Dilly

by Batey, Mavis;

  The Knox brothers all had a great ability for words and were addicted to Carrollian ‘chopped logic’, the sort of nonsense based on the ambiguity of words as used by the Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Humpty Dumpty’s ‘knock-down arguments’. Lewis Carroll liked to tease his child friends by leading them through the most complicated mazes of reasoning to the conclusion that they had meant exactly the opposite of what they had said, this also being a favourite Knoxian game. Carroll and the Knox brothers were devoted to Punch, which fostered similar humour. Apparent nonsense could always be unravelled by logic. Both Carroll and Ronnie Knox invented games for teaching logic and Dilly had a whole codebreaking career before him of making sense out of nonsense. I remember a Carrollian question he would ask us at Bletchley Park was: ‘Which way does a clock go round?’ and if you were stupid enough to say ‘clockwise’ he would answer: ‘But not if you are the clock.’ We had to think this way when dealing with the insides of the Enigma cipher machine.

  Limericks and humorous verses were a speciality, such as this one from Ronnie on Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy:

  There was a young man who said: ‘God

  Must think it exceedingly odd

  If he finds that this tree

  Continues to be

  When there’s no one about in the Quad.’

  Reply:

  Dear Sir, Your astonishment’s odd.

  I am always about in the Quad.

  And that’s why the tree

  Will continue to be

  Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.

  Rhyming and metre, which prompted trains of thought, were particularly important to Dilly, who would go on to produce his own types of acrostics and become an inspired unraveller of textual puzzles, ancient and modern.

  In his Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, Bishop Knox comments how proud their mother would have been of their successes, and what pleasure it was to him to see that the output of his four sons and one daughter took up several pages of the British Museum catalogue. Much credit could also have been claimed by the Bishop for the upbringing of his remarkable, versatile family. Like John Bunyan’s pilgrim, he was Valiant-for-Truth, preaching the gospel of truth, and had had a lifetime of coming to terms with challenges. When he took up his first incumbency at Kibworth he found that his church served two parishes, Kibworth Harcourt and Kibworth Beauchamp, the latter the home of radical ‘Stockeners’, who turned out hosiery on frames in their cottages. They were despised by Kibworth Harcourt, the home of the sporting squire-archy and retired businessmen of Leicestershire. Edmund Knox’s heart was with the Stockeners, as he had witnessed his father’s anguish arising out of the terrible agricultural depression of the late 1870s in his Rutland parish. At Merton College, with his evangelical convictions, Edmund had avoided being embroiled in the Oxford Movement – the group of high-church Anglicans also known as the Tractarians, who sought to show that the Church of England was the direct descendant of the apostles – but at Kibworth he had to replace a devout Tractarian, who had served the church for over thirty years.

  He later wrote:

  There are few people, certainly very few clergy, who doubt their competence to run a country parish. A nice little Church, not trying to the voice – a modest organ, which, at a pinch, the wife could play if necessary, a choir of boys from the Sunday school; backed by the gardener and a labourer or two – no week-night meetings worth mentioning, two of the old sermons cut down and simplified for village use each Sunday, no societies with tedious and tiresome accounts, no parish council likely to give difficulty, a good house, a delightful little garden with fresh-cut flowers and fresh vegetables – maybe a squire who will have to be placated, abundance of time for reading or learning the rudiments of horticulture. So it seems to the outsider. But the vicar who comes into the country with these impressions is not long in altering his mind, and usually arrives at the conclusion that his parish is a very exceptional parish.

  I entered upon my work at Kibworth with very few of these illusions. Four years in an Oxford slum had taught me something about the difficulties of plain preaching and something too of the difficulties of wise almsgiving. Visits to my father’s parish in Rutland had shown me that Joseph Arch’s Agricultural Labourers’ Union had created since 1874 a strong prejudice against the Church, and acted very unfavourably on the labourers’ churchgoing. I had witnessed my father’s perplexities arising out of the terrible agricultural depression of the later ’70s. I knew also that my predecessor, a very devout and sincere Tractarian, had been Rector of Kibworth for over thirty years, and that a rumour had gone about that I was intending to wreck all his work, and to hand the parish over to the Dissenters. So I was not unprepared for difficulties.

