AT THE END OF THE GREAT WAR, Eddie was thirty-seven, Dilly thirty-five, Wilfred thirty-two and Ronnie thirty. The new decade, the 1920s, accepted them as a natural phenomenon. In 1922, in the Michaelmas term, the Cambridge Union organized a debate, at which all four brothers were to speak. The motion proposed was “That This House Believes That the Whole World Over, There’s No Place Like Home.” Eddie and Wilfred were to speak in favour, Dilly and Ronnie against. “Ronnie was usually the best speaker,” Winnie considered. “Dillwyn was hesitant, Wilfred was more appealing than Ronnie, who laid down the law too much, Eddie was an awful speaker, so brilliant, but hated it and was too nervous to be heard.” But the upshot of the debate will never be known. On the appointed afternoon a thick yellow fog descended over London and made it impossible for any of them to get to the station.
After the Great WAR, the money left by the Bishop’s first wife (Ellen French) was divided between the children; it was apparently a provision of the will that the youngest child should have turned thirty. The history of this legacy was as follows. Wealthy old Mr Jansen, Ellen’s grandfather, had adopted two nieces and had two daughters of his own; to each of them he left £160,000. In the French family (Bishop French, of course, did not touch a penny of it) it was divided between eight children, and after that between six Knoxes, who received about £3,000 each, mostly in railway shares—“an excellent example,” Winnie said, “of how to get rid of inherited money without spending it.”
Bishop Knox retired in 1921, handing over his see to William Temple. The diocese, in gratitude for his many years of devoted work, had already presented him with a majestic Daimler “whose machinery seldom failed to work,” and with his portrait, to be painted by the Academician of his choice. In any artistic matters the Bishop was quite at a loss; he tramped wearily round the Academy until rescued by one of Mrs K.’s sisters; she chose the artist A. T. Nowell, who produced a delightful portrait, in which the Bishop is apparently about to rise from his seat and knock somebody down with a Bible. Finally the diocese subscribed to buy him a house for his retirement, and Mrs K. supervised their last move, to 18 Beckenham Grove, Shortlands, in Kent.
The house needed repair, but very soon acquired the true deep leathery fragrance of a Victorian rectory. Huge roses and cabbages appeared in the garden; all the strange heavy old implements were back in the kitchen, things for ironing clerical collars, opening oysters, sharpening steel knives; Alice and Richmond, whose ages nobody liked to ask any more, still presided there, grumbling tenaciously; Ethel was installed in her room with her typewriter and her work for the Christian Missionary Society, all the letters she had ever received, all the old toys, all the old books; when the four sons came to visit, they became, as soon as they passed through the stained-glass front door, the “dear boys” once again. Indeed, the two priests, Wilfred and Ronald, became Iffie and Whooks.
It must not be thought, by the way, that Ethel, who had now become Aunt Ethel to three nephews and a niece, was at all discontented with her lot. Her Victorianism was not of the kind that appeared in twentieth-century novels. She did not like the outside world, and was proud to stay at home. Her bits of jewellery were put away for “the Miss Knox of the next generation”. When her niece married, she put them away with a sigh, because now there would be no Miss Knox.
The Bishop settled down immediately to write a further refutation of the Tractarians, and to prepare the opposition to the threatened changes in the Prayer Book. “It is an anxious time,” he told Winnie, “the Press are concentrating on the wrong points. I even wrote a letter to the Scotsman to try to head them off, but it was not printed—perhaps they did not recognise E. A. Knox, Bishop, any more than Dobie & Co [the grocers], who send in my accounts addressed to K. Bishop Esq.” But, even in retirement, he was formidable. “Peg away,” he wrote, putting all his scholarship at the disposal of the Parliamentary opposition. In 1928, when the Commons rejected the Prayer Book, he was warmly congratulated: “The general-ship of the octogenarian has resulted in a great victory. To you, more than to any man, this decision is due.”
In appearance, the Bishop had grown increasingly stout, and his wheezing presence in the study was perhaps more alarming than he knew. Mrs K., however, now silver-haired, was as elegant as ever. Still exceedingly busy, and always with Ethel to care for, she never seemed in the least hurry. At teatime she presided with a small kettle boiling over a spirit lamp, so that a little hot water could be poured to warm each cup before the tea was put in. At her elbow there was a “curate’s friend”, that is, a bamboo framework holding four plates so that the curate need not go round the drawing room offering each cake separately; on a table there was always a book of French poetry or memoirs, with an ivory knife to cut the pages.
At the end of the 1920s Mrs K. was persuaded to write an article for the Daily Chronicle in a series entitled “Mothering Famous Men”. In this she recalled the Birmingham schoolroom days, but at once a discrepancy appeared; while Eddie, as Evoe, and Ronnie had become more and more well known, Dilly and Wilfred were less and less so, particularly Dilly, behind the closed doors of Room 40. The features editor printed pictures only of Mrs K. herself and of Ronnie (“a most accommodating friendly child”) and Eddie (“a sensitive nature behind a coating of reserve”), both guileless in their Eton collars. Dilly had to be described simply as “a classical scholar”, and Wilfred as “an Anglo-Catholic priest”.
Wilfred had been expected to “go over” when Ronnie went, but there was never any question of his doing so. In 1917 his vicar at Graham Street, who was also his confessor, J. C. Howell, died after an operation; then in the following autumn, after the loss of so many friends on the Western front, came the spiritual loss of Ronnie. Wilfred, always independent, had been driven into himself. As soon as the war was over, he staked all his hopes for his Church on one pamphlet, printed in 1918 by the Society of St Peter and St Paul: At a Great Price Obtained I This Freedom.
