet had ventured out of harbour and saw his chance to damage it decisively, but had to keep up the appearance of unpreparedness while he brought his destroyers to at short notice; credit for spotting the Italian cruisers had to be given to the Fleet Air Arm, so that the Enigma source
would not be compromised. Dilly on this occasion wrote a poem for the Department, “When Cunningham Won at Matapan”, introducing the names of all his girls; Mavis (Lever) rhymed with “rara avis”, and Margaret (Rock) with “target”—not a good enough rhyme for a Knox brother, but all this doggerel came from the heart.
2. The search for the Bismarck (May 1941), when the battleship disappeared during the middle watch until eleven a.m. on the 25th; at this point the Admiralty received information which made them tell our pursuit forces to “act on the assumption that the enemy was making for Brest.”
3. The anxious matter of the Malta convoy (April 1942), when the U.S. aircraft carrier Wasp undertook to bring a cargo of Spitfires through the Straits of Gilbraltar, and it was essential to find out, through the signals of the German agents in Spain, whether the secret of the convoy had been kept or not.
Churchill paid a visit of congratulation to Bletchley. Once again, Dilly was not on duty, and once again this left him unconcerned. He admired Churchill, but did not consider him discreet, and he felt that, if the work at Bletchley was not to be compromised, it might be better if as few details as possible were known to the Former Naval Person. He would, admittedly, have liked his staff to receive some credit for the work they had been doing for so long and so patiently, but he understood, as did they all, that credit might very well not be possible.
In 1942 Dilly was threatened with a second operation for cancer. He was admitted to hospital. Eddie, the only person who could understand him completely, arrived to find him smiling sardonically over a book called The Art of Dying. They took turns in reading each other passages, just as in the Birmingham schoolroom they had read each other Smiles’s Self-Help. Dilly did not want the operation; his considered opinion was that a human being ought not to be turned into a bit of plumbing; the place for taps was the sink. He had also been looking, in a detached way, through the burial service, and, unexpectedly, through the Epistles of St Paul, in particular 1 Corinthians 15, which is a discussion of the resurrection of the dead. Of what use was it, St Paul asks in this chapter, “to fight with the beasts at Ephesus,” if, at the end of it, he did not know he would rise from the dead and live again?
After he had got back home to Courn’s Wood, Dilly asked his niece to come and see him, to discuss the possibility of a job at Bletchley. “You don’t share the family pretence of not understanding mathematics?” he asked anxiously. It had to be a pretence, since mathematics, after all, consisted only in seeing what was there. But was it a pretence when he said that he didn’t understand music? That was a totally different matter, Dilly said. Music was simply a conspiracy to make certain loud and less loud noises, to prevent other people from thinking. Returning to the subject of the family, he added that he would not mind seeing rather more of them, as he was going to die. All expressions of sympathy were brushed away. “It will give me something to do,” he said.
He had not forgotten the Pentelopes; one of them he considered as his epitaph:
A wanderer on the path
That leads through life to death,
I was acquainted with
The tales they tell of both,
But found in them no truth.
Dilly was aware, when he said that he needed something to do, that he could not do much more in his department, but he was too ill to give up the habit of cryptography, and too loyal to stop working if there was even the slightest chance of being of use. At last he could not make the journey to Bletchley any longer, but stayed in his study at Courn’s Wood, working on a small, isolated difficulty in the Italian cipher, with the tactful help of Margaret Rock. Pain produced fantasies, and he would send over to Bletchley elaborate suggestions for solutions which his staff scarcely knew what to do with. Olive nursed him devotedly. These two people had loved each other for twenty years without being able to make each other happy. They would have given the world, now they were at the point of separation, to understand one another. But Dilly’s nerves were on edge. Even the dog James, now very elderly, could not be tolerated in the room. Still an iron discipline held.
It was not in his nature to be daunted [writes his son, Oliver] … By this time eighteen or nineteen years old, I was given compassionate leave to be at home during his last days. He had just been awarded the C.M.G. It has been explained to my mother that security considerations precluded his being given some more illustrious honour. Far too ill to travel to London, he deemed proper receipt of the honour to be a duty; he insisted on dressing and sat, shivering in front of the large log-fire, as he awaited the arrival of the Palace emissary. His clothes were now far too big for him, his eyes were sunk in a grey face, but he managed the exercise all right. ‘Nothing is impossible.’
The decoration was sent over to the Department, since he felt it was theirs as much as his. Dilly did not leave his room again. Ronnie came over from Aldenham; he slept on a made-up bed, praying, waiting, as a priest, to see his brother out of this world. Dilly, though hardly conscious, could hear him. “Is Ronnie still out there bothering God in the passage?” he asked.