  The Kibworth Harcourt parishioners were happy enough with Anglo-Catholicism, but Beauchamp preferred to give it a miss. To satisfy his own evangelical conscience, Edmund Knox maintained only the ornaments and ritual he could live with, and gradually dispensed with those he could not; confession went by the board. It seemed to work and the Beauchamp poor were seen in the pews again. Little did he know then that he would later have to come to terms with religious controversy within his own family. During university vacations, Wilfred and Ronnie used to bicycle round Manchester to find a church which observed the Seven Points of Ritual, and their bewildered father said to his daughter: ‘Between ourselves, Winnie, I cannot understand what it is that the dear boys see in the Blessed Virgin Mary.’ He had become reconciled to Ronnie’s rosary being produced at family prayers.

  Ronnie would spell out his own soul-searching in his A Spiritual Aeneid, describing the period between 1910 and 1915, when he prepared to be ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. The Bishop’s reply to the news of his son’s final conversion in 1917 was typical of his ability to face facts and hope for the best. All he said in a letter to Ronnie was:

  First, I must acknowledge gratefully the affectionate spirit in which your letter was written, and express my satisfaction that you will not be required to repudiate your baptism. Next, I will say what I said to both the Clergy in my diocese, that when the time came for their return, they might be sure of a most hearty welcome. I am enclosing a copy of the prayer which I have been offering and shall continue to offer on your behalf.

  Eddie managed to sit on the fence and to go through the motions of backing what the Church of England had to offer, but Dilly had clearly drifted away. He had done his best to conceal it from his father, but already when at Eton he had decided he was an agnostic. Dilly always maintained, however, that their father came to terms with his agnosticism more easily than with Ronnie going to Rome. All the boys continued to support the Bishop’s humanitarian and reformist missions. Dilly refused an invitation to go to Brittany with his artist friend Henry Lamb in order to join his father’s march to London in support of Church schools. The Bishop, a passionate advocate of free education, headed a procession a mile and a half long to a mass meeting in the Albert Hall singing ‘Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’encircling gloom’. Setting aside doctrinal beliefs, Dilly had been brought up in a world of active Christianity and charity which stood him in good stead, and he never forgot the resonance of the words of the daily Bible readings which seemed instinctively to come to mind for any situation.

  Dilly had written two brilliant papers in his Cambridge entrance examination, one in maths and the other in Greek verse, but had left all the others unfinished. Nevertheless, such was the promise of his work that the King’s admissions tutor in classics recommended him for a scholarship, believing him to be ‘capable of indefinite improvement’. Dilly’s friend from Eton, John Maynard Keynes, respected Dilly as a mathematician but said that he presented his work ‘in a most loathsomely untidy, unintelligible, illegible condition’, forgetting to write down the most necessary steps. As will be seen when Dilly later presented his brilliant codebreaking reports, they were incomprehensible to all but a few and his staff found his elliptic way of speaking challeng
ing to say the least. Keynes, who had already been up a year, took Dilly in hand when he arrived at King’s in 1903 and through him he met up with key members of the group of writers who would subsequently become known as the Bloomsbury Group. King’s was a liberating experience for Dilly and he made friendships there that would last a lifetime.

  The year 1903 was a defining moment for moral philosophy in Cambridge, when their own professor, George Edward Moore, published his Principia Ethica. Dilly was never one of the Cambridge Apostles, of whom Keynes was a leading light, although he had been proposed on more than one occasion. This exclusive intellectual society, officially called the Cambridge Conversazione Society, founded in 1820 for discussion, enthusiastically took up Moore’s philosophy of open-mindedness and mutual criticism, which encouraged an unwillingness to let any statement go unquestioned. ‘Why do you say that?’ and ‘What do you mean by that?’ would frequently occur in Dilly conversations in the years to come.

  Keynes was not the only Apostle to whom Dilly was close. His friends included the writers Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf, all later members of the Bloomsbury Group, of which Keynes would also be a prominent member. Strachey, who had initially disliked Dilly, would later fall deeply in love with him, an unrequited passion since Dilly was uninterested in the homosexuality then common at Cambridge. ‘You must forgive me please if I can talk of nothing but Knox,’ Strachey wrote to a friend. ‘I came back from Cambridge having only seen him once – but the impression was so wonderful! Oh dear! You needn’t be jealous! I’m as far away from him as from you!’

