The Knox Brothers

скачать книгу бесплатно

The Knox Brothers
Richard Holmes

Penelope Fitzgerald

‘When I was very young I took my uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else in the world was not like them.’In this, only her second book, Penelope Fitzgerald turned her novelist’s gaze on the quite extraordinary lives of her father and his three brothers. A masterly work of biography, within which we see Penelope Fitzgerald exercising her pen magnificently before she began her novel-writing career.Edmund Knox, her father, was one of the most successful editors of Punch. Dillwyn, a Cambridge Greek scholar, was the first to crack the Nazi’s message decoding system, Enigma, and in so doing, is estimated to have shortened the Second World War by six months. Wilfred became an Anglo-Catholic priest and an active welfare worker in the East End of London. Ronald, the best known of the four during his lifetime, was Roman Catholic chaplain to Oxford University’s student body, preacher, wit, scholar, crime-writer and translator of the Bible.A homage to a long-forgotten world and a fascinating account of the generation straddling the divide between late Victorian and Edwardian.

PENELOPE FITZGERALD

The Knox Brothers

with an introduction by Richard Holmes

Edmund 1881–1971

Dillwyn 1884–1943

Wilfred 1886–1950

Ronald 1888–1957

Dedication (#u9dc5f1a6-2900-57a6-832a-4d850a0874c6)

For My Father

“Evoe”

OF PUNCH

Contents

Cover (#ub817f264-d11a-509b-ad7a-182e949a55e3)

Title Page (#u9bcb40c3-60e3-57c1-8012-06e36a222d13)

Dedication (#u9b39cd39-bdc6-5b14-958e-a1d17de47caf)

Genealogy (#u8f1bdf60-5eee-5e72-a66d-51cdafd28454)

Introduction by Richard Holmes (#u7e953922-bcc0-5d51-9c9e-a2929c0e0765)

Foreword (#u42c54bb3-5be9-54a8-830a-1458a7d0ab1d)

I. Beginnings (#ufebf0b6a-1c18-57d2-866e-1fbd769d514b)

II. The Sterner Realities of Life 1891–1901 (#ued5b3d7e-d356-5f8f-9eb9-f2f5da922080)

III. “We imagined other people might think we were peculiar” 1901–1907 (#ua5cc25fa-9c27-5bc8-81e3-d4800c8d8a01)

IV. Knoxes and Brother 1907–1914 (#u6b335c03-18fc-5f8b-826b-1589ac8e5031)

V. Brothers at War 1914–1918 (#u86a01434-ac3b-5305-9227-d6d73a836b7f)

VI. The Twenties 1919–1929 (#u8c25225f-2573-5a6b-9f64-9ffc50b35cb6)

VII. “The Fascination of What’s Difficult” 1930–1938 (#uce8b2119-f82b-57ef-b832-a0f85344ca67)

VIII. The Uses of Intelligence 1939–1945 (#uc434d54e-895f-5314-9630-77b3a70eb172)

IX. Endings 1945–1971 (#u589ecc4a-ca7d-5975-bcfa-8fb76399fece)

Bibliography (#u4587f721-d017-53b2-8aea-0f31324961fe)

Index (#ue2803d85-0ed9-533e-bcd8-d96f7318d7d8)

About the Author (#uac1edc75-07e3-52e7-9c58-527b57b9c627)

Also by the Author (#u8268a6c2-8e6b-58ce-bbe6-1367fe92b7f8)

Copyright (#u5b0e388d-96f5-5685-8c88-32e4904afccf)

About the Publisher (#uc3e8fd96-9c83-5701-844c-b131599cd03d)

Genealogy (#ulink_0884269b-a202-5c2c-a1aa-2c3eab50e4c9)

Introduction by Richard Holmes (#ulink_3cb28429-a70b-58eb-8c63-a9a134d345e0)

PENELOPE FITZGERALD’S MARRIED NAME, the name under which she became loved and celebrated as a novelist, subtly disguised her true inheritance. For Fitzgerald was really a Knox, and this marked her invisibly – or perhaps, indelibly – all her long life, and especially in her later and astonishingly creative years.

