His hobbies included tennis and boating. He was a member of the Australian
(Sydney) and Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron. Errol Knox married on September
4 1919 Gertrude Mary – daughter of George Millbank Coore, sometime
Director of Education, London.
He had two daughters, Patricia and Pamela Ann and one son Peter Edmund
In 1949 Errol Knox was knighted. On October 19th 1949 Errol Knox died.
Obituaries are noted separately.
*the above is a synopsis from Who’s Who in Australia Published
1933 and newspaper articles – Jane Knox-April 2002
‘Knocker’ (Sir Errol Knox,)
by Professor A. R. Chisholm-Australia
from “Men were My Milestones
Australian Portraits and Sketches
Melbourne University Press
ALTHOUGH I have tried to keep these portraits in chronological order,
this one goes back rather abruptly to the days when I attended Fort Street
School in Sydney. And yet its place at this end of my memories is justified;
for my relations with Knox became closest from 1940 onwards.
All his school friends, and many of those who knew him later, called
him ‘Knocker’. It could have been because he often pounded
the table to emphasize a point. But more probably it was a normal outcome
of the system prevailing among boys of our generation, which consisted
of adding a special syllable to a name to make it easier or more familiar.
Thus ‘Jones’ became ‘Jonah’; ‘Charles’
gave ‘Chiller’; ‘Maurice’, ‘Modger’.
Why not, then, from ‘Knox’, ‘Knocker’? But I must
not let the philologist impede the portraitist.
Somewhere towards the end of 1905 we formed, at Fort Street, a debating
club, presided over by ‘Sammy’ Lasker, the deputy headmaster.
I must not be lured by nostalgia into giving too many details about it;
but one memorable debate stands out, the question under discussion being
(even then!): ‘Is England decaying?’ It is memorable because,
when the croakers and decay-mongers had nearly won the day, a quiet boy,
Harold Mason, rose to his feet and delivered a magnificent address which
anticipated by some thirty-five years Churchill’s famous blood-and-toil-and-sweat
speech after Dunkirk. Even the ranks of Tuscany cheered; and Lasker could
not but adjudicate in favour of the patriotic optimists.
That is the background on which ‘Knocker’ shot suddenly into
my consciousness, to remain there for the rest of my life. I forget what
the subject of debate was that day. But very vividly I remember a new
boy—in short pants of course—who stood up boldly, advanced
to the table, and said: ‘Mr. Chairman, will you
please read out again the subject of the present debate?’ And while
Lasker complied, the new boy stood there with folded arms, looking for
all the world like a barrister getting ready to hurl a devastating question
at a witness.
‘Thank you, Mr. Chairman,’ he then said. ‘I wanted the
exact terms, and now I wish to point out this...and this.. . and this’;
and he proceeded to hammer the table and drive his points home with all
the aplomb of an experienced orator. Knocker was always like that. It
was not bumptiousness; simply an immense self-confidence, tempered, as
I learnt later, by a patiently mastered and well concealed shyness.
We became very good friends; and yet I saw him only at intervals for many
years after we had left school. He came to the University in my time,
but took a different course, including a lot of history. We sometimes
sat together, on the steps near the Arts tower, and joined in the current
discussion, with Knocker emphasizing his points in his characteristic
way, slamming fist against palm for lack of a table.
We went to a geology camp in 1908, under the command of W. G. Woolnough,
and found ourselves allotted to the same tent. The scene of our geological
searchings was along Barber’s Creek, in a picturesque region not
very far from Goulburn. The camp was one day divided into two parties.
One explored the bed of the valley, the other scaled a razor-back mountain
in search of fossils. The afternoon moved on towards its close, and Woolnough
was becoming uneasy about the razor-back party, visible on the mountain-top
but so far away that communication seemed impossible. Then Knocker stepped
forward and took command as he had done before in the debating club. He
pulled out a handkerchief, borrowed a second one, and began to semaphore.
Fortunately, someone at the other end knew the code, and Knocker proceeded
to pass on Woolnough’s instructions. I did not know where he had
learnt signaling; but I did know, from that hour onwards, that he was
a man of action and a born leader.
At that time, as at school and in after years, he had a high, broad forehead,
accentuated by the way he brushed his hair back over his scalp; eyes with
a bold yet wistful glint in them, as if they had a metaphysical as well
as a pragmatical focus; well-marked parentheses bracketing his nose to
the corners of a rather tight-lipped mouth. He must have been short-sighted;
for when he took to glasses, they magnified his eyes a little.
