They Knew Mr Knight

Brilliant Mrs Whipple strikes again

As I slowly work my way through the Persephone catalogue, I’m delighted to come across another classic by Dorothy Whipple. I’ve written about her before:

The enchanting Mrs Whipple

but this time I’ve been reading They Knew Mr Knight, published originally by John Murray in 1934, and later (1945) made into a film. Like others of her works, it is set in Nottingham, where she lived, disguised as Trentham, and is a family tale, told primarily from the point of view of Celia Blake, a woman in her forties, wife of an engineer, Thomas, and mother of three teenagers, Freda, Ruth and Douglas. The story opens late in the 1920s, the shadow of the Great War still hanging over families. Thomas Blake is the managing director of a local engineering business originally established by his grandfather, and lost to the family ownership in his youth owing to his father’s incompetence. All Thomas wants in life is to somehow get the company back: and fate delivers him into the path of Mr Knight, local boy made good, in fact made extremely wealthy, in ways that no-one quite understands.

The plot is simple and predictable: Mr Knight is a proxy for the devil, and Thomas comes close to selling his soul to the man. For a few years the compact holds, and Thomas and his family reap rewards beyond their wildest dreams, climbing up through Society, moving house and enjoying the fruits of hard work, enhanced by Thomas’s financial speculations (egged on by Knight). But as we move into the 1930s, we can guess where this is going. Knight has much in common with those financiers of the great Victorian novels, Melmotte and Merdle, but also with Golspie of Priestley’s great novel of the 1920’s, Angel Pavement. The 1920s and 30’s saw middle class England gripped by the horror of the Depression, of business failure, of boom and bust, and both Priestley and Whipple write poignantly about the naivety, and tragedy, of honest folk caught in the coils of the trickster, the self-made man with no morals, and no compunction in taking everyone down with the ship.

Of course, They Knew Mr Knight is not just a tale of sharp business practices. Whipple does what she does best, she inserts herself into the heart of a family that we all recognise, not perfect by any means, but initially content in its own way. But it is the secret dreams and aspirations that will tempt them away from safety: Thomas wants to be master of his own business again; and at the other end of the scale of aspiration, his eldest daughter Freda wants to rise out of mean and dirty Trentham into the glamorous world she has glimpsed in the cinema and the magazines, her ambition concentrated on getting a permanent wave in her hair, against her mother’s wishes.

C. Nestle Permanent Hair Waving Machine, illustration from An Illustrated History of Hairstyles, by Marian I. Doyle.

We don’t get to see much of Mr Knight, although we know that Celia comes to hate him ‘He’s a gross, sensual grabber. I think he’s revolting’, she says to her husband, appalled by what she has inadvertently learnt of his personal life. But by then it is too late and Thomas is up to his neck in debt, mostly held by Knight himself. Even Thomas should have been warned: early in their relationship, he has a nightmare that he is showing Knight round his factory and in the lights of the forge, sees Knight transformed into the face of a grinning devil.

It is Mrs Knight we see most of, as she takes ambititous, dreamy Freda under her wing. She is a lonely women with no children of her own:

In her anxiety to ‘keep her husband’ as she would have put it, Mrs Knight had thought it safer to bank a figure rather than a family, and Mr Knight had gone anyway. She had not been mistaken in her husband; he still appreciated a figure; but not hers.

Once a music hall starlet, Miss Maudie Valentine, Mrs Knight is now a prisoner of her undergarments:

Mrs Knight did not move easily; her corsets would not let her. The physical endurance of stout, restricted women is not sufficiently realised or admired.

And indeed, her loneliness is compounded by the knowledge that her husband keeps a string of mistresses. Thomas knows this too: he has seen the couch in his business partner’s office, but he chooses to hide these ‘feet of clay’ from his wife.

Whipple is particularly good at capturing women in just one or two sentences. There is Thomas’s miserable, disappointed widowed mother: ‘She couldn’t discard anything in her life. She kept all her old worries and added new ones to them.’ Then there is the appalling neigbour Mrs Greene, who ‘knew how to knock the confidence out of most people with a glance…If they were in doubt about a new hat, when they met Mrs Greene they were doubtful no longer.’ There is the Blakes’ eldest daughter Freda, not very bright, with no idea of what she wants to do in the world, and a determination to do nothing that will contribute to the family. She refuses to get a job when she leaves school: ‘She must have her own life, she said. What this life was, her mother could not make out, it was no sort of life that anybody else could define. A great deal of it seemed, to Celia, to be spent in yawning and saying there was nothing to do.’ A sentiment only too familiar to parents of teenagers today.

The line that struck me most, though, was Celia’s own description of the feelings of the middle-aged woman whose children are leaving home and no longer need her: for the women who have devoted their whole lives to being mother (and wife), it’s a scary time, what will they do with themselves now. Or as Celia puts it ‘Now something in me stretches out, like those caterpillars that cling to the end of a twig and wave themselves about in the air, feeling for something to hold on to.’

I could leave this here, and I certainly don’t want to give you so many plot spoilers that you don’t want to read it yourself. But something very strange happened to me this weekend, while I was reading the book, and the plot became weirdly familiar:

This could be the Blake family in happier times. The dates and ages match, there’s just one child too many, but otherwise it is a photograph of a prosperous middle-class family in Northern England at the end of the 1920s. It sits on my bookshelf where I am writing this piece because the extra child, the little boy, is my Dad Reg. His father, Herbert, at the time of this photograph, was a successful and prosperous businessman, not an engineer like Thomas Blake, but an insurance broker. He had done very well for himself: born in South Shields in 1885, he had left school at 14 and in the 1901 census, aged 15, he is working as an insurance clerk. By 1909 he is sufficiently well established to marry Charlotte Sarah, the daughter of the Mayor of Gateshead. He served in the War, and was invalided out in 1918 having reached the rank of Captain. By 1919 the family was living in some style outside Glasgow in Bridge Of Weir, where my father was born, and Herbert’s office was in the prestigious ‘Hatrack’ Building, St Vincent Street, Glasgow. Like the Blakes, he rose through the post-war boom of the 1920s, and thought nothing could go wrong.

144 St Vincent Street, Glasgow, still there today

In the early 1930s he expanded the business to London, the family moved south to Croydon and began to move in prosperous middle class circles. The teenagers joined the local tennis club, and the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. My Uncle was sent to Brighton Academy, my father, even more prestigiously, went to Westminster School, and was all set, like Douglas Blake, to continue on to Oxford University. The family seemed to have ‘arrived’. But then at some point in the mid-1930s, just like the Blakes, it all went catastrophically wrong. I am not saying that there was a Mr Knight involved, no-one seems to know. But the family found itself hitting very hard times. University was no longer an option: my father left school at seventeen and took the clerical exams to join the Civil Service, finding himself working in the Air Ministry in 1936.

Until yesterday, this was the only story I knew about my grandfather’s younger days, he died when I was three. But then I was given this absolutely lovely painting:

My grandfather was 14 when he painted it. I’m more than a little sentimental about this, I have no artistic abilities myself, I don’t think any of my immediate family do either, but I can’t help but shed a metaphorical tear for the boy with that much talent, who had to put away his paints and find a job aged fifteen. And for my father, who dreamed of university but never made it.

I will give Celia Blake the last word, as she worries over her dreamy daughter Freda with a crush on an unattainable boy:

Don’t hope for too much. Life may turn out to be good, but it won’t be like that. But of course she said nothing. Youth would not listen or believe; and it was right that it should not. The smuts of disillusion fall gently, begriming imperceptibly the radiance.