As a Knox, she was descended from one of the great intellectual, Anglo-Catholic clans of late Victorian England. She was born Penelope Mary Knox in December 1916. Her great-grandfather had been the missionary Bishop of Lahore; her grandfather was Bishop of Manchester; one uncle was the writer and translator of the Bible Monsignor Ronald Knox (like Newman, a Roman Catholic convert); and her father was for sixteen years the much-admired editor of Punch, at a perilous time (1932–1948) when the magazine was still a great institution of national identity, like The Times or Speaker’s Corner or Harrods (and shared some of the attributes of each).

The Knox Brothers is her remarkable tribute to this family inheritance. It is a strikingly original group biography, and a highly engaging piece of family history, written with extraordinary wit and shrewdness: a funny, tender, clever book. But it is very much more than that. One might call it a study in a vanished civilization, and I am sure that it is destined to become a twentieth-century classic.

Its place in Penelope Fitzgerald’s work is intriguing. The biography first appeared in 1977, when she was sixty. But because of her unusual, late-flowering literary career, it was in fact one of her earliest books, and seems intimately connected with her self-discovery as a writer. In taking the measure of her formidable family background (and this is hardly a work of pious memorial), Penelope Fitzgerald found a narrative style, a fascination with human character, and a series of moral preoccupations which seemed to release the whole flow of her fiction.

Her late start as a novelist was something Penelope Fitzgerald was frequently, and often wistfully, quizzed about – for instance at the Hay-on-Wye Festival of 1994. She was famous for the modesty of her replies, and one explanation was that she had simply been too busy with life, until she happened to enter a Ghost Story competition organized by The Times in Christmas 1974, when she had just turned fifty-eight.

(Her winning story, ‘The Axe’ was published in The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories in 1975, and subsequently collected posthumously in The Means of Escape. Its victim, an ancient and – one might say – an almost disembodied office clerk called Singlebury, is introduced with a gentle but slightly unnerving irony, that is already recognisably hers. ‘Singlebury had, however, one distinguishing feature, very light blue eyes, with a defensive expression, as though apologizing for something which he felt guilty about, but could not put right. The fact is that he was getting old. Getting old is, of course, a crime of which we grow more guilty every day.’)

More searching interviews (such as that by Hermione Lee, for BBC Radio 3, in 1997) revealed how directly her first novels drew on a mass of autobiographical material, stored up over forty years, and awaiting a moment of release. The pattern of her life suggested a long, slow period of imaginative and intellectual assimilation, in preparation for a literary career that she had always hoped for, but never quite expected.

Tantalizing glimpses of her as a teenager appear in later chapters of The Knox Brothers. But, characteristically, she always refers to herself in the third person, as ‘the niece’ or ‘the daughter’. If you blink, you will miss them. From these we learn that she was largely brought up in literary London, in Hampstead and Regent’s Park, with an elder brother, and her father’s circle of brilliant acquaintances such as Belloc and AP Herbert. She attended (unhappily, one gathers) Wycombe Abbey, near Oxford, one of the most academically demanding of public schools for girls. This too appears in a wonderful, single-paragraph cameo in chapter seven.

In 1935, when she was still only eighteen, her mother died of cancer, which devastated the household. She writes characteristically of her father, Edmund Knox, at this time of overwhelming grief. ‘It was many years before Eddie could bring himself to mention her name directly, even to his own son and daughter. At the time, he asked the proprietors of Punch for a short leave of absence, and an understanding that he would not be writing any funny pieces for the paper that year.’ She says not a word of her own (‘the daughter’s’) feelings, but only notes that her uncle Ronald, when attending the Anglican funeral, being a Catholic insisted on kneeling alone in the aisle. (p. 208)

Penelope Knox took a First at Somerville College, Oxford. She then worked in a series of institutions, great and small (the wartime BBC, a children’s drama school, a Suffolk bookshop) having married Desmond Fitzgerald, a lawyer, in 1941. The family was mildly bohemian, in the Knox tradition, and were happy to live on a Thames barge, while taking occasional summer holidays in Italy and one memorable winter holiday in Russia. All of these experiences appear, transformed but recognisable, as settings for her later novels.