  In 1913, Ronnie Knox stepped in with his first serious book, Some Loose Stones, refuting Moore’s idea of morality being self-evident common sense and truth intuitive, as opposed to the need for spiritual guidance. Dilly dismissed the whole subject as unnecessary by replying with Some Floating Stones, which he showed only to his King’s friends. Dilly’s father became alarmed at what he heard of Cambridge and Wilfred was sent to Oxford, where he, like Ronnie later, would begin a spiritual journey, which took him in a different direction from his father’s Church of England. Wilfred became an Anglo-Catholic priest at the Oratory of the Good Shepherd and took a vow of celibacy, which the Bishop could not condone, but he whole-heartedly approved of his social welfare work in London’s East End. Mrs K was a true Christian, keeping the family together as best she could.

  Dilly left King’s in 1907, having won the Chancellor’s Classical Medal, but with only second-class honours in the second part of his Tripos, and, after a holiday with Eddie and Ronnie in Rome, he went to teach classics and ancient history at St Paul’s, Hammersmith, where he made no attempt to keep order in class but was ‘loved by all’.

  For a short time, he tutored a young Harold Macmillan at his home for a Balliol scholarship, but was rejected as being ‘too austere and uncongenial’ and was replaced by Ronnie. It was a considerable relief when, in 1909, he was offered a fellowship at King’s, where Keynes was now a lecturer in economics and engaged on an improving campaign, which necessitated getting rid of the bursar. Dilly helped him expose the bursar’s incompetence, in a truly Knoxian way, by ridiculing the situation in the columns of The Basileon, the college magazine. He appealed to the bursar to inspect the rats in the fellows’ bedrooms; then to come to the rats’ rescue because the rooms were now so damp that they were being driven out by water-rats; lastly, to provide better care for the water-rats, whose nasty coughs kept the younger fellows awake at night. In 1911, he made a new friend, Frank Birch, a history scholar, who would remain close to him for the rest of his life. Frank, a born actor and brilliant talker, was much more amusing and relaxing than most of Dilly’s Apostle friends, and he arranged for Dilly to have a part as Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest.

  Another new arrival in 1911, which greatly affected Dilly, was the scholar poet A. E. Housman, who became Kennedy Professor of Latin at Trinity College. Housman’s poetry had been important to all the brothers, but particularly to Dilly, who revelled in the romantic pessimism of A Shropshire Lad, much of which he knew by heart. He counted himself lucky if he could exchange a few words with its author at the Classical Club. What Dilly admired most was Housman’s skill with forceful simple metre. Dilly’s fellowship dissertation had been on the prose rhythms of the Greek historian Thucydides; it was said that his argument was so clever that nobody could contradict it.

  It was Dilly’s tutor as an undergraduate, Walter Headlam, who originally inspired in him a passion for Greek literature and language. Headlam was a direct descendant of the great classical scholar Richard Bentley, the master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was eccentric with little grasp of reality but a brilliant ability to understand the thoughts of the classical Greek writers and to work out, where passages were missing, what they would have contained. Headlam was greatly concerned with textual criticism and had read exceptionally widely in Greek texts. He had devoted much time to Aeschylus, the ancient Greek dramatist often seen as the father of Greek tragedies, but when Dilly knew him he was focused on producing an edition of the Mimes of Herodas, the classical Greek poet who flourished at the high point of Hellenistic poetry in the second and third centuries BC. The floor of Headlam’s room in the Gibbs Building was notoriously untidy and stacked high with papers. The one thing Dilly wanted to do was to be of use to him in his project, and this he was unexpectedly able to do as a result of Headlam’s tragically early death in 1908, at the age of forty-two. When Dilly returned to King’s to take up his fellowship the following year, he inherited his former tutor’s work on Herodas, whose Mimiambi or Mime Iambics, in the Ionic dialect, were short scenes of everyday life at the time, some very bawdy. The family knew that Dilly didn’t admire Herodas as a writer but rather as a familiar foe, and the Mimes provided a difficult game in which nearly all the rules were missing, one which Dilly intended to win and arrive at the correct text. He commuted between Cambridge and the British Museum and corresponded with foreign scholars in Latin.