They were the words of the garrison commander in Jerusalem to St Paul, who had claimed consideration as a Roman citizen. Paul’s reply was, “But I was free born.” How could the Church earn the right to be called free-born again? And what had gone wrong with the Church of England anyway? Wilfred’s answer was painfully direct. “The poor object to the church, because it is rich. There is a general feeling that the church is a church of the rich, governed by the rich for the rich. The feeling is largely inarticulate, but it is widely and deeply felt.” All Anglo-Catholics should lead the way by demanding an absolute separation of Church and State, and they should be prepared to pay the price, that is, to give up all the money and patronage derived from the State. Priests must live on what they earn. A hundred a year would, he thought, be a fair living wage for a priest. A priest shouldn’t want a living wage, which meant “bringing up a family in the style customary among the upper middle classes. I cannot find among Our Lord’s charges to his disciples that they should live in the style customary to the upper middle classes.” Bishops, perhaps, might have five hundred pounds a year. “Their palaces could go, or be used as diocesan seminaries, a far better use than the present one.” Church buildings, or some of them, could stay, because they would be genuinely needed if the clergy were poor and gave up all idea of social status, “an absolutely unmixed advantage, since it will teach England to respect a priest as the representative of God, not as a gentleman from Oxford. Then we can follow the carpenter of Nazareth, and rid ourselves of the unholy alliance of the Church with middle-class respectability that has led to the deadness of English religion.”
If Wilfred could have had Ronnie still standing by him, what might they not have done? As things turned out, the question of corporate reunion with Rome was obsessive, and occupied nearly all the time of the successive Anglo-Catholic conferences. Although Wilfred himself became a leading Anglo-Catholic apologist and historian, he was intensely disappointed by the failure to respond to At a Great Price. He had written it with the urgency, not of inexperience, but of something that had been long held back and desperately needed saying. Christ was concerned with the condition of human beings as He found them on this earth, and took every kind of risk to show this. Couldn’t the Church of England take the one risky step, the first one, of ceasing to be respectable? Whatever support Wilfred expected, it did not come.
But his loneliness found its own relief. Ronald was at heart family-loving and domestic, Wilfred community-loving and sociable. In 1920 he was introduced to a community, the only one, perhaps, in which he could ever have felt truly at home. It had the odd distinction that the same thing could be said of nearly all its members.
The Oratory of the Good Shepherd was not, and is not, in fact a community at all, nor is it a guild, nor an order, nor could it have been in origin anything but English. The vagueness of its definition, and the absolute certainty of its members as to what they are, makes it one of the many unseen and unknown currents that quietly deepen the life surrounding it.
It is a religious brotherhood of unmarried priests and laymen which gives its members the help (not the compulsion) of a close fellowship and a common rule. This help extends to both daily work and the spiritual life, or, perhaps, makes them the same thing. There is a Superior and a Chapter General which meets every year, but some members live in communities, some are scattered from end to end of the world. For these, meetings are rare, and letters must keep them in touch. At the fixed hours of prayer, wherever they may be, they know and feel themselves together. For prayer, stillness is necessary, and this is difficult, because busy activity seems more rewarding. Stillness, however, does not mean inactivity, but peace.
The Oratory “grew”, or “originated”, like any natural form of life, in Cambridge just before the Great War, but it was very characteristic that two of the founding members, Father Waggett and H. L. Pass, a layman from St John’s, were such individualists that they could not get on and worked from houses at opposite ends of the town. After the war, when the O.G.S. expanded, they expressed their ideal somewhat more formally. They recognized that they were in a world “hostile to Christianity and sick of old watchwords,” which had nevertheless shown the apparently boundless extent of human courage and self-sacrifice, even when all confidence in the Higher Command had gone. Sacrifice, in the name of Christ, has remained the keynote of the Oratory, whose duty is unselfish action, loyalty and love. “They shall be absolutely forbidden to speak ill of other bodies of Christians.” There were to be none of the “quick or harsh judgements that harden differences” on anything or anybody, and this charity would be hard to put into practice, because other people are not only infuriating, but boring. The O.G.S. faced this from the beginning. “It is fortunate for us that loving and liking are not the same thing. We are not called upon to like our neighbour, but to love him.” This comment, by one of the Superiors, George Tibbatts, shows how practical unworldliness can be.
Self-sacrifice is a matter of organized will. If possible, those living in a group should share their earnings. Certainly, every member is called upon to make sure, at the end of every month, that he has spent as little as possible on himself, and, furthermore, that he is not pleased with himself for having done so. Each Brother may ask for six weeks a year free board and lodging with any other. Before any decision, from accepting a new appointment to buying a new typewriter, one should (but does not have to) consult the other members as to the right course to take; one should (but does not have to) accept their advice. The Oratory gives up, in a sense, less than the other orders, but each individual has the entire responsibility of self-discipline, “and being quite unknown we have not the judgement of the world outside to control us.” But they have the great comfort of belonging to an understanding community.
A distinctive duty of the O.G.S. is the “labour of the mind”, a special duty of thought and study, to meet the questions of the twentieth century. Every Brother has his own private rule of writing and reading and of not sinking back into a doze or “glancing” at the newspapers. The “labour” takes many different forms; Eric Milner-White, for instance, one of the earliest members, was a fine musician who arranged for King’s College Chapel the much-loved Festival of Nine Carols and Lessons. But each member must be sure that no question put to him by an unbeliever is too difficult for him to try to answer it, and he must do this, too, without “embarrassing holiness”.
In scholarship, the Oratory is to avoid jealousy of those who are quicker, impatience with those who are slower; in doctrine, to remember that intolerance usually turns out to be the worship of ourselves; in worship, to avoid above all things “the impression of the Conservative Party at prayer.” The recognizable note of the Oratory is joy, not to be confused with heartiness. Joy is simply evidence of the love of God. “And after all, what else is there in the world that matters? To love and be loved—it is all contained in this.”
The membership of the O.G.S., always small, is growing yearly and has spread to Africa, India, Australasia and the United States; its centre is no longer a University; like Keynesian economics, like the assumptions of Bloomsbury, like the atomic research programme, it radiated outward from Cambridge, and left it behind. Those who wish to become members have a probationary period of from one to three years; as always, they are free to leave whenever they like. It is a community that is rarely talked about, and never talks about itself.
It would be absurd to suggest that there were no difficulties at the Oratory, or that it completely reproduced the spirit of the household of Little Gidding, which had partly inspired it. The majority of the Brothers were brilliant and eccentric, and eccentricity, by definition, leads to divergency. There were differences, though these, in the spirit of the place, were charitably settled; each of the members modestly considered himself very ordinary, while the others, when you came to think about it, were odd.