In 1976, the year following the ghost story, her husband Desmond died after a long illness. Penelope Fitzgerald never wrote directly about this time. But it was now, in amazingly rapid succession, that she produced in just five years, no less than six books which must have been, in some sense, bursting within her. The fascinating thing is that the first two were not novels, but biographies.

She had been working for some time on her life of the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones (1975), perhaps as a distraction from her own immediate pain and unhappiness. It was inspired, she said, by Burne-Jones’s stained-glass window of the Last Judgement, in St Philip’s, Birmingham. ‘No agitation here, the dwellers on the earth simply stand waiting for their sentence. The whole effect depends on the late afternoon sun slanting through the glorious red of the massed angels’ wings. It is a window for Evensong.’ (p. 271) The biography is lively, engaging, and well-researched, with a particularly striking picture of Burne-Jones’s domestic life. But it also has the slight narrative stiffness, the uncertain deployment of materials, and uneven emotional tone, of a first book.

Nothing could be less true of The Knox Brothers, which appeared just two years later in 1977. Somehow, an artistic transformation has taken place. From the very first chapter, with its amazing and moving tale of her great-grandfather the missionary Bishop, sailing calmly out to his lonely death from Muscat, ‘in a fishing boat, under a blazing sun, with his book-bag’, the biography is pitched with a narrative assurance, a gentle irony, and a delight in curious anecdote, which proved to be the hallmarks of Fitzgerald’s clear and silvery style.

Reading The Knox Brothers now, some twenty-five years after it was written, one is delighted by its period charm, its playful narration, and its barely repressed sense of mischief. But one is also struck by its technical ambition. For Fitzgerald, the obvious choice was to write mainly about the two famous literary figures of the family: her father Edmund and her uncle Ronald. Here were two well-known, but nicely contrasted brothers, who provided a perfectly balanced biographical subject, of great interest and wide appeal.

But in fact, of course, there were four Knox brothers. Penelope Fitzgerald took the daring (and indeed characteristically loyal) decision to write about all of them, and all of them equally. The biography thus has a highly unusual and almost musical form: a string quartet. The brothers’ individual stories are not presented separately as four static portraits (perhaps the obvious biographical method). Instead, they are carefully interwoven and developed, with a novelist’s sense of their growing individuality and changing fraternal alliances.

Their story begins in a country rectory deep in rural Leicestershire of the 1880s: the ‘blue remembered hills’ of arcadian childhood. (p. 15) As Penelope Fitzgerald later said, in an interview for the Highgate Institution Newsletter, in 1997: ‘They were a vicarage family and vicarages were the intellectual powerhouses of nineteenth-century England.’ But soon, as the four brothers grow up in Edwardian England, each alarmingly clever with strong but increasingly distinctive personalities, Penelope Fitzgerald starts to switch her narrative from one to the other, obtaining penetrating effects of emotional contrast, suppressed rivalries and shifting loyalties.

These transitions are wonderfully well handled, as for example in their very different experiences in the First World War. One brother is in the trenches, another in Naval Intelligence, the third working as a priest in the East End, the fourth writing books of spiritual comfort (chapter five). There is a wonderful scene in which they all manage to meet up, for one evening in 1917, in Gatti’s restaurant in Mayfair, and drown their sorrows in champagne. (p. 139)

These contrasts immensely enrich and deepen the human scope of the biography. Though it remains a work of family history, it becomes something much broader. It is partly the vivid, humorous evocation of a lost England. But it is also a study in different kinds of human intelligence, and different kinds of virtue. One of the many things we learn, is that intelligence and virtue are not the same qualities at all. Another is that neither is very comfortable to live with. A third is that both may frustrate happiness.