  The Mimes papyrus, found in the excavations of the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, 100 miles south of Cairo, in 1889, was a little worm-eaten roll about 5 inches high, written out by a copyist around ad100 and preserved in the hot sands of the Sahara. They were transcribed in 1891 by the director of the British Museum, Dr F. H. Kenyon, an eminent palaeographer, but there had been a major problem when the charred fragments had originally been assembled as the papyrologist who had worked on the jigsaw puzzle had little knowledge of Greek letters. Dilly noticed something wrong with the strips that had been mounted and after some persuasion Dr Kenyon agreed to have the crumbling strips realigned. More literary papyri were being unearthed at Oxyrhynchus and Dilly was determined to find any in his anonymous scribe’s handwriting which would throw light on the Mimiambi. Headlam had never worked on the puzzle aspect of the fragmented Mimiambi, although with his extensive knowledge of Greek literature he had detected quotes from them in other authors.

  Dilly was now all set for working on the definitive text, which had eluded his tutor, although he knew it would take some time to achieve. He intended to be not only linguist, palaeographer and papyrologist but to understand the whole world of the ordinary Greek people depicted by Herodas. A scholar, particularly a Knox, must see things through. As the war clouds gathered in 1914, however, he knew Herodas and the Greeks would have to be put aside and he could not believe that his kind of erudition would be of any use in the years ahead. Having ridden one of the first motor bikes in Cambridge, he tried to enlist as a dispatch rider, but his poor eyesight and his erratic driving let him down. Fortunately, another fellow at King’s was talent-spotting clever young men for the Naval Intelligence Division, which had set up a codebreaking section to be known as Room 40, after the room in the Admiralty in which it was housed. Dilly was duly recruited in early 1915 and would now find himself breaking enemy messages rather than attempting to deliver dispatches on a motor bike to British commanders in the field.

  TWO


  Room 40

  The Admiralty had cut the German transatlantic underwater cables in the English Channel on the first day of the war, which meant that in future their communications overseas would mainly be through wireless telegraphy. As Morse messages could be intercepted, they would have to be encoded and new cryptographic bureaux set up to deal with them. In France and Germany they used servicemen, but in Britain it was wisely decided to search for candidates with wider experience and minds of their own, not intimidated by service hierarchy. Rear-Admiral Henry Oliver, the director of the Intelligence Division (DID), recommended that the man to recruit the right people for codebreaking and analysing the messages would be Sir Alfred Ewing, emeritus professor of engineering at King’s College, Cambridge, who was no stranger to wireless. He had already patented an electro-magnetic wave detector some years earlier and addressed the Royal Society on the subject of identifying electric oscillations occurring during wireless transmission. Moreover, he had become interested in codes and ciphers when as director of Naval Education he had been consulted about the construction of secure codes for the navy. Breaking the enemy’s coded wireless messages would have to be put on a secret service footing and the naval education department seemed a plausible temporary cover.

  Ewing’s first job in 1914 before looking for codebreakers was to set up a series of listening stations manned by the Post Office and the Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company with the help of his friend William Russell Clarke, a barrister and radio enthusiast. As director of Naval Education, Ewing was also able to obtain the services of language teachers at the royal naval colleges and one of the first to be recruited was Alastair Denniston from Osborne College on the Isle of Wight, who was destined to become the first head of Bletchley Park in the Second World War. The new recruits were crammed into Ewing’s room on a shift system, and, as Denniston said, all six of them were singularly ignorant of the process of breaking a code or cipher, which was like a foreign language, but they did make progress in distinguishing German naval messages and identifying call-signs. As yet the Admiralty had no inkling of what a revolution in naval intelligence they had on their hands; they were still in the days of patrolling vessels reporting movement intelligence to the fleets, but now minefields and submarines had to be contended with, and this sort of Nelson-like exercise had to be abandoned.