Wilfred himself, even as early as the 1920s, was certainly unusual in manner. His transparent honesty could give offence. If he was busy, and was asked if it was convenient for him to spare a moment, he simply answered “no.” If he forgot an engagement, the best he could do by way of apology was to say, “I didn’t come to dinner with you yesterday.” Some of those who were attracted or interested by the O.G.S., without necessarily intending to join it, found him, at first encounter, puzzling. Malcolm Muggeridge recalls that he was greeted with an almost unintelligible remark out of the side of the mouth, followed by a number of disjointed sentences. Could they connect? Well, that was the fascination. There was just a chance that if you stayed long enough, they might. Canon Jack Bagley, who did become a member, first arrived when Wilfred was gardening and had a hoe and a spade flung at him, with a command to “Get on with it.” Others, falling over a wheelbarrow, were sternly disregarded, or were suddenly left alone at ten o’clock, the retiring hour, without explanation.
In 1920 the O.G.S. had acquired a building in Lady Margaret Road which became Oratory House; the members, Wilfred included, sold out their shares to meet the freehold price. It was an unbeautiful, inconvenient, poorly lit red-brick building, with very cold passages and a tangled garden. Here Wilfred came to live when his novitiate was completed, in the summer of 1921, with the Warden and six undergraduates. One of them, Fred Brittain of Jesus, has left a description of the routine. There was a married couple to do the cooking, but the residents cleaned their own rooms and waited at table; most men in those days had very little idea how to do this, and still less how to manage the cooks; one couple was found dead drunk in the pantry. Breakfast was taken in complete silence, which seemed irritating at first, afterwards helpful; the centre of the whole day was the time of meditation and prayer.
Another early lay member was Joseph Needham, later Master of Caius and the great historian of Chinese science. The openminded discussions at the Oratory, he has said, showed him “the great need for a re-thinking of Christian doctrine and practice in the light of scientific knowledge, for example, in the attitude to sexual questions, race relations and social justice.” He noticed neither the cold nor the irregular cooking. Wilfred Knox “was one of the people from whom I learned most in my youth from personal experience and contact; a demonstration of how to combine a deep attachment to devotional and liturgical traditions with a totally liberated and fearless search for truth.”
Wilfred was most certainly deeply attached to the liturgy, without, however, being able to sing one note of music correctly. For tone-deafness there was not much to choose between him and Ronnie; on the eve of his ordination as deacon Ronnie had gone down to the bottom of the drive at St Edmund’s to practise singing the Ite, missa est; “I did think I could cause no annoyance to anybody there, but every rook in Hertfordshire rose shrieking in protest.” At the Oratory, Fred Brittain acted as Wilfred’s Vicar Choral, and describes him as joining in the carefully arranged service “like a bull-frog”. Brittain still regarded him with qualified amazement.
Wilfred Knox was not a handsome man, and his complete indifference to his outward appearance did not help him to look any more so. He was shy with strangers … and his extremely nervous laugh, accompanied by a hysterical intake of the breath, was the reverse of attractive. He generally wore a pair of stained grey flannel trousers, very baggy at the knees because they were never pressed … Out of doors he wore a somewhat greasy and battered black trilby hat, and if the weather was wet a cheap raincoat. All his clothing indeed was cheap, as it was apparently part of his rule of life not to spend an unnecessary penny on clothes. He used to go into outfitters’ shops asking for ‘the sort of shirt a workman wears’.
That “apparently” shows the very private nature of the self-discipline at the Oratory. Raggedness was not supposed to evoke pity. Wilfred registered mild annoyance when gifts of underclothing and wine appeared in his bicycle basket after a service at the parish church. These windfalls were, as far as possible, shared. And, dismayed though Brittain was by the grey flannel trousers—soon to become part of the archaeology of Cambridge—he characterizes Wilfred as “witty, humble, shrewd in his judgement of men and affairs, charitable, compassionate and saintly.” Certainly at the Oratory Wilfred’s loneliness was healed, and he allowed himself the heresy, if it was one, that there will be a place for such small communities, still together, still understanding one another, in the life to come.
The garden, where Jack Bagley had had to dodge the spade and hoe, was Wilfred’s daily resource between two and four in the afternoon. Gardening was simply gardening, therefore the best of recreations. “I always start pruning my roses on Lady Day, not out of devotion to the Rosa Mistica, but because it is an easy fixed date to remember.” Smith, the cook’s husband, who did the vegetables but never exceeded his sphere, claimed to have brought Father Knox to gardening, but Wilfred had always known how to do it. Ronnie recalled that at Edmundthorpe they had each been given a patch of earth, but only Wilfred’s had flourished. Ronnie, however, really liked the temporary sense of power in a garden, popping fuchsia buds and blowing tobacco smoke into white flowers to make them turn yellow. Wilfred would not have stood for this at Lady Margaret Road. On the subject of plants, only Mrs K. and Christina were permitted to offer him advice.
Part of the summer was spent with the Cambridge Mission to fruit-pickers, at Hickman’s, a grim-looking field close to the main road. Most of the fruit-pickers came down from the East End, and it was a privilege for him to meet them again. In June, he and Eddie went fishing.
Out of the many parishes in England where they had been on holiday with the Bishop, the brothers settled, for their fishing, on Kington in Herefordshire. It is a little hill town, a sheep and pony market, on the debatable Welsh borderland. The stream they fished was the Arrow, which rises in the Marches, runs through the main street of Kington, and falls into the Lug at Leominster. “Arrow” in Welsh means “rough water”, and, though beautiful, it was not an easy stream. It was, as Eddie wrote, “rather too full of herons and otters and kingfishers and cows”, and densely over-grown with bushes on both banks. Sometimes Eddie suspected that the cows might be eating the trout, so few were to be seen.
