with Free Trade I shall instruct him to introduce a bill for spelling reform.” No alterations were to be undertaken at St Philip’s Rectory until Wilfred had come home to direct the workmen with a few well-chosen words, and if too many visiting clergymen arrive, he advises that it will be best to poison them with white arsenic.
In contrast to this, Wilfred showed the humility of the “in-between” child in a large family when he insisted that he doesn’t need a new bicycle—the old Raleigh will do quite well “for something I have always rather wanted to do, ride back from Rugby to Birmingham,” and his only request for new clothes is when the time comes for him to sit for his University scholarship.
The problem which had begun to occupy Wilfred’s inmost thoughts was moral and social, rather than religious. It was the question of poverty, which concerned him at the simplest and perhaps the only important level: is it tolerable that anyone should be truly poor? At Edmundthorpe he had asked Aunt Fanny whether it was right that the village children should be lifting potatoes until it was too dark to see, and had received the reply, “Nonsense, Wilfred! It will teach them habits of industry!” Since then he had seen the frightening slum poverty of Aston, where the women gathered round the stalls on Friday nights to fight for scraps of bone and offal. He did not, of course, underestimate his father’s tireless work in the grimy parish, but the Evangelical Movement, with all its wonderful record of service to humanity, did not go as far as Wilfred wanted. He felt that a new century needed a new direction.
Of all the older boys at Rugby, the one who had impressed him most had been Billy Temple. Temple, even as a schoolboy, had steadfastly refused to discuss “the Christian solution” for any specific problem; there was only one solution, and that was a total change of heart in society. From this idea, for which he had an ungrudging respect, and from what he had read of Ruskin and F. D. Maurice, Wilfred, at the age of seventeen, began to arrive at his own vision of the socialism of the future. In March 1903 he wrote to Ronnie about the Woolwich by-election in which Will Crooks, brought up in the workhouse, had just won the seat for Labour in what had always been considered a safe Conservative stronghold. Ronnie was not sure whether to rejoice or not. He was struggling, for his part, with a “Sunday Question” on the subject “What do you understand by Socialism and by the doctrines of Nietzsche?” Ronnie’s suggestion was that the poor and habitually unemployed might be shipped to Canada “or other places”. “This would only be applicable to the young,” Mr Goodhart wrote in the margin.
In the August of 1903 Wilfred and Ronnie were sent abroad together on a trip down the Rhine in the perennial hope of parents that they would “improve their German”. They were to photograph the churches and to keep a Tagebuch. They began by drawing up elaborate rules and regulations for calculating the number of lemon squashes consumed and the probable weight of the very stout German ladies on the boat. The tramway systems were, they thought, unimpressive, but they dutifully did the sights. Cologne was “clean but papistical”—and Ronnie, very much the junior, was made to sew on Wilfred’s buttons. The diary soon became light-headed:
August 5: Wilfie asks for beer at Gurzenich restaurant. Thrown downstairs. [Ronnie] … Ronnie evicted from St. Somebody’s by sacristan for sitting on tomb and intoning from Baedeker during mass. [Wilf] … W. excommunicated by Archbp. of Cologne for photographing him in Compline. [Ronnie] … Pulled Archbp’s mitre about his ears and beat him with a beadle’s bargepole. [Wilf] … Got W. out of military prison on plea of insanity. [Ronnie] …
As the trip went on, however, Ronnie grew serious. Not very sensitive, in later life, to the language of painting, he was touched, during those hot summer days, by the unmistakably direct appeal of what religious pictures he saw. On 16 August he wrote: “We went to the church of Notre Dame in Bruges, where there is a glorious Van Dyke Crucifixion with a very dark background and no one else except Our Lord in the picture. It makes one feel terribly lonely.” Although Ronnie, as he wrote in A Spiritual Aeneid, “then as always dreaded the undue interference of emotion in religion,” he bought a small silver crucifix in Bruges which he put first on the wall, then on his watch chain, then round his neck. Such an object had never been seen before at St Philip’s Rectory. He found himself responsive also to the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. “I should like books for presents; obscurer English poets, esp. before and just after the Revolution,” he wrote to Mrs K. He was still very ready to become a finished product of Eton; he still valued highly the power of Etonian understatement. (The best reproof for a violent offender, A. C. Benson tells us, is “I believe, Smith, we do not see you quite at your best today.”) Ronnie’s heart was given to Eton, but it was also open to the poetry of Henry Vaughan and his emblems of light and “dazzling darkness”, the night-time when “spirits their fair kindred catch”. He read for the first time, and memorized, Vaughan’s “Peace”:
My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a wingèd sentry
All skilful in the wars …
But the book which moved him most at this time was a present from his sister Winnie, a volume of unashamedly sentimental short stories, Hugh Benson’s The Light Invisible, a book abounding in wise, tobacco-stained old priests, one of whom tries and fails to save a child in danger of being crushed by a cart: an angel appears and gently guides the child, not away from, but underneath the wheels. This story particularly struck Ronnie. We have no idea what God intends for us; we have no right to ask for safety, perhaps we do not even know what it is. A lifelong enthusiasm for unpopular causes awoke in him. He borrowed a history of the Tractarian Movement, and, as he put it, “trembled for Newman, mourned for him as lost to the Church, and rose with the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the circles I moved in, there was a cause for which clergymen had been sent to prison and noble lives spent; a cause which could be mine.” To his father, to all the Evangelical homes of his childhood, the Tractarians were traitors from which English Christianity must be rescued. Ronnie’s changing views were “known at home, and doubtless regretted”, but he was only sixteen, the favourite child, the youngest, and these notions of his would surely pass.
Meantime the Bishop’s field of activity grew even wider when he was appointed, in the autumn of 1903, to the see of Manchester. He accepted by return of post, knowing that Balfour’s ministry might fall and the offer might not be repeated by a new Prime Minister less favourable to the Evangelicals. The bishopric had been constituted only fifty years earlier, and covered a huge district of east and central Lancashire, caring for three million souls. The great Lancashire battle to keep its own religious education, of which the Bishop was to be a staunch champion, had only just begun. There were unshepherded multitudes in Blackpool, where in Wakes Week the landladies let their beds for half the night, then put in a new relay of holidaymakers while the first lot were turned out in the backyard. Manchester, with God’s help, would be a worthy opportunity for his energy and splendid powers of organization.
Ronnie, who had rather expected “fatal opulence”, as though the Knoxes were entering a new chapter of Barchester Towers, was a little dashed to be told by Mrs K. that “it wouldn’t make much difference; it would make much more if we all got scholarships.” Perhaps even she was disconcerted by a moving day of such formidable proportions—it was during this move that Wilfred’s Bits of Old Churches were finally dispersed—and still more by the sight of Bishopscourt, the family’s new home in Manchester.
Dear Father [Ronnie wrote],
I told you that I didn’t want us to be better off, but only not worse off, so I am quite happy. Besides, you speak as if keeping a carriage was a necessary expense without any remuneration; but if we have a carriage we save cab-fares. Again, if we keep a garden, no more (or at any rate a little less) need to buy vegetables; even extra hospitality always has its remains; with charity the gain is purely moral. So we are practically better off.
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