The oldest, and the longest-lived brother, was her father Edmund Valpy Knox (1881–1971). Fitzgerald draws the portrait of a clever, handsome, clubbable man, a brilliant journalist, a lightverse writer, a survivor of Passchendaele, a legend in Fleet Street, universally and fondly known by his curiously perverse and unpronounceable pen-name – ‘Evoe’ of Punch. This was meant to be in the tradition of Lamb’s ‘Elia’, at the London Magazine. But Eddie used to complain that people were always referring to him as ‘Heave-Ho’. He was unfailingly generous and encouraging to young writers.

But Fitzgerald also hints shrewdly at a disappointed, and perhaps embittered man, driven in on himself by the early loss of his own mother, difficult and saturnine as a father, secretly feeling that his ambition to be a poet was never fulfilled by his ephemeral Fleet Street glories. The editor of Punch thought that real humour ‘lay not in ingenuity, but incongruity, particularly in relation to the dignified place that man has assigned to himself in the scheme of things.’ (p. 264) Years later his daughter, in the interview with Hermione Lee, would describe herself as ‘a depressive humourist, or a depressed humourist, which comes to the same thing.’

In strongest contrast was the youngest brother, her affectionate and even cleverer uncle, Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888–1957). Fitzgerald presents him as a conscious celebrity, the widely-read essayist, detective-story writer, Catholic apologist, Biblical translator and (significantly) pipe-smoker. He emerges as an odd mixture of childlike unworldliness, and powerful social ambition. He is the poverty-stricken socialite, the shabby chaplain visiting the great country houses of England, the golden friend of the Waughs and the Lovats and the Asquiths, who also lives in tiny, freezing, antiquated rooms at the Oxford University chaplaincy.

For some years Knox was considered by many to be the intellectual heir to Cardinal Newman in England. But in Fitzgerald’s wonderfully funny, but faintly subversive account he is always ‘Ronnie’, never Monsignor Ronald Knox. Ronnie ‘did not have Newman’s musical ear, nor his pastoral touch with ordinary people.’ Ronnie was always slightly in danger of being spoilt, or self-dramatising, or taking up poses (kneeling alone in the aisle). He ultimately played safe with his translation of the Bible, sticking close to the uninspiring Catholic Vulgate instead of returning to the original Greek and Hebrew texts, and so rendering ‘Peace on earth, good will towards men’ as what Fitzgerald calls the much more grudging ‘Peace on earth to men of goodwill.’ (p. 241)

Of course Ronnie was witty, intelligent, charming, modest to a fault. He was the greatest popular asset to English Catholicism of his generation. He was always ready to write engaging, religious articles for the newspapers (quickly to be turned into a never-ending stream of books). These articles, writes Fitzgerald carefully, ‘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.’ (p. 166)

The final, softly ironic landing of that last sentence suggests that Fitzgerald, in exploring the subtle ambiguities of Ronnie’s character, had quickly begun to find her mature style. This she would carry directly over into the humorous, subtle, understated portraits of her fiction. Indeed Ronnie Knox, himself an ironist and prose stylist of great finesse, seems to have inspired Penelope Fitzgerald by example.

Writing of his uneasy sojourn as the Catholic chaplain at Oxford in the 1930s, we find her entering into his persona, and imitating his voice, in a way that is perhaps closer to fiction than traditional biography. ‘He regarded himself, he said, as medieval rather than middle-aged, a man who refused to fly or go to the cinema and whose idea of the last really good invention was the toast-rack. Oxford, of all places, was prepared to tolerate such an attitude.’ (p. 210) It is fascinating to compare this with the much blander and more respectful accounts of Evelyn Waugh (1959), or Father Thomas Corbishley SJ (1964).

Next among the brothers, the closest in age to Eddie but the shortest lived, was Dillwyn Knox (1884–1943). In some ways he is the most enigmatic, and fascinating of all the Knoxes. He is the eminence grise behind the family, the austere Mycroft to Ronnie’s glamorous Sherlock. Fitzgerald unfolds his character slowly, expertly, appreciatively. First we become familiar with a tall, bespectacled, fiercely clever and donnish young man, with a biting wit and distant manner, who seems both withdrawn and imperious. His standard response to anything vaguely emotional or wrong-headed is, sharply, ‘Why do you say that?’ (p. 221) He is the dry, atheist scholar of Greek texts, a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, an aloof friend of Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey.