But the rule of the local club was “no wading”—laid down, apparently, after Henry Tudor crossed the Arrow on his way to the battle of Bosworth. And on the principle of “doing the most difficult thing” the brothers remained devoted to this lovely water for more than twenty years. They knew every kingfisher’s nest in the bank-holes and every gradation of the light during the evening rise, when the trout come up to the surface like dancers. Set them down in the darkness by the Arrow or the Lug, and they could tell you in a moment by what reach or what deep pool they stood. Their meeting point every year was a shop in Leominster, kept by a Miss Blomer, who knew nothing at all about fishing, but could tie any fly that was described to her; each of them kept a record of catches, and at the end of the day they exchanged books, and accused each other of being fanciful.
During these years of restored happiness Wilfred found writing moderately easy. On holiday he read only detective stories; back at the Oratory, working direct onto his frightful typewriter, he wrote apologetics and historical theology, and began his great study of the background of St Paul; but he also published a small, modest book, which has become a great favourite, Meditation and Mental Prayer. He made no claims for it; it was only a summary, he said, in convenient form. It takes the reader, in the most disarming way, past all the real difficulties. All prayer, Wilfred tells us, is answered. As for those who feel that the whole idea is beyond them, “a person who is not clever enough to practise mental prayer is not clever enough to be entrusted with the ordinary affairs of daily life, and ought to be shut up in an asylum or a private home.” Wilfred could be very astringent at times.
When Eddie went back from holiday he was still a countryman, or, rather, a commuter. Christina and he had decided to try somewhere within easy reach of London, where they could keep hens and grow vegetables and put up a swing for the children, and everything would be cheap. In this expectation they found a homely mock-Tudor house with a lawn and a cherry tree, in Balcombe, near Haywards Heath in Sussex.
Balcombe, to quote the title of the book Eddie wrote about it, was An Hour from Victoria; Sussex, favoured by writers since the turn of the century, was now the centre of the second wave of the Georgian movement. The bookshops, Eddie found, were stacked with volumes of poetry in which “innumerable writers stated their firm conviction that Sussex not only contained Downs, but that these Downs were adjacent to the Sea.” These were the pale followers of Belloc and Kipling; meanwhile the simple fellows with smocks and clay pipes in the bar parlours turned out to be regional novelists, on the lookout for Sussex hinds. But even these were outnumbered by the weekenders. On Saturdays the lanes smoked with the adventurous traffic of the 1920s.
The village itself was a different matter, and the young Knoxes were discreetly welcomed. The rector suggested that as he believed Eddie was a writer, he might try a history of the local Ancient Ironworks, and act as secretary of the debating club, which met in a room hired from the Village Institute. Here—or so he insisted—Eddie proposed debates on: “The League of Nations”; “That Mr. G. B. Shaw is the most promising young dramatist since Shakespeare, and his future may be looked forward to with confidence”; “That this Club strongly opposes the Einstein Theory of Relativity, and considers it injurious to health and morals”. But no one came, until he proposed: “That the butcher’s prices have increased, are increasing, and ought to be diminished”. There was only one butcher in Balcombe.
The presiding genius of Sussex, as has been said, was Hilaire Belloc. Kipling, who was living at Batemans, received guests, but went out very little. Belloc, though much broken down by his wife’s death, still strode across the downs with the energy of an old Gaul, and kept up the true customs of Merrie England at King’s Land. Ronnie, as the coming Catholic writer, had been to stay with him for the Christmas of 1921, and, perhaps as a sequel to this, Belloc suddenly appeared at Balcombe one Sunday in the following June and said he had come to luncheon. In spite of the high concentration of poets in the area he was very conspicuous, solid, almost cubical in shape, heavily dressed in black in the summer heat. Eddie recalled that Belloc had once, when standing as Liberal candidate for Salford, come to Bishopscourt and suffered terribly from the sour claret; when asked how he slept, he replied that he hadn’t, and had had to sit up all night reading. At Balcombe, however, there were one or two bottles of good hock, but before they could be fetched, Belloc, marching in, produced from under his black garments a flagon of his own wine, apparently bottled by himself. After this doubtful compliment lunch began well enough, until Belloc uttered a cry, more like the horn of Roland echoing over waste places: “Bread! But we eat like the English, without bread!” In those days the baker brought “two small browns”, or whatever was ordered, every morning in the pony-trap; in the afternoon there was no more to be had. Belloc could not accept a small brown as bread, and was, perhaps, doomed to another sleepless night.
A few years afterwards, Belloc showed his weary and sympathetic side when he wrote to Eddie about his satire, Belinda: “It is the only book I have written with care since The Path to Rome and I hope I shall never write a book with any care again, for care is a great burden.” Eddie, who was making a list of things he could and couldn’t do in case of emergencies (“I can’t milk or do the things that work electrical things; I can saw wood and if the two cuts don’t meet, bang it about until the piece comes off; I can’t bake; I can work a lift and black boots and polish brown ones and do bacon and eggs—learned in lodgings”), added privately that, though he admired him very much, he could not entertain Hilaire Belloc.
As Evoe of Punch, his correspondence grew. To take only two items from the “files”, now the drawers of a desk, rather than a hat box: a letter from a Polish reader, addressed from Warsaw to “The Very Renown Evoe of Punch, care of the Daily News” from America, an invitation to give humorous evenings for the International Chautauqua Association, “Brings Entertainment to Your Door, Every Kind for Every Occasion”. But Eddie, like Ronnie, never felt quite confident enough to make a personal appearance in the United States.
During the Twenties he was particularly well known as a parodist. Parody, an art which has declined with the disappearance of a recognizable literary style, depends on the finer shades of exaggeration. Eddie was gentle—much gentler, for instance, than Max Beerbohm—but wonderfully accurate. Walter de la Mare was a favourite subject, perhaps because Eddie loved his poetry, perhaps because it was so difficult to render delicate uncanniness by delicate absurdity. In Eddie’s “The Lost Bus” the driver has a moustache green with moss, the destination boards trail with weeds, and, entangled in its own magic syllables, “topples the bus and heels”. The idea appealed to de la Mare himself. Indeed, with a few exceptions, the authors were enthusiastic; Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance, the author of Tarzan, wrote rather unexpectedly from Tarzana Ranch, Reseda, California, that “you have saved me from oblivion”.