The end came a few days later, on 27 February 1943. In the Times obituary Maynard Keynes described his old friend as “sceptical of most things except those that chiefly matter, that is, affection and reason.” Without ever reconciling these two, Dilly had gone, unwavering in his disbelief, into what he believed was endless darkness.
“Yesterday’s news came to draw us all closer …” Ronnie wrote to his sister. “What a happy family life we’ve had really, though so scattered in these last years. No feuds, no scandals, and the youngest turned fifty-five before the circle was broken.”
Broken it was, however, with a mortal shock to the whole structure.
IX
1945–1971
Endings
“HE WHO TRAVELS IN THE BARQUE of St Peter,” Ronnie once said, “had better not look too closely into the engine-room.” This was particularly the case when the mechanism had to be put gently into reverse.
His translation of the New Testament was finished on St Jerome’s Day, 30 September 1942. It was three years since the Hierarchy had commissioned it, and they might have been expected to authorize it at once. They hesitated.
Extracts from St Paul’s Letters, printed in The Tablet, had been a success. “The fan-mail,” he wrote, “does lead me to hope that my version of the Epistles gives some glimmering of what it’s all about.” A trial edition, strictly for private reading, not issued to booksellers, barely announced in the Press, sold over 9,500 copies in advance. Subscription was by postcard, and Ronnie allowed himself to feel mildly exhilarated. The farmworkers at Aldenham grew used to seeing him, even more often than usual, tramping across the fields to collect his post. It was encouraging that a lot of the cards were evidently not from his usual book-buying public, not, in fact from people who would ordinarily feel it was worth while to lay out ten shillings on a book; but they wanted his Bible.
The next step was to submit the trial edition to the Bishops for their approval. Their meeting was delayed by the air raids until the autumn of 1944. By this time they had all received their copies from the Archbishop of Westminster, with a questionnaire: would they be prepared to see the Knox Version made official? If not, what about the profits? It was made clear that in no case would Ronnie make any profit beyond the £200 a year he had been allocated for the work, but, if it went ahead simply as a private venture, the Church would lose a valuable copyright.
The replies were not altogether encouraging. “Regrets matter being rushed” (this although it was two years since the New Testament had been finished) … “Seeks opinions everywhere. Has not read much yet” … “Many favourite quotations spoilt by R.K.” … “I am not prepared to sanction the translation for public use in Church. I have prohibited its public use here.” Only Shrewsbury and Middlesbrough were wholeheartedly in favour. Some had “no strong feelings”. The whole could be construed as a grudging majority vote in favour, but, as poor Ronnie said, people kept
asking him “Have the Bishops authorized your N.T.?” and he was obliged to answer “Well, sort of.”
Would an Imprimatur from himself, just to show there was nothing against it, do for the time being, the Archbishop of Westminster wondered, instead of a full authorization? Here the machinery of the Barque could be seen in action. Ronnie’s reply is a classic in the literature of disappointment. In the third paragraph of his letter he brought out what, after all, was the crucial point; Protestants would say: “Father Knox should have known the Church of Rome better by now. He would have been wiser to stick to detective stories.”
It was not the habit of the four brothers to show enthusiasm about their own work. That would have gone contrary both to their real modesty and to the Edwardian habit of understatement, the habit which called the massacre of the Somme “a show”, and an expensive lunch at Simpson’s “something to eat”. Ronnie had long ago lost count of his published titles, and only hoped that no one would ever have to undertake his bibliography. But he did care about his Bible. “He was very sensitive,” wrote Douglas Woodruff, the editor of The Tablet, “if anyone criticized the most contentious of his renderings, ” and he felt rather uneasy himself at the reflection that a long study of the Holy Scripture should result in “this unreasonable streak of touchiness”. But perhaps only Ronnie, at this juncture, would have called his touchiness unreasonable.
He had consulted the widest range of scholars he could, and his New Testament, after all these collations, was entirely his own, in his own living language, sober, lucid and civilized, conservative in many ways—he kept “thou” and “thee”—but quietly moving. It was not, perhaps, a people’s Bible; a contributor to The Tablet, H. P. R. Finsberg, commented that “not all of us know Latin, and some of us, alas, are not gentlemen.” In America, as Ronnie well knew, there was a voice of criticism which accused him of scribbling “a flipthroughable improvement on the Divine Revelation.” But it was an exercise in humility to read these opinions, and Ronnie said that on his deathbed, if he found he had no enemies left, he intended to forgive his reviewers.
The Knox Brothers Page 29