marry yer today—
My wife won’t let me!
When their father arrived he could hardly credit the vulgar gaiety, so different is the measure of heartbreak in adults and children. He hastily inaugurated new amusements—cricket on the sands, as far as possible from Uncle Sam, and expeditions to neighbouring churches. The next year Aunt Emily’s nerves and health failed, and he had to take them himself to the Isle of Man. “But of course,” he wrote, “it was evident that while I might be able to manage a parish, I was a poor hand at controlling the high spirits and caring for the costumes and manners of so charming and irresponsible a party. ‘Garters’ I remember as a special trial. They were always missing!”
Although Knox’s pastoral work flourished, the rectory at Aston grew more seedy and neglected with every passing month. The furniture was engrained with soot, the drawing room shut up, the cupboards full of mislaid or broken articles. The boys were beginning to resemble savages, speaking Latin and Greek. There was no help for it, the home would have to be broken up. At this point the Bishop of Worcester, Perowne, an old friend of Bishop French, sent for Knox and offered him a new appointment—the parish of St Philip’s, Birmingham, with the post of Bishop Suffragan of Coventry.
It would be a considerable responsibility—another vast district, a diocese with only one minister to every five thousand of the population. In his own words, “it became evident that I must marry again.” The whole rich supporting background of Victorian churchgoing—the parish workers, the lay readers, the churchwardens, the Gospel Temperance meetings, the missions, the men’s Bible classes—everyone, up to the Bishop himself, knew that Knox could not go on without a wife.
She would have to be vicarage born and bred, or she could hardly face the huge city diocese, administered from Coventry, as Knox knew, “by the most charming of old-fashioned clergy, whose interest in Birmingham was, to say the best, tepid.” All the work and duty would be his. As a husband, he was now a man of forty-seven, growing bald and very stout, his natural geniality under a cloud, barely solvent as a result of his many charities and building activities, and chronically overworked. He would never marry without love and respect, and that meant respect, also, for his uncouth children. Many, however, were undaunted. Out of the unmarried lady church workers of Aston, few would have refused the new Suffragan Bishop. Here was another difficulty. From this aspect, Edmund Knox was in need of rescue.
Through Bishop Perowne, he was invited several times to meet Canon Newton, the Vicar of Redditch—a kind of vicar quite outside Knox’s experience, because he had inherited an absurdly large sum of money and had not given it away, but lived in comfort, even luxury. Horace Newton went deer-stalking every year on his own moor in the West Highlands, travelling from Glasgow on his own steam-yacht; he built a vast holiday mansion there, Glencrippsdale, and, since the vicarage was much too small for him, another one at Redditch. This house, Holmwood, had been designed for him by Temple Moore at the beginning of his career as an architect.
At Holmwood there was ample room for his six daughters and his long-wished-for son, and the handsome family moved like the Shining Ones in this appropriate setting. In Scotland the girls rode and fished, but always gallantly and high-heartedly, enjoying risk, but not taking it seriously. As vicar’s daughters, and sincere Christians, they undertook the parish duties, but admitted frankly that they found them very boring. They remained serene, never pretending. They had style.
The eldest of them, Ethel Mary, was a graceful and handsome young woman with blue eyes, an airily penetrating blue gaze before which affectation collapsed. Her uncle, Richard Wilton, a minor Victorian poet, wrote a sonnet on her photograph:
Since through the open window of the eye
The unconscious secret of the soul we trace
And character is written on the face,
In this sun-picture what do we descry? …
Courage, certainly. Wilton also refers to “the gentle current of thy days”, but this was soon to be interrupted.
In 1894 Ethel was twenty-seven, with many admirers, one of them a wealthy cousin. She could certainly have “looked above” Edmund Knox. This was in spite of the fact that Canon Newton settled no money at all on his daughters when they married. Why should he? His own wife, their mother, had been penniless, and they were perfectly happy. He did not give the girls any formal education either. They were taught music and languages, spoke French, and picked up the rest of their knowledge from the books in the library. Ethel had learned classical Greek, but simply because she wanted to.
Was it possible that she would consider marriage with Edmund? Not much less romantic than the day when he bought the rose on the station platform, he decided that if Ethel accepted an invitation to his consecration at St Paul’s Cathedral, that would mean that she had given him encouragement to hope. “It proved,” he wrote, “that I was right, to my own unspeakable gain.”
But would it be a gain for Ethel? She had not yet met the children, to whom, after all, she must be stepmother. Determined to risk everything, Edmund Knox arranged to bring the whole lot of them to Holmwood for the New Year of 1895.
The Newtons, meeting them at the station, gave no sign of dismay, for that would have been unkind, and they were never unkind. The Knox children looked like scarecrows, or remnants from a jumble sale, the girls in all-purpose black frocks, two sizes too large to allow for growth, Ronnie and Wilfred in grotesque black suits, handsewn by their grandmother’s maid at Edmundthorpe. The six of them clung together awkwardly, too shy to find the right words. They had known them at Kibworth, but had forgotten them since. For their part, they stared almost in disbelief at the house to which they had been brought. Holmwood was in the highest style of the Arts and Crafts movement, with stone-framed lattice windows and steep slate roofs, the haunt of doves in summer, now deep in snow. Once inside the white-painted hall they saw shining floors, Gimson furniture, Morris chintzes, and a staircase sweeping upward to the glass dome of the house. A blazing wood fire drew out the scent of hothouse plants. And where did the light come from? None of the children had ever seen electric light in a house before. When Wilfred and Ronnie were put to bed they sat in their nightgowns, taking strict turns, as they always did, to turn it on and off, and nobody told them to stop.
At dinnertime, under the glowing lights, the Newton girls wore Liberty gowns of velveteen; they were beautiful, the house was beautiful—in the boys’ terms, “awfully jolly”. Faced unequivocally with beauty, the older children recognized at last a starvation they had never known by name. It was strange territory. They felt humiliated most of all when, as they usually did at home, they began to quarrel, punching and pulling each other’s hair to emphasize their points. The Newtons said nothing in reproach, they simply went away; no one ever quarrelled, or even raised their voices, at Holmwood.
“It never occurred to me,” Winnie wrote, “for we had no idea why this treat had come our way, that upstairs slender forms in satin dressing-gowns were slipping in and out of their charming bedrooms to murmur to my future stepmother: ‘Ethel, darling, you can’t possibly face that family.’ But luckily for us expostulations were useless.” Ethel would never have given Edmund Knox encouragement if she had not intended to carry off everything in her stride. She wanted to do this, just as she had wanted to learn Greek. The family never let her forget the entry she made in her diary on her wedding day. Finished the Antigone. Married Bip.
All that could be done in the way of improvement she did, rapidly and tactfully. Her first task was the decoration of St Philip’s Rectory, a good large house in the very centre of Birmingham, but with no garden, only a small backyard. This was a further restriction for the children, and a real sacrifice to the Bishop, an expert gardener. As to the rooms, St Philip’s would never be much like Holmwood, but it could be painted