Owen Seaman raised his remuneration to twelve guineas for a poem. It was time to branch out a little and to buy a motor-car. A gleaming new Citroën arrived, about which Eddie found it difficult to make any comment, except “to sneer because the speedometer had to be wound up by hand”. With the car came the lady driving teacher, Miss Gompertz, in leather gauntlets, the very spirit of the 1920s. “I don’t want speed to brace my nerves; I want it for its own sake.” Nevertheless, every time the Citroën passed a breakdown or a puncture, Miss Gompertz gave instructions to pull up, with the quiet words: “Let us not forget the chivalry of the road.”
The car had to be kept in a kind of byre or hen-roost—what Eddie called a “wild garage”. On one occasion, stopping abruptly to avoid a goat, he turned the car over onto its side, without the least damage. The villagers, he thought, were disappointed; Miss Gompertz had not given instructions on how to address people through the windscreen of a car turned over on its side. But Eddie was far too impatient ever to be a good driver. That had to be left to Christina.
Balcombe, before very long, proved to be too far from the heart of things. In September 1920 Eddie had been invited to the Table—the weekly meeting of the Punch editorial staff. “You will not find us a formidable body,” wrote Philip Agnew, the managing director, “(please remember that we do not even dress for dinner) and we shall gladly welcome our new man.” In 1921 he joined the regular staff. After work there were the clubs, then an important part of the professional literary career. Eddie had been elected to the Savile in 1920, although Christina and he both felt the ten-guinea subscription was going to be hard to manage, and the Garrick in 1925; in 1921 he had been a guest at E.V. Lucas’s famous Garrick dinner for Charlie Chaplin, when Barrie had asked Chaplin to play Peter Pan. In fact, unassertive as he was, Eddie’s wit made him much in demand as a guest; he was a host, however, by temperament. All this was difficult if one lived an hour from Victoria.
The hens, the lawnmower and the rabbit hutches were sold; they would have to return to London. But, once again, they were hopeful of finding something in Hampstead, where they had always been happy, and the air was quite fresh.
Dilly, also, had moved to the country, but with considerably more reluctance, and, in his case, for a lifetime.
He married Olive Roddam in July 1920, at Ingram Parish Church in Northumberland. It is no criticism of the Roddams, an honourable line of squires and soldiers whose lands were first granted by King Athelstan, to say that they were somewhat uncertain how to get on with the gaunt and hesitant bridegroom, about whose “war work” so little could be said, who was known to be very clever, and, although a bishop’s son, rather different from the kind of man they had expected Olive to marry. She had formerly been engaged to the son of a neighbouring landowner, a young man called Christopher; they had agreed that if he did not come back from the Front, and Olive married, she would call her first son after him. Christopher was killed in 1914 and Olive’s brother in 1915; it was partly to recover from the shock that she had gone to London to work in the Admiralty; she had come back with Dilly.
Dilly was somewhat on his own at the wedding. One of his Cambridge friends was best man. Bishop Knox could not come; he was in the thick of the Lambeth Conference, battling over the Prayer Book. The brothers would have liked to come, but in his nervous agitation Dilly forgot to ask them. He was most anxious to please, but worried, even by the kindly hospitality of the Roddams. The gifts—the old lace, the piano music, the enormous quantities of silver and china—where could they be accommodated? What kind of life could he offer to Olive? He felt himself in alien territory. The Alnwick Gazette, which reported the wedding, noted in its editorial that day that “it shows a right grip of the affairs of life that in all our sports we have well nigh thrown off the depression of war, still, however, missing the jolly fellows now in happier hunting grounds. Full cry ahead lie the meetings of the Percy Hunt (with festivities to be generously provided). Yoick! Yoick!” Dilly, with all his anxious affection, could not Yoick. Would he be able to make her even passably happy?
On their return from a honeymoon in Scotland, he took her back to Chelsea. Frank Birch had also married (Maynard Keynes having organized a generous gift from King’s for both young couples), and it seemed at first to Dilly that they could all set up housekeeping together in Edith Grove. With this in mind he enthusiastically bought a two-shilling cookery book, and opened an account with the Kensington Unique Laundry. But the arrangement did not work out well.
Dilly was still at the Admiralty, though Room 40 was in process of being transferred to the Foreign Office under the euphemistic title of the Government Code and Cypher School. Shrunk to a small department, still under the supervision of A. G. Denniston, one of the first Naval officers selected by Ewing, its future importance was undecided. Dilly was waiting eagerly for his release. During the war he had been appointed Librarian of King’s, although he had never managed to get there; and back to King’s, with the Herodas to finish, he firmly intended to go. Meanwhile, it was clear that Olive would never see eye to eye with the Birches. She was not flourishing in Chelsea. She was really only at home with the life of a landed proprietor. In October 1921 he sold out most of his Great Western Railway shares and bought, for £1,900, a house surrounded by forty acres of sodden woodland on a ridge of the Chilterns. It was called Courn’s Wood House, and was a few miles from High Wycombe.
The usual troubles of vacant possession followed. Dilly approached every problem laterally. The agents wrote to ask why he had sent down two people to deal with the valuation who knew absolutely nothing about it—one a lecturer in classics, the other an electrical outfitter. Fortunately Dilly had as his solicitor the celebrated E. S. P. Haynes. Haynes had believed, until 1914, that a just world would prevail; since the loss of Grenfell, Lister, Guy Lawrence and their generation, he no longer thought so; he resigned himself to good living and to knowing everyone and everything, reminding his friends that “to eat and drink with the wrong person is like intercourse with an inefficient prostitute.” Haynes appealed to Dilly a good deal more than he did to Olive, but he was an excellent negotiator; he never came much to Courn’s Wood, however, after the conveyance was completed, because he said it was too cold there, and so it was; a heavy, chalky, insidious chill from the miles of damp woodland laid its finger on every room, above all the dining room, where the table stood like an island exposed to draughts from every quarter, and was only dispelled in Dilly’s study by a large wood fire. Victorian concepts remained in the households of the Twenties, and very often it was only in the study and the airing cupboard that one could feel warm.