But as it turned out (and unknown even to his own family) Dillwyn was also a brilliant cryptographer. Recruited by the Admiralty to its top secret ‘Room 40’ in 1915, he broke the German naval flag-code in World War I; and in World War II he helped to ‘find the way in’ to Enigma at Bletchley Park, even as he was dying from cancer. Fitzgerald clearly admired this work and dedication enormously. It arose from a different kind of unworldliness, oblivious to praise or recognition, hugely conscious of duty and a different kind of virtue. She explains his cryptography at great length, and has brilliant perceptions of the kind of superb intelligence, hovering between poetry and mathematics, that it involved.

In Fitzgerald’s portrait, Dillwyn also slowly reveals an oddly romantic side to his nature, a natural grace and shy gallantry. He unexpectedly falls in love and marries one of his wartime secretaries from Room 40. Twenty-five years later, he somehow finds himself surrounded by particularly tall and pretty girls at Bletchley Park. He is instinctively kind to, and protective of, ‘the niece’ when she is an awkward teenager, unhappy at her school. Fitzgerald presents this in a brilliantly funny paragraph, rich with tenderness and ironies, and ending in a characteristically provoking epigram. (One needs to know that ‘Dilly’ loved cars, but was an appalling driver.)

‘The fates did not give Dilly a daughter, before whom, very likely, he would have been as helpless as he was without his spectacles. To his niece, confined for what seemed an eternity to a boarding school at nearby High Wycombe, where the girls, although their anatomy made it impracticable, were obliged to play cricket, Dilly was the kindest of visiting uncles. Agitated at having brought her back late in the Baby Austin, which seemed to spring and bounce along the road like a fawn, he bravely entered the precincts, blinking in the bright light, confronting the outraged housemistress, who said, “Rules are made to be kept,” with the answer: “But they are defined only by being broken.”’ (p. 191)

Finally there was Wilfred Knox (1886–1950), in some ways the most obscure, humble and unworldly of the brothers, yet also the most unbending and emphatic. Wilfred inherited the burning missionary zeal, but none of the Victorian pomp, of his bishop forebears. He was an Anglo-Catholic priest in the East End, a dedicated socialist, a fearless motor-bike rider, a welfare worker, an eccentric recluse and just possibly a saint.

He remained closest, not to the other priest in the family, Ronnie; but to the most worldly of his brothers, Edmund. He always came for family Christmas, when ‘the niece’ was there, and consumed huge helpings of brandy butter, the famous Knox ‘hard sauce’. He loved to go trout fishing in the summer with Eddie in Wales, his one other sensual indulgence. Fitzgerald shows a man of great spiritual honesty and simplicity; but also one of harsh impatience, extreme loneliness and cruel abruptness. Religious doctrine had divided him from Ronnie, and Fitzgerald guesses that the loss had damaged him emotionally for life. She quotes a fellow priest: ‘he somehow communicated with everyone a deep love from a broken, unloving man … Looking back now one realises how deeply he had been hurt, and how he hid behind his wit and apparent tartness.’ (p. 235)

Despite all this, or because of it, Wilfred finally became a Doctor of Divinity, a Fellow of the British Academy and an influential wartime university chaplain at Cambridge. He proved a natural pastor among the young. ‘The attendance in chapel, which a priest watches as carefully as an editor watches the circulation, went steadily higher.’ His demeanour, ‘a curious mixture of briskness and spirituality’, was so striking that one undergraduate recalled that the very sight of Wilfred silently wheeling an old bicycle through the Pembroke College gate, ‘helped me grow in the Christian faith.’ (p. 238)

So Penelope Fitzgerald builds a memorably rich, composite portrait of these four brilliant and unusual brothers, which is both moving and compelling. We are left with the tantalizing question: which one of the brothers was Penelope Fitzgerald’s favourite? It cannot be assumed that it was her own father, Edmund. It might, for example, have been Dillwyn. For beneath her bright, witty narrative, the biography allows for large areas of shadow, leaving deliberate zones of mystery, and moments of discretion. For instance, we only discover in passing asides, that Ronnie was actually disinherited by his father the Bishop; that Dillwyn’s marriage was unhappy; and that Edmund became ‘haunted’ and depressed by having to write his weekly article for Punch.