After our University years, I lost track of him for a long time. Subsequently
I learnt that, even before finishing his Arts course, he had taken up
journalism, and had been given, at the age of twenty-two, an editorial
post on the Sydney Sunday Times. His paper sent him to America for further
journalistic experience; but the war broke out, and he came home to enlist,
joining the A.I.F. as a private in 1915. He found his way—no easy
matter, as many old A.I.F. men know—into the Australian Flying Corps,
and was seconded to the Air Staff of the Royal Flying Corps, where he
held the rank of major (army rank-titles were used in the air force in
the first world war). He saw a great deal of active service, was twice
mentioned in dispatches, and at the end of the war was awarded the decoration
of M.B.E. Those who knew Knocker in his Melbourne days will remember a
marked hoarseness in his voice. Even as a boy he had a certain huskiness:
and this had been drastically increased by his having been gassed at the
war, as he told me himself on one of the rare occasions when he talked
about his military service.
Back from the war, he became news editor of the Sydney Evening News. He
rose to the position of managing editor, and also became a director of
Associated Newspapers. But Knocker was born under an unfortunate star,
despite his natural gifts, and a disaster befell him which was destined
to be repeated in Melbourne, as we shall see later: the Evening News was
sold and closed down.
I have never been sure how he made his way after that, prior to his appointment
to the Melbourne Argus; for I rarely met him, and even when I did so,
it was invariably in the train between Sydney and Melbourne: he always
worked as he traveled, so that we had little time to discuss personal
matters. Not long before the second world war Argus and Australasian Ltd,
whose financial situation was rather precarious, appointed him managing
director, in the hope that with his experience and his energy he might
put its affairs on a firmer basis.
Even then I saw little of him for a few years, as we were both very busy;
and though our friendship was still warm, we had drifted apart in the
haphazard way that often characterizes human relations.
A close association, closer than ever before, was to begin shortly. It
was largely the first war that had separated us; the second was destined
to bring us together.
Early in April 1940, a small group of Francophiles, including my friends
Maurice Belz and Rent Vanderkelen (the latter was then Consul for Belgium),
decided to ask the Argus to give us a column every week, to be written
in French, for the purpose of strengthening the morale of French people
in Victoria and their pro-French friends. We went to see the editor, Mr.
Bonney, who was very cordial; and with Knocker’s blessing we began.
I wrote the opening article, L’Homme de lettres et la guerre, which
appeared on 27 April. Things went well for six or seven weeks, articles
being furnished by two members of my staff, Carey Taylor (now a professor
in London) and Lloyd Austin (recently appointed to the chair of French
in Manchester), by my friend Belz, and by C. Lancial, who was then Consul
for France. (I lost his co-operation later, as we quarreled violently
over the Petain question. Perhaps I did attack the aged marshal a little
too savagely in the press, but we were all subjected to severe tension
in 1940.)
Then the black month came: June 1940. Knox, like the rest of us, was despondent,
and the Dunkirk evacuation, magnificent though it was, did not beget any
notable gaiety. During the events immediately preceding the dreadful Petain
armistice I was asked to write an article in English for the Argus; and
I followed it up with several others; though heaven knows it was hard
to make them cheerful. Later in the year, Knocker persuaded me to write
a regular weekly column and to help him with wartime leading articles.
From then onwards I saw a great deal of him; and what I saw remains unforgettable.
As I was fully occupied at the University, I frequently went to his office
in the evening, and we sat discussing the war and its impacts on Australia
for hours at a time.
What a bundle of energy he was! He was ready for any emergency, and was
always thinking ahead, so that he might be able to deal with new emergencies
as they arose. And in addition to all this patriotic devotion he was managing
the affairs of his company; supervising his staff; personally checking
all leading articles; interviewing angry columnists (I had no idea how
temperamental good journalists can be); hammering his table; answering
telephone calls from all over Australia; being interviewed by politicians
and military men; ensuring supplies of drastically rationed newsprint.