Two sons were born to Dilly and Olive at Courn’s Wood. The first, in accordance with her promise, was called Christopher; his second name was Maynard, after Keynes, who stood godfather. In spite of this dedication, so to speak, to King’s, the sweet-tempered little boy grew up to be quite unacademic, while the second, named Oliver after his mother, proved to be a brilliant Greek scholar; if this was an irony of the Fates, it did not wound, for Dilly was extravagantly affectionate to them both when they were young. To push them through the deep leaf mould, he devised and constructed his own vehicle, which Oliver remembered as “a wooden scaffolding erected on a single large wheel”. Here the little boys could be secured at a level with their father’s nose, and conversation could continue. Dilly also threw himself, with not very well-directed energy, into planting, sawing and building log cabins, all on an improved but unintelligible system. But, do what he could, he never looked, as he tramped up the overgrown paths, in the least like a landed proprietor.
The Headlam-Knox Herodas finally appeared in 1922. Much of it, as Dilly warned the academic world through the pages of Philologus, had been done on trains going up and down to London. His eyes had been troublesome, and the Cambridge Press had distributed some of the type during the war, so that it was now impossible to make the alterations he wanted. Still, it was a handsome and definitive volume. There was criticism, of course, of Headlam’s glorious irrelevancies and too numerous parallels, but, in the words of Professor Arnott, “the imperfections pale beside the glowing achievement not merely for the text of Herodas but for the Greek language and literature in general.” Dilly’s own work was compared to the restoration of a damaged old master. In particular, in spite of the Museum’s unwillingness to remount the wrongly aligned scraps of papyrus, he had arranged and made sense out of the fragments of Mimes IX and X (The Breakfast and The Factory Girls), and the almost complete Mime VIII, The Dream. In this “purely personal and even sentimental fantasy”, as Dilly called it, Herodas is rusticating on his pig farm, and wakes his slaves in the early morning to tell them about his dream, a meeting with the god Dionysus at a drunken winter festival, which ends with the hope that his poems will be immortal. This hope had at last been fulfilled. The Headlam-Knox Herodas was worthy of both the master and pupil, and more than worthy of the salacious old Alexandrian poet.
It was an achievement that was not of much interest, however, in the High Wycombe and Naphill district, largely inhabited by retired officers and stockbrokers. Dilly went to the local tennis parties (he played tennis, as he did all ball games, with an unreturnable spin). He was known as an absent-minded dear. As a relief, he wrote verses in a notebook; these give an alarming panorama of the neighbours. Many are said to be lucky to escape hanging, and a visit from the High Wycombe doctors means death within the month. Motorcars and even light aircraft have been bought by husbands to get away from their wives, although the prevalence of adultery is surprising when all the wives look so much like each other. Eric Gill, the sculptor, who at that time lived on Pigot’s Hill, grinds his teeth with rancorous hatred at the sight of anything as natural as a daffodil. (Gill, in reply, asked Dilly why he did not eat Health Foods; but in Dilly’s view nothing was so unnatural as health.) Meanwhile, the boredom of the conversation in Naphill and the length of the stories told by their neighbour, a retired Admiral, added a new terror to the concept of infinity.
In 1923 Dilly made another contribution to Greek scholarship, an elegant dissertation on Cercidas, identifying 150 lines on papyrus as the dedication to an anthology. In consequence, he was offered the Professorship of Greek at Leeds University. Nothing came of it, but the letter was one of the very few papers he kept. It was worth remembering that he might have been a professor.
As soon as the Herodas was finished and he no longer had to work on photographs of papyrus in the train, Dilly bought a motor-bike to go up and down to London. It meant liberation from the stockbrokers on the High Wycombe platform. Olive was uneasy. She knew that he was in even greater danger than Wilfred, because Wilfred understood nothing whatever about his machine, whereas Dilly did understand, but expected far too much of it. And he had not ridden one since he was rejected as a dispatch rider in 1914.
Dilly had been induced to stay on at the Foreign Office as a peacetime cryptographer, continuing to read the secret traffic of the nation’s rivals and ill-wishers, and, occasionally, of its friends. While his work had to remain in secrecy or obscurity, Ronnie was named by the Daily Mail in 1924 as “the wittiest young man in England”. As a sparkling light essayist he blossomed out, not only in the Catholic press but in columns everywhere. Many of these pieces were not religious at all; they simply established his personality and opinions with a wide public. Ronnie Knox was young in his high spirits, nostalgic in his recall of the lost domain of childhood. His imagery was largely drawn from school prizes, cricket, laundry, drawers that stick, embarrassing moments, pipes, trams and bicycles (unsound arguments “give you a sensation of freewheeling instead of pedalling”). The readers got to know him very well. He told them about his expenditure on tobacco, his income-tax forms, his reading (Herodotus, Trollope, The Egoist), none of them quite coming up to the excitement of his first book, Wood’s Natural History; he explained his objection to flying, and the length of time, as a travelling preacher, that he had to spend in stations—he memorized, quite uselessly, the whole map of Cardiff Docks while waiting at Crewe Junction. Then, in describing a walking tour in the Cotswolds, he passed the camp where in 1914 his friends had assembled in their new uniforms. “A little rain crossed that peopled solitude, and memory rehearsed for me the roll-call of the unregarded dead.” This transition to a graver key was beautifully managed, both in articles and sermons.
Ronnie’s weekly pieces have suffered the fate of most journalism, but they had long-lasting, perhaps unexpected, effects. Quite casually and straightforwardly, they introduced an exceedingly brilliant person whose reasoning mind was able to accept the contradictions of Christianity. At the same time they showed that a normal, pipe-smoking, income-taxed Englishman, not a Jesuit, not a mystic, no black cloaks, no sweeping gestures, could become a Roman Catholic priest. The News and Standard columns, with their wide readership, brought very many people to think rather more favourably of God. Ronnie’s informal sermons of the 1920s were in much the same style, and as he tried to sort out, step by step, his own difficulties of faith and doctrine, his congregations found—though they did it timidly at first—that it was possible to laugh out loud in church.
