The Knox Brothers. Penelope Fitzgerald
habit of saying “a few seasonable words” to everyone they met, by his old-fashioned Rugby slang, mixed with phrases of classical Persian, and by his tendency to disappear entirely. On the day when they visited Lindisfarne it rained in torrents, and Edmund Knox thought it right to order a carriage, but “at the time of starting it was discovered that the Bishop had slipped away unnoticed.” Some three or four miles onward they overtook him “in his shirt-sleeves, dripping wet, his coat over his arm, trudging gallantly onwards.” He had forgotten everything in his desire to be at the scene of the ministry of St. Aidan. Worse still, he refused to calculate where, at the end of the day’s walk, they could get tea. The simple people of the country, he said, in the goodness of their hearts, would provide. This sometimes meant no tea at all. And yet it is something to have a saint in the family.
French resigned his bishopric, for reasons of ill-health, at the age of sixty-four. To the C.M.S. he was a “grand old campaigner” more in danger of going native than ever, a man who had friends among both Franciscans and Quakers, and who, during a recent tour of the Middle East, had shared an altar with a Chaldean priest. The Jansens still wondered whether unworldliness could not be carried too far, and were heartily thankful to hear of his retirement in 1889. Even French wondered “if perhaps my dear Lord and Master has no more need of me.” But in the following autumn, after much thought and prayer, he knew he must venture again. The Jansens were appalled to hear that he had been up to London to look at an exhibition of Stanley’s African medicine chest, so that he might choose the same brands himself. With little more than these and his book-bag, which he had carried himself over deserts and mountains and up the stairs at Kibworth Rectory, the old man set out in the November of 1890. He had no authority or backing. His destination was the whole Arab world, simply to tell them, even if no one accepted it, that Christ loved them and had died for them.
In this spirit he reached the holy city of Kairouan, where, dressed as a mullah in cloak, burnous and shawl, he sat down to teach at the outer gate of the Mosque. The Bishop of Jerusalem urged him, for his own safety, to move to Cairo. There he met a young missionary, Alexander Maitland, whom he had ordained himself, and who gave up everything to be with him and to accompany him to the Red Sea coast. They lived on dates and early oranges, and French took a quantity of Bibles in the folds of his burnous, to distribute where he could.
In February they reached Muscat, the capital of Oman, a little gap in a sea-wall of sheer rock, rising to six thousand feet. In that scorching climate, the Arabs say, the sword melts in the scabbard. The British India Company’s steamers called only once a fortnight. French and Maitland were not expected and knew nobody. The consul begged them to leave. They had to take refuge in two dirty rooms over a Portuguese grog-shop, and there they read and prayed together, and Maitland managed as best he could. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he wrote to Mrs. French. “I was glad to wash plates for the Bishop.”
Maitland had the heavy responsibility of the old man, who disappeared, as he had done at Lindisfarne, without warning, to preach in the bazaar. Because of the danger of violence and stoning, he would not let his young friend accompany him there. After a month Maitland, who was consumptive, was overcome by the heat and had to go back to Cairo. The servant he had hired soon deserted, and French was left quite alone.
“As a villager told me the other day,” he wrote to his wife, “I am no Englishman but an Arab! I shall be in danger of becoming an alien, not to my own children I trust even then, and grandchildren. With a tanned and dyed skin, however, and added wrinkles, even Ethel and Eddie might fail to recognise grandpapa. . . . So Eddie has begun his schooldays! May they be days he will look back upon with happy thankfulness and joy hereafter . . .”
The ink dried, he added, before he could put pen to paper; he was living “like a sparrow on the housetops.” Occasionally he found a listener, who would stay for a reading of the gospel. He was trying to lay in a little store of biscuits “so as not to be at the mercy of the people I may be amongst.”
It was true that schooldays had started at Kibworth. While their sisters studied with a governess, and lay down every day on a blackboard to give them a good posture, Eddie and Dilly walked over to Mr. Rogers’s school in the village. Eddie had begun on Kennedy’s Latin grammar; there were more inexplicable runes for Wilfred to repeat in the nursery: “Caesar adsum jam forte—Caesar had some jam for tea.”
Dilly was the mathematician, to the amazement of his father, who had not been able to make head or tail of the Merton College accounts. Dilly could not balance his accounts (twopence a week pocket-money) either, but he did not have to “do” sums, he “saw” them.
Meanwhile, the tender messages from their grandfather had ceased. No more letters came from Muscat. It was only later that they were able to follow his last wanderings, from Muttrah up the coast to Sib, from which place he hoped to journey into the interior. He had set out in a fishing-boat, under the blazing sun, with his book-bag. Agents of the Sultan, who deeply respected the strange old fakir, were deputed to keep watch over him, but they could do nothing when they found him insensible, still with a book in his hand. When they picked him up to bring him back to Muscat they found he weighed almost nothing. He died on 14 May; his body was prepared for burial by a group of Goanese Catholics, who had heard of him and his mission, although he did not know them.
“God had not left him the measure of strength he hoped to have,” Maitland wrote to Mrs. Knox, “but that could only be proved by experience.” He arranged for the burial in the northernmost of the two coves of the Bay of Muscat, at the foot of the cliffs. It was wild and barren, but a kind of shrub with pink flowers grew there. He painted on the gravestone the words: He endured as seeing Him who is invisible. French’s biographer noted that “the grave is under the protection of a British gunboat, so there is little likelihood it will ever meet with neglect.”
At Kibworth the children were put into black clothes, and a new game—Caves in Arabia—was added to the nursery, played by any one of them who wanted to get away from the others. The effect on their mother of her father’s lonely death was profound. It led directly to an upheaval and to the end of their first happy period of childhood.
EDMUND KNOX HAD TAKEN ORDERS because he felt God called him to do so. But to enter the mid-Victorian Church meant both more and less than this. “The plain fact is,” his son Ronnie wrote, half a century later, “that while England led the world, and the Church of England was the expression of its national life, there was a monumental quality about the partnership which, do what you would, laid hold of the imagination. Anglicanism fitted into the landscape, was part of the body politic.”
To become one of its ministers was to join a legal establishment which influenced those who governed, to take responsibility for the souls of a great empire, and to make effective judgments in peace and war. That might mean a disputed loyalty. Knox, the scholarship boy whose education had cost one shilling, was a passionate supporter of free education, but a stout opponent of the government’s long-drawn-out attack on the Church schools. Again, when he became rector of Kibworth, it was assumed that, as a mild Tory, he would settle down comfortably in that heavy clay country and become a squire’s parson. But nothing of the kind happened.
Edmund’s heart sank when he saw the farm-laborers, in their smocks and tall hats, waiting outside the church so that “the quality” could go in first. He did not feel at ease with such a system, and longed for a wider scope, if not abroad, then in one of the great industrial cities. In 1891 he received from the Trustees of Aston-juxta-Birmingham (who were mostly Evangelicals) an offer of preferment. Aston was a huge, built-over, crowded industrial district, known to the world only through its football team, Aston Villa.
On a preliminary visit he found the vicarage, after making a number of inquiries, “in a dark and narrow street, set in a maze of smoke-begrimed small houses.” Edmund was