Raging inferno: the 1867 fire at Croydon Parish Church destroyed hundreds of years of records, tombs and artefacts. Young Edmund Knox was among the first on the scene
CROYDON CHRONICLES: From the night of the Great Fire of Croydon, DAVID MORGAN tells the story of a family of vicars and bishops, of writers and editors, and Enigma codebreakers
The fire which destroyed Croydon Parish Church in 1867 had a lasting impact on many people. One of them was a teenager at the time who lived near the church and who saw the flames from his home and ran to see if there was anything he could do to help.
Edmund Knox was living in Waddon. He attended the Parish Church and quickly realised the significance of the event unfolding before his eyes. He is reported to have said that the vicar, Rev John Hodgson, would have to be woken and be told of the catastrophe.
Knox lived with his family in a house near the River Wandle and was brought up in a strict household, dominated by religious faith, “in a spartan fashion”.
His father was the Rev George Knox, and his mother was Frances Reynolds, the daughter of George Reynolds, a prominent local Quaker. It was Foster Reynolds, her grandfather, who had purchased an estate in Carshalton through which the River Wandle flowed.
The Reynolds family ran some extensive bleaching fields using the water from the Wandle, with up to 50 acres of land at one time covered with linen which was kept damp by labourers who constantly patrolled the area using scoops to take water out of the network of shallow ditches.
Lifelong churchman: Edmund Knox, photographed in later life when he was Bishop of Manchester
Rev George Knox had begun his ministerial life in 1837 as a curate in Wales, before sailing to India two years later to take up a post as chaplain in the East India Company. In December 1844, he married Frances, “a pious quaker”, at Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, on the south-east coast. They had eight children – four sons and four daughters. Edmund, the second son, was born in Bangalore in 1847.
The family returned to England in 1855, at first living in London in Bentinck Street, Marylebone, before moving to Waddon when their father was appointed as Association Secretary of the Church Missionary Society.
Waddon, in those days, was not much more than a hamlet, consisting of a few cottages, some substantial houses, a farm and a mill. Initially, the Knox family moved into one of the cottages, which had the reputation of being linked with smuggling. This was due to a shallow cupboard which, when opened, revealed an entrance to “a good sized room”.
The cottage was really too small and the Knox family soon moved to one of the larger houses on the estate, with a coach house, a paddock and a garden. The brick-walled garden was a suntrap which allowed the fruiting of peaches, apricots and greengages. The family employed three maids, a cook, a housemaid and an old Cornish nurse.
According to the 1861 Census, the family included four sons and two daughters.
Carshalton estate: the Knox family lived in property on an estate bought by Edmund Knox’s maternal great-grandfather, which used the waters of the River Wandle to bleach linen
On a Sunday, they would walk as a group, parents, children and servants, 13 of them, to Croydon Parish Church. It was a large church, but more people wanted to attend than there was space in the pews. The Knox family were allocated only six seats in the gallery. The rest had to find seating where they could.
On the fateful night in January 1867, by the time Edmund Knox had run to the blazing church, the tower was alight and there was nothing that could be done to save it.
As an old man, Edmund Knox would reflect on his time at the old Parish Church. He remembered sitting and pondering about the Archbishops of Canterbury who were buried there, the sort of men they were and the lives they led. This was hardly surprising from a young man who had a vicar for a father and a grandfather. He remembered the parish church sermons as being dull, but “unimpeachably orthodox”.
Edmund Knox was a bright young man. He attended St Paul’s School in London as a day pupil, his academic performance earning him free tuition. He won a scholarship to Oxford in 1865, much to the satisfaction of his father, meaning that he never had to pay a penny for any of Edmund’s education. After being awarded a first-class degree, Edmund Knox won a clerical fellowship to Merton College in 1869, where he studied modern history and was ordained as a vicar the following year.
Bishop of Lahore: Thomas French
In 1878, he married Ellen French. Her father, Rev Thomas Valpy French, was then serving as the first Anglican Bishop of Lahore. His father-in-law was a much more zealous missionary than his father ever was. Thomas French died in 1891 in Muscat, aged 66, still preaching to the occasional Muslim who deigned to listen to a messenger of the gospel.
Edmund Knox’s career in the church was to take him to the high office of bishop. From being Dean of Merton College, Oxford, he served successively as Rector of Kibworth Beauchamp, Leicester, vicar of Aston, Birmingham, honorary canon of Worcester Cathedral and Archdeacon of Birmingham, holding the last two posts for just a few months each.
Knox recalled his time at Kibworth and especially the Rectory: “It was a house of which Jane Austen’s Mrs Elton would have approved, with its lofty hall and reception rooms, its bay windows looking out on the rectory garden and fields, its shrubbery with a marvellous wealth of acolites, primroses of all shades of colour and wild violets.”
In 1903 Knox was appointed as the fourth Bishop of Manchester, holding this post until his resignation in 1921.
As the Bishop of Manchester, Knox made his mark. He was a caring, dedicated man who worked long hours for his flock.