The newspapers of the day were obsessed, or felt that their readers were obsessed, with Famous People. That was why Mrs K. had been induced to write her article, and Ronnie was often run as a kind of rival or opposite number to the equally witty, but deeply pessimistic Dean Inge, who claimed that the world after the Great War was “a place where everybody was wanted, but nobody was wanted much.” Another use for Famous People, so popular that it amounted to mania, was the collection of their opinions about God—“What I Believe”. Everyone was asked, from Bertrand Russell to the excavators of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Eddie contributed to this in Punch by claiming to have interviewed Steve Donoghue, the champion jockey, and getting the reply: “I have always been conscious, especially at the finish of a race, that Good and Evil are Relative Notions, and Sin is a Mere Negative,” while Jack Hobbs is said to have smiled quietly at the scant interest his fellow batsmen took in eschatology. This hit the tone pretty well. Ronnie’s task, in the name of authority and orthodoxy, was to take on the writers one by one and to point out their faults in logic.
For this he was reasonably well-paid, and began to accumulate a certain amount of money. His motives were completely unselfish. Ronnie, like all his brothers, was generous to a fault; during his lifetime, for example, he gave more than £20,000 to the Converts’ Aid Society alone, on condition that nothing should be said about it. Eddie was known in Fleet Street as a soft touch; his sardonic smile was deceptive, any hard-luck story would do. At home Christina tried to protect him, but in vain. Not long after he was demobilized she found him being harangued by an ex-serviceman who had called, uninvited, to read him some verses:
While you sat here at home
I sailed across the foam
And fought with heart so brave
To keep the likes of you safe.…
“I thought he ought to have a fiver,” Eddie muttered. “I couldn’t have written that poem.”
If Ronnie, therefore, was hoping for financial independence, it was for a specific reason. At the back of his mind there still lingered the example of Hugh Benson, who had feverishly written books for money to establish himself as a writer-priest in his own house at Hare Street. Hare Street had been somewhat theatrical and showy. Nothing that Ronnie did after his conversion was likely to be showy, but the idea of a home with some resemblance to the house party with Guy and Harold Macmillan that never took place, a home shared with other congenial priests, a centre for reading and writing—that ambition died hard. And it was particularly tempting at the moment because the daily conditions of his life were becoming unbearable.
Cardinal Bourne had appointed him, as his first post in the Catholic Church, to teach Latin at St Edmund’s, a seminary and dullish boys’ school in a dullish part of Hertfordshire. The level of the classical forms was low. Bishop Knox had feared that the Romans would make “no sparing use” of Ronnie, and Dilly pointed out that this was the sparing use to which in fact he had been put. Ronnie accepted the appointment with true humility. But he had not realized that he would be required to stay at St Edmund’s for seven years.
During the Twenties and early Thirties the Catholic Church in England made a miscalculation, the kind of error which history permits to Rome so that she can resume her majestic progress undisturbed. It was the heyday of the Conversion of England, or Apostolate to Non-Catholics (an awkward word which Ronnie had difficulty in fitting into his lucid sentences). But the task was seen, not so much as the capture of the Establishment as the creation of another one side by side with it, a Catholic model, every bit as good. Power was felt to lie with the aristocracy, public schools, universities, rank and patronage. Right-wing causes were supported everywhere, and the trained intelligence of the Jesuits was directed to organizing a cricket match at Lord’s which would be as smart as Eton and Harrow. Cardinal Bourne’s great anxiety, however, was for the secular clergy. There were too few of them, and their standard of learning was unimpressive; on all brilliant occasions, the demand was for Benedictines or Jesuits. It was, in the true sense, a Godsend when Ronald Knox, after the death of Guy, no longer thought of joining an Order. As a secular priest at St Edmund’s he could be—to quote one of his contemporaries—“a sort of talent scout and a sort of trophy.”
Ronnie’s duty was to be brilliant, and to advertise the place, socially and intellectually. The idea was quite enough to make him miserable; worse still, St Edmund’s happened to be disturbed, as most places of education are at some time or another, by unpleasant feuds. Neither Eton nor Shrewsbury seems to have prepared Ronnie for this. He pined, and his indigestion tortured him. For the sake of good example, he attended the school dinners, where he was faced with mutton stew that tasted of sheep droppings, and a blancmange known as “shape”, which, he pointed out, was its only attribute.
But it was years before he complained. Difficult things were the right ones to do, and, as a recent convert, he felt uncertain and humble. (“Whoa! I’m only a convert!” he once said to an Irish priest who was pouring him out a triple measure of whisky.) His colleagues loved him; the boys remembered him as the priest who could balance on a garden roller, and imitate a mouse taking a sip of beer and then going out to challenge the cat. He retreated from the schoolroom to lecture on the New Testament in the seminary. But the days still seemed long.
Ronnie did not fish, and his summer vacation was spent in Scotland, where he was the yearly guest of the Lovats at Beaufort Castle. Lady Lovat was the younger sister of Charles Lister, which made a strong link; she had “gone over” at the age of eighteen, when she had become engaged to the forty-year-old Catholic clan chieftain, Lord Lovat. Her letter to Ronnie on his conversion was one of the most delightful he had.
I think the first year (or 6 months) after being received are v. difficult—I fluctuated between feeling utterly isolated—or being one of a rather—unsympathetic and very dense crowd. I don’t know which sensation was worst—Both, I think now—were very superficial but meant a rather long swim against the current—(or is it currant? Scarcely the latter I feel!) … asking to be remembered in your prayers—Laura Lovat.
The mixture of seriousness and charm marked Lady Lovat as a true descendant of the Souls. She had utterly transformed Beaufort, restored the gardens, banished the cows from straying into the front hall, and provided a haven for artists and writers. Lord Lovat, who was said to be a patron of every sport and activity except literature, painting and coarse fishing, welcomed his wife’s guests as his own. The great Victorian castle resounded with children and relations and with those who came to discuss sport, farming and politics; Ronnie worked apart, in the peace of the library. All the generous chieftain’s books were there to be lent; Ronnie suggested that the family motto on the bookplates, Je suis prêt, should be changed to Je suis prêté.