We are told that among the characteristics that they all shared, was the terrible ‘Knox Temper’. But perhaps we are slightly shielded from the causes of this, and how exactly it manifested itself – shouting? sulking? silent furies? It was known to terrify colleagues (Dillwyn’s), alarm fellow priests (Wilfred’s), and even drive the family dog out of the sitting room (Eddie’s). The reader can usefully consult the Index under ‘Knox Brothers: Collective Characteristics’, which also included love of pipe-smoking, Greek poetry, and steam-trains.

We never learn much of the two Knox sisters, Ethel and Winnie, though Winnie in particular clearly played a vital part in her brothers’ emotional lives. This reminds us that it is essentially the picture of a male world, and among Penelope Fitzgerald’s imaginative triumphs are the evocation of particular closed, long-lost, masculine societies: the Edwardian Cambridge of MR James, Housman and Lytton Strachey; the boisterous Fleet Street of the 1930s; the tense, cocoa-drinking, war-time nightlife of Bletchley Park. (p. 229)

In fact it is now clear how the Knox biography seemed to open the door directly into Fitzgerald’s own imaginative world, taking her from history to fiction. In the same year of its publication came her first novel, a murder mystery, The Golden Child (1977), followed almost immediately by The Bookshop (1978, using the Suffolk experience, including a poltergeist that she always claimed was genuine); and then Offshore (1979, using the Thames barge) which won the Booker Prize; and then Human Voices (1980, using the wartime BBC). In five years she had established herself as a major fiction writer. Afterwards, she only once returned to biography, in an intriguing life of the reclusive Victorian poet Charlotte Mew (1984).

Over a decade later, in her last two novels, Penelope Fitzgerald seemed to return to fictional versions of her Knox inheritance. The Gate of Angels (1990) is set precisely in an Edwardian Cambridge like Dillwyn’s, and begins with the incident of a bicycle accident that is close to a ‘romantic encounter’ described there by Ronnie. (p. 77–8) Moreover, its theme of the battle between intellect and emotions, one very close to Fitzgerald’s heart, is central to her picture of the Knox family. There are similar echoes in The Blue Flower (1995) – her wonderful last novel about Frederick von Hardenberg, the Romantic poet Novalis. The picture of the close-knit, brilliantly clever family of the Von Hardenbergs, although they are late-eighteenth-century members of the German aristocracy, bears considerable resemblance to the Knoxes.

It was this last book that bore an epigraph from Novalis himself, which Penelope Fitzgerald said she had come to love. ‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.’ But perhaps it could also be said, that novels sometimes arise out of the impulses of biography.

Foreword (#ulink_3e9db4e5-111e-532f-b599-2531a72af7fb)

IN THIS BOOK I HAVE DONE MY BEST to tell the story of my father and his three brothers. All four of them were characteristically reticent about themselves, but, at the same time, most unwilling to let any statement pass without question. I have tried to take into account both their modesty and their love of truth, and to arrive at the kind of biography of which they would have approved.

When I was very young I took my uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else in the world was not like them. Later on I found that this was not so, and eventually I began to want to make some kind of record of their distinctive attitude to life, which made it seem as though, in spite of their differences, they shared one sense of humour and one mind. They gave their working lives to journalism, cryptography, classical scholarship, the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church. Since I wrote this book twenty-three years ago all these professions, all these worlds, have changed. If the four of them could be reborn into the twenty-first century, how would it treat them? I can only be certain that they would stand by the (sometimes unexpected) things they said. Evoe, my father, muttered to me, on the way to my wedding, “The only thing I want is for everyone, as far as possible, to be happy.” Dillwyn: “Nothing is impossible.” Wilfred: “Get on with it”—also “Why should we not go on, through all eternity, growing in love and in our power to love?” Ronnie: “Do the most difficult thing.” I miss them all more than I can say.

