Piety and wit

During the second world war, while one brother was editing Punch as a national institution (‘Working with him was a little like helping to edit the Journal of Hellenic Studies,’ said a colleague), and another brother, given to asking questions like ‘Which way does a clock go round?’, was breaking codes at Bletchley (as an interlude to piecing together fragments of the Greek low-life mime writer Herodas), Ronald Knox was translating the Bible.

He did this at Aldenham Park, where he lived as a weekend guest who stayed for ten years, thanks to the hospitality of Lord Acton (whose grandfather was the historian) and more particularly Daphne, Lady Acton (whose grandfather had discovered argon), with whom he was sort of in love. There were also 55 evacuated convent girls staying in the house.

‘Sort of’ in love because Knox, or Ronnie as everyone called him, had determinedly switched off the gene that expresses sexuality at the age of 17 when he knelt down in the cloisters at Eton and vowed to God that he would remain celibate all his life, which he did. From a previously unpublished preface, addressed to Sligger Urquhart of Balliol, to his early memoirs, A Spiritual Aeneid (written in 1917 when he was 29), you might think he was in love with all the young men who were killed in the war: ‘Laurence coming back all flushed from playing tennis… or Douglas, in those preposterous trousers, or Julian with hardly any clothes on, cracking his whip’.

Yet nothing improper occurred, then, or during his years, 1926–38, as Catholic chaplain at Oxford. Emotionally, Knox needed the company of a woman, which, after Daphne Acton had gone safely to Rhodesia, Providence found for him in the person of Katharine Asquith, then in her sixties, with whom he stayed from 1947 for the last decade of his life at lovely Mells in Somerset.