Another literary guest was the brilliant and wordly-wise Maurice Baring, said to be the original of Chesterton’s Man Who Knew Too Much. Baring loved things to be done with an air; Ronnie delighted him by translating a line of Rossetti’s, “You could not tell the starlings from the leaves,” into Greek and Latin on the spot. At other times they had to speak Umble, one of Baring’s several invented languages, in which Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop came out as Dumble’s Umble Cumble Shumble. Lord Lovat did not attempt it. “By far the greatest scholar in this language,” wrote Mumble Bumble to E.V. Lucas, “is Ronald Knox.”
Although Ronnie’s family wished him to be happy, and understood that he needed a change from St Edmund’s, they looked with some misgiving at his gravitation towards grand country houses. Dilly felt that patrons were like the mills of God, and if you were not careful they ground you down exceeding small. Wilfred once again wondered why, if Ronnie wanted to get to know his new church from the inside, he did not apply for a working parish.
Perhaps they did not realize how much Ronnie needed feminine sympathy. He was truly at home in a home. Little habits showed this. An old friend of Ebury Street days, Mrs Baker, recalls how he used to stand by the fire in his long soutane which completely sheltered the cat, so that no one could tell where the purring came from. He understood the day-to-day problems of women, the peculiar diminishment, for example, which a woman feels when her children grow up; he learned that through Winnie and Mrs K. The devotion, too, with which he had picked bunches of flowers for his new stepmother was something he needed to feel, in some form or another, throughout his life.
Eddie and Christina moved back to Hampstead in 1922, to a small Queen Anne terrace house this time, 34 Well Walk, at a rent of forty pounds a year. The village—and Hampstead still felt itself very much a village—was a place of high thinking, plain living and small economies. The steep, charming old streets were full of ham-and-beef shops, old bookstalls, and an amazing number of cleaners and repairers, all helpful to shabby refugees and literary men. There was even a jeweller’s where one bead could be bought at a time, for all the Hampstead ladies wore long necklaces. The livery stables had only just turned into a garage, and still called itself a Motor Jobmaster. Poets walked the streets, Stanley Spencer pushed his pramful of painting materials amiably across the Heath, Henry Lamb was living in the top room of the Vale of Health Hotel; his sister Dorothy was now married to Reeve Brooke, an old Corpus friend of Eddie’s. At one end of Well Walk was the wooden seat which John Keats had sat on, at the other was a pub kept by a man called Strube, the brother of the cartoonist; it was a haven for journalists down on their luck.
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 of 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.
The governments of the world now began to close down the Soviet consulates and trading posts in their midst. In 1926 the Turks raided the Soviet-Turkish delegation, and made arrests; there were also arrests in Switzerland and Austria, and in April 1927 the Chinese police entered the Soviet consulate in Peking.
In December 1926, after various protests and rebuffs, a Foreign Office memorandum was circulated privately to key ambassadors, giving notice that a breach with the Soviet Union, and a raid on ARCOS, were probable in the near future. On 13 January 1927 Dilly bought himself a new Burberry overcoat, costing £6 10S, and ordered dinner at John Fothergill’s rather expensive inn at Thame, the Spread Eagle. These expenses might pass as unremarkable, but with Dilly they could only mean a celebration, and it is at least possible that the Government, apart from any other intention, had agreed, in his own phrase, to “get something from the post office”.
At 4:30 on the afternoon of 12 May, the British police raided Southampton Buildings on an ordinary magistrates’ search warrant. The editorial staff of the ARCOS magazine, who in January had announced that they were gaining “more opportunities of getting to know the situation of our hosts, the British people,” were thrown into confusion. Rather oddly, they printed an issue dated 16 May with a leading article on the raid. We are told that “in the cipher room Comrades Meler and Zudyakov tried to explain to the police that as fundamental principle of right they could not allow anyone to see the ciphers and telegrams,” but met with a “harsh rejoinder.” The paper then goes on to discuss the market in heavy machinery.
The police were not dissatisfied, because they were able to pick up several “known spies” in Southampton Buildings. Of the confiscated secret papers, most were ludicrous. They found a complaint, for example, that the British Communist Party had made a terrible mess of providing “politically conscious seamen” for the three Russian vessels which remained under the British flag after 1918; they had sent “the refuse of the Labour Party”—some drank, some were good orators but bad stokers, some did no work at all. Such things were hardly worth knowing, but it has been said that a mysterious “missing document” was never found because the police gave proper warning, and ARCOS had time to destroy it. Indeed, the Soviet chargé d’affaires encouraged this idea, cabling to Moscow on the 18th: “I consider it expedient for you to publish as a rumour a statement that the missing document refers to the aerial bombardment of a certain European capital.”
How was this last message—which must have been in cipher—translated in London? The real prize which Scotland Yard brought back was what the ARCOS leading article described as “the writing machines and all that they had printed”. These would give away the general system, even if the specific key was changed. When they realized that the material would not be returned, the Russians appealed to Khinchuk, the head of the trade delegation, to protest on the grounds of diplomatic immunity. The reply was unfavourable. No more numbers of the ARCOS magazine appeared, and the delegation were requested to leave Great Britain.
Our information about Soviet Russia between the two world wars is usually considered to have been good, though it was derived, of course, from many other sources beside cryptography. The question remains: did our cryptographers break the cipher, and provide information which led to the expulsion of ARCOS, or did they fail to break it, but profit from the raid far more than anyone else?
Dilly was promoted to a higher grade—which may have been for a number of reasons—and joined the Wine Society, although he never became, like Eddie, a connoisseur. Olive also thought they ought to buy more land, and in 1929 E. S. P. Haynes acquired for them another small estate, North Dean, let out at a yearly tenancy of £17 10s.
The family felt that Dilly’s woodlands were too much for him already. Small accidents abounded with the saws and choppers. Olive’s shelves, put up by Dilly, collapsed with the year’s preserves. Aunt Ethel, visiting, fell into a deep pit full of brushwood and hurt herself quite badly. There was no real safety at Courn’s Wood, just as there was no real warmth, outside Dilly’s study.