I should never have got any way at all without the help and encouragement of my family, and the notes, letters and photographs which they lent me. I should like to begin by thanking my stepmother, Mary Knox, for all that she did, my brother, Rawle Knox, and my cousins Christopher and Oliver Knox, Tony Peck and Julian Peck.

Lord Oxford and Asquith most kindly let me use the large collection of unpublished material collected by the late Evelyn Waugh for his biography of Ronald Knox; to that brilliantly discreet work, and to the collection itself, I owe a very great deal. The bibliography of Ronald Knox’s published works, which he believed had grown too complicated even for the Recording Angel, has now been undertaken by Miss Patricia Cowan, who was good enough to lend me her copy.

I feel very real gratitude to Dr Alec Vidler, who found time to answer all my inquiries about Wilfred Knox, and to Professor Henry Chadwick, for his most helpful letter about Wilfred and The Sources of the Synoptic Gospels; to the late General Gustave Bertrand, who explained to me the early stages in the solving of Enigma; to Professor Gilbert Waterhouse and Professor W. H. Bruford, who told me about Room 40; to Mavis Batey, Helen Morris, Margaret Rock, and Peter Twinn, who most kindly and patiently re-created for me the strange world of Bletchley Park; to Richard Price, the historian of Punch; to Professor W. G. Arnott of Leeds University, and to Mr I. C. Cunningham, the most recent editor of Herodas; to the late Rev. Meredith Dewey, Dean of Pembroke; to David Kahn, the authority on codes and ciphers; to Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew all four of the brothers and was able to give me a detached opinion; to the late Dr A. N. L. Munby and the staff of King’s College Library, who let me read the unpublished autobiography of Nathaniel Wedd; to Mr P. J. Law, the librarian of Corpus, who showed me Dr Fowler’s letter-book, and to Dr John Lake, who made mathematics seem simple.

I should also like to take the opportunity to thank the following people, who, simply out of their affectionate memories of one or other of the Knoxes, wrote to me and helped me in many different ways: Canon Jack Bagley, O.G.S., Mr Ian Bailey (Manchester Grammar School), the Hon. Mrs Vera Birch, Canon Henry Brandreth, O.G.S., Mrs Susan Brooksbank, Mrs Patricia Chambers, Mrs Dorothy Collins, Mr John Cooper (Trinity College Library), Mr J. J. Creaven, the Very Rev. Horace Dammers, Dean of Bristol, Mr Robin Denniston, Mr Humphrey Ellis, Mr Laurence Elvin (Lincolnshire History and Tennyson Collection), Professor Herbert Farmer, the Rev. John Gillings, Mr Harry Golombek, Mrs Bridget Grant, Mr J. Green (Borough Librarian of Newham), Canon George Handisyde, Professor and Mrs Edgar Lobel, Canon Murray Macdonald, Mr Iain Mackenzie, Mr Leslie Marsh, Mr Hugh Mead (Librarian of St. Paul’s School), Miss Dionys Moore, Mrs Elsie Moseley (who remembers being chased round the lawn at Edmundthorpe by my uncles when they were all very small children), Dr Joseph Needham, the Rev. J. C. Neil-Smith, Mr Bernard Palmer (editor of the Church Times), Mr Pepys-Whiteley (Deputy Keeper, Magdalene College Library), the Rev. Richard Rawstorne, Mr Gilbert Spencer, R.A., Canon Robert Symonds, O.G.S., Canon George Tibbatts, O.G.S., Mr George Wansbrough, Mr Auberon Waugh, Mr Patrick Wilkinson. I am most grateful to Richard Garnett of Macmillan, who helped me through so many difficulties.

Finally, for this new edition I should like to thank Christopher Carduff for his energy, inspiration and patience.

Penelope Fitzgerald

15 March 2000