Even in wartime he always set his face against what is known in the newspaper
world as ‘colouring the news’. He argued— quite rightly—that
a paper can say what it wishes in its leaders, but that all news items
must be strictly objective. In editorials, the Argus and Knox loyally,
though not uncritically, supported the Curtin and then the Chifley government
throughout the war, turning against Labour definitely, for the first time,
when Mr. Chifley introduced his Bank Bill. If, in Knocker’s opinion,
a matter was urgent, he could not rest for an instant until it had been
satisfactorily handled. One Friday, when
I had no lectures to give at the University, he rang and asked me to come
in for lunch in the room adjoining his office. When I arrived, he was
full of excitement about an American book and thought it ought to be reviewed
for the next morning’s issue of the Argus. I ventured the opinion
that this was impossible. ‘Nothing is impossible in wartime,’
said Knocker. ‘I’ll read it to you while we eat’. He
read aloud, rapidly, for about four hours; I rushed through the remaining
sections; and sure enough, my review appeared next morning. If I remember
rightly, the title of the book was Union Now; its author was Clarence
K. Streit.
There was no escaping from Knox once one got into his patriotic clutches.
When the Japanese entered the war, I was snatching a brief holiday at
Frankston. He sent me an urgent message, and I came in, arriving about
noon on an unbearably hot day. Knocker had lunch and many syphons of iced
soda-water waiting for the two of us; and all through that stifling after-noon
we sat thrashing out the doctrine that it would both pay America and give
us indispensable protection if Australia, the largest friendly land-mass
in the South-West Pacific, were made the main base for the operations
of the United States forces. I was exhausted by the end of the afternoon,
but managed to sum up our conclusions in a leader that appeared next day.
On another occasion he asked me to write a special article, for which
he was reserving the front page of the Week-End Supplement, printed separately
in those days and distributed with the Argus on Saturday. I arrived with
the article on Friday. Knocker read it, liked it, and sent immediately
for his head colour-printer and his lay-out expert. ‘This must appear
tomorrow morning,’ he said, ‘with a map to illustrate it’,
and he proceeded to give the exact measurements of the map, the precise
details of its shape and appearance, with rounded corners, and so on.
There were protests; but when the article was published next day, the
map was with it.
That sort of irresistible energy, curiously enough, brought little, if
any, lasting resentment; for most of his staff, both senior and subordinate,
realized that there was in their chief (they usually addressed him as
‘Chief’) an energy greater than himself; the energy that manifests
itself through certain individuals in wartime, but is really the energy
of a civilization fighting for its survival. This energy, which eventually
wore Knox out and brought about his untimely death, was so enormous that
he even found time to put on uniform once more and, with the rank of brigadier,
undertake the task of organizing press services here, in New Guinea, and
elsewhere. It entailed a lot of dangerous traveling, and I was afraid
even then that he would kill himself. But the spiritual strength that
was greater than himself kept him going long after his bodily machine
had begun to wear out; and he held this position, in addition to his duties
at the Argus office, from 1942 to 1944.
He had to bear a very heavy personal load as well; for his son Peter,
who had followed his example of many years before, had joined the R.A.A.F.,
and was shot down over Belgium. He was posted as missing, and it seemed
only too clear that he was dead. Knocker, though he must have been tortured
by this uncertainty, kept his chin up. He refused to give up hope, and
often assured me that he knew ‘Pete’ would come back some
day. I do not know whether this belief was instinctive or whether it was
some kind of defense mechanism. But happily it was justified. Peter Knox
had been taken care of by some Belgians after parachuting to the ground,
and with the help of these faithful friends escaped the vigilance of the
enemy. Afterwards he came home unscathed.
I was very grateful to Knox for the free hand that he gave me for defending
the French cause at a time when too many people were too ready to say
that France had let us down. He was not quite as convinced as I was, perhaps,
that the General de Gaulle of those days was a great figure that was worth
building up. But though occasionally he made some half-jocular remark
about my ‘fanaticism’, he was so entirely sympathetic that
a special column or a leading article was invariably at my disposal when
I wanted to preach this doctrine. Right up to the time of the liberation,
France was never once disparaged in the Argus, even in columns with which
I had no concern.