One of the most important areas of his work was education. Knox was chair of the education committee in Birmingham before moving to Manchester. In 1906, the Liberal government tried to bring in new legislation to address the religious disputes in schools created by the 1902 Education Act. The Bill faced great opposition from both Anglican and Catholic churches. Knox led a march to London against the proposals which helped to change minds and defeat the Bill.
As well as Knox’s own achievements, members of his family achieved great things, too.
Booker Prize-winner: author Penelope Fitzgerald was the granddaughter of Edmund Knox
His sister Ellen, who died in February 1924, was the principal of Havergal Hall Ladies’ College, Toronto, for 30 years. She also achieved much acclaim as a writer, publishing The Girl of the New Day and other books, such as Bible Lessons for Schools. She never forgot her Waddon roots.
Edmund’s brother George, who was knighted in 1906 and made a Companion of the Order of the Star of India in 1917, was a High Court judge who worked in Allahabad, now called Prayagraj, in Uttar Pradesh. Gifted in languages, he was able to work without using translators.
Knox’s own children also made significant impacts in the literacy, academic and ecclesiastical worlds.
His children were greatly affected by the death of their mother in 1891. They were cared for by various relatives until, in 1895, Knox remarried. His new wife, Ethel Newton, was 20 years younger than Knox, but reunited all the children under her wise care.
Two of Knox’s boys, Wilfred and his younger brother Ronald, had been looked after by their grandmother. They came back “as solemn little boys wearing horrid black suits fashioned by their grandmother’s maid”. Both flourished under the care of their stepmother and went into the church.
Ronald was to become the more famous of the two, converting to Catholicism in 1917, much against his father’s will. Monsignor Knox was a chaplain to undergraduates at Oxford for many years and was a mentor to Harold Macmillan. He published a translation of The Bible together with many books and was a regular broadcaster on BBC radio.
Wilfred was ordained in 1915 and was the Warden of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd in Cambridge for many years, a community set up “to support a disciplined celibate life of prayer and study while remaining active in University life”. He became an outspoken representative of the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Anglican church.
Two other siblings achieved their fame through very different routes. Edmund George Vaply Knox, Edmund and Ellen’s eldest son, was born in 1881. Known as EV Knox, he became a poet and satirist who was the editor of Punch magazine from 1932 until 1949. He wrote under the pseudonym of Evoe. His facial features may be seen in the face of Mr Banks in the Mary Poppins books, which included the illustrations of his second wife Mary Shepard (the daughter of EH Shepard who famously drew for the Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows).
Working for Punch, EV Knox was obliged to write about golf: “Golf is played with a number of striking implements more intricate in shape than those used in any form of recreation except dentistry.”
Poet and satirist: EV Knox
His daughter Penelope Fitzgerald was also a writer who won the Booker Prize in 1979 for her novel Offshore. Fitzgerald wrote a biography of her father and his three brothers, called The Knox Brothers.
One of those brothers, Alfred Dillwyn Knox, was a classics scholar, papyrologist and a significant codebreaker in both world wars. Known as Dilly Knox, in 1915, during World War I, he joined Room 40 in The Admiralty. There, he excelled in deciphering German naval signals and broke the German Admiral’s cypher. He also helped to decrypt the Zimmermann Telegram which brought the United States into the war.
In 1919, Royal Navy and War Office intelligence services were combined to form GCCS – the Government Code and Cypher School, the predecessor to the modern-day GCHQ.
Chief cryptologist Knox continued to decode and decipher material from Europe. By the time of World War II, they were working at Bletchley Park. Knox set up the team, managed by John Jeffreys, to follow up the Polish “Netz” method of breaking Enigma as well as encouraging Alan Turing to develop the Bombe machine which was to be the main tool for breaking the Enigma keys.
As he lay dying of cancer in 1943, his brother Ronald came to pray outside his room. Dilly, an atheist, said: “Is that Ronnie still out there bothering god in the passageway?”
Edmund Knox’s youngest daughter Winifred became a writer and novelist. Styled Lady Peck from 1938, she wrote her first book at the age of 27 on the life of Louis, the French Sun King, before starting on a new career as a novelist 10 years later. Of her 25 books, two detective mysteries were completed, The Warrielaw Jewel and Arrest the Bishop.
The Knox family story is an amazing one, from the Croydon Parish Church fire of 1867 to the Bletchley Park Enigma codebreakers, with a Booker Prize and Punch editor thrown in for good measure.
I wonder what they did find in their Waddon cottage in the cupboard which opened into a room?
David Morgan, pictured right, has been chronicling Croydon’s history for Inside Croydon for almost a decade. Morgan is a former Croydon headteacher, now the volunteer education officer at Croydon Minster, who offers tours or illustrated talks on the history around the Minster for local community groups
If you would like a group tour of Croydon Minster or want to book a school visit, then ring the Minster Office on 020 688 8104 or go to the website on www.croydonminster.org and use the contact page
Some previous articles by David Morgan:
- The wartime night that the ‘first lady of jazz’ sang for Croydon
- Music Hall performer whose potato song helped the war effort
- The church fire that consumed a thousand years of history
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