Those were hectic days, but I cherish the memory of them; for they gave
me an unforgettable insight into the character of one of my best and most
gifted friends. Knocker was a human dynamo; but in this definition the
noun has to be subordinated to the adjective. He could be fiercely intolerant,
ruthless even, when confronted with incompetence or slackness. But he
remained deeply human, with a boyish belief in certain standards and values
which he considered to be everlasting. He was unorthodox in his metaphysics,
yet profoundly religious in his own peculiar way. Strange to say, he loved
poetry, particularly Australian poetry, and had an astounding capacity
for quoting it from memory. The only point on which we permanently disagreed
was a personal one. He tried hard and often to persuade me to take a full-time
post on his staff, promising me frequent trips to Europe and other tempting
rewards for changing my profession. But academic work was in my blood,
and I was determined neither to abandon nor to neglect it. I had—and
have—no superiority complex with regard to journalism, which is
at its best an admirable profession. It has its hacks and its shallow
people, no doubt; but in the academic world also there must always be
a certain percentage of pedestrian scholars. Still, there is something
that I have always loved in humanistic scholarship, and which has its
natural home in a university: I refer to its timelessness. The goals that
a scholar seeks have a permanent character; they do not vary with changes
of government, with the colour of current events, or with technological
transformations. Life, seen through a humanist’s eyes, is an everlasting
continuum, from the stone age to the age of man-made satellites. Only
its manifestations change according to periods and circumstances, in much
the same way as the sun’s appearance changes according to the weather.
Cultures rise and fall; but they have a constant substratum, without
which they would not be cultures at all. There is, of course, no reason
why higher journalism should be incompatible, in its essence, with scholarship.
But there is apt to be something in any form of journalism that precludes
the long view, the timeless assessment; and this something is the necessity
of devoting so much of one’s time to commentaries on current events
as such, that is to say, as if they had an absolute value; whereas the
ultimate comment on events can be made only when they are past, only when
one has had the time and the leisure to put them into the wide perspective
to which they belong, and which is their true explanation. The danger
of hasty comment was almost dramatically revealed in 1957 in the spate
of ill-considered utterances on the implications of the Russian satellite.
Would-be technologians, who are quite different from true technologists
and men of science, have rushed in with their fifth gospel. If we were
converted to it, man could cease to be human; a greater emphasis could
be put on what young people are going to do for a living than on the fundamental
question of what they are and what are their innate qualities and talents;
education could run the risk—the terrible risk—of ceasing
to ask ‘What is man?’ and concentrating on the problem of
making bigger and better satellites. There is a place for this and other
big technological problems, of course; but we cannot afford to abandon
our timeless perspective and our sense of proportion. Knox and I had many
an argument on such questions of goals and proportions; and though he
stuck to his main contention that journalism would give me a new horizon
and a wider scope, the argument never became acrimonious.
Knocker was given a well-deserved knighthood a fairly short time before
the second journalistic catastrophe in his career occurred; the first
I have already mentioned, namely the selling of the Sydney Evening News
over his head. In June 1949 he learnt that an English newspaper company
had bought up enough shares in Argus and Australasian Ltd to acquire a
controlling interest. He foresaw at once that this would mean at least
the appointment of a co-managing director, and probably a different political
outlook for the Argus; and no one could picture Sir Errol Knox sharing
the command of his organization or changing his political views. Not long
afterwards he went abroad—still nominally a managing director—to
make final arrangements for the installation of a new colour-printing
plant in which he had been interested for some time. Some years before,
during a visit to America, he had had a severe attack of thrombosis, which
had left him much more fragile than he would allow himself to believe.
The day that I said good-bye to him was the last day of our close association;
I never saw him again. When he returned by air—he should have come
back by sea, obviously—he was taken straight from his plane to Mount
St. Evins Hospital in East Melbourne, and died there on the afternoon
of Monday, 17 October 1949, at the age of about sixty (he was born in
Sydney in 1889).Thanks to our frequent conversations on the subject I
had known for some time that Knocker, who, like myself, had been brought
up in the Presbyterian faith, had a growing sympathy and admiration for
the Catholic Church. I was not surprised, therefore, to learn that he
had died a Catholic. He was buried on Wednesday, 19 October, after a Pontifical
High Mass, at which Archbishop Mannix presided, at St. Patrick’s
Cathedral.
Errol Galbraith Knox was a great, impetuous, basically simple man; a gifted
journalist; a dynamic administrator; an ardent and devoted lover of Australia
and a faithful servant of the British Commonwealth. His passing caused
deep and sincere distress among those who knew him intimately enough to
evaluate him according to his merits; but his memory enriches their lives.
Melbourne Argus
October 20, 1949
By PROFESSOR A. R. CHISHOLM, An Old School-mate.
“Dynamic” has become a banal word, and yet it is the first
that comes to the mind of anyone who had known Sir Errol Knox over a long
period. He was born that way, and he went through life that way —
all too quickly, as we realized yesterday.
Even as a schoolboy he showed an extraordinary capacity for intellectual
and general leadership. In his first week at Fort St, the old Sydney school
that turned out so many distinguished Australians, he joined the debating
club. By the end of his third week he was one of its most dynamic members.
At the University of Sydney, as an undergraduate, he remained a debator,
and achieved fame by more than one brilliant improvisation in the philosophy
tutorial. Everyone thought that he was the making of a great lawyer. He
had some leanings that way, but he turned his talents to journalism.
He joined the first AIF as a private, but on active service his promotion
was inevitably rapid. He did splendid work on the staff of the Royal Flying
Corps, and was twice Mentioned in Despatches, as well as receiving the
MBE.
He could, in fact, have been a first class professional soldier; but
his capacity for leadership showed itself, after the war, as before it,
in journalism.
As everyone knows who saw him at work at The Argus, he combined two
qualities that are not often seen together; he was a forceful executive
and a born editor, with an uncanny capacity for picking up and binding
together all the threads of administration, even on the mechanical side,
and a no less notable capacity for sifting news and drawing conclusions
from it. In other words, the philosopher that he had been as an undergraduate
was still very much alive in the man of action that he became.
He was a man of strong political opinions; but they were not political
prejudices, and he was on excellent terms with leading Parliamentarians
of all political colours. The only political creeds towards which he maintained
an attitude of uncompromising hostility were Fascism and Communism.
This is not a miniature biography; and there is no need to mention here
the numerous activities outside journalism in which he distinguished himself.
All that is part of the history of Sir Errol Knox.
What fills the minds of his old friends at the present moment is the
memory of “Knocker”; the violently argumentative, warm hearted,
impulsive, clever, self-assertive, but basically modest “Knocker.”No
man ever had a greater inability to endure bad work patiently; yet his
storms were all on the surface, and he was quite devoid of rancour. His
loudest storms always ended in warm sunshine.
A side of him that was perhaps not so well known was his immense knowledge.
He had, among other things, been a first-class student of history, and
his memory for the facts of Australian political history was staggering.
He saw it all as if it were still living itself out before his eyes; and
as a kind of aura to this he had an immeasurable memory for quotations
from Australian poetry.
In other words, he was a great Australian. But he was never an insular
one. One of his deepest beliefs was the yardstick by which he measured
Australian politicians.
They had to be good Australians to fulfill his exacting requirements;
but they needed also to have the wide vision, to see Australia as part
of that British world which was, to use his won favourite expression,
the greatest bulwark of peace in modern history. He preached that doctrine
and worked without sparing himself to advance it.
And that is where “Knocker,” beloved by so many, merges
into Sir Errol Knox, admired by still more. It is hard to say in his case
which kind of immortality is the greater: that which is conferred by the
fame of achievement, or that which radiates from the hearts of his many
friends.
“Friend lost to Australia,” says Premier
“In the death of Sir Errol Knox, Australia has lost a great ambassador,
and Australians have lost a firm and true friend,” Mr. Hollway,
Premier, said last night.
“Sir Errol was endowed with a wide vision, and was a newspaperman
who helped greatly to create in this country a pride in the Empire.
“He has consistently stressed the need for a big population in
Australia and the urgency for greater immigration.
“A patron of the arts, he has given great assistance to the national
theatre movement, and was chairman of the Drama Panel.
“Despite his many activities of a national character, Sir Errol
never lost his great love for the flora and fauna of Victoria, and his
appointment as chairman of the committee of management of the Healesville
Sanctuary was a fitting recognition of his efforts to have the sanctuary
put on a proper financial footing.
“He was a true sportsman — in every way.” Mr. Hollway
added.
|
|
‘Knocker’ (Sir Errol Knox,)
by Professor A. R. Chisholm-Australia
from “Men were My Milestones
Australian Portraits and Sketches
Melbourne University Press
ALTHOUGH I have tried to keep these portraits in chronological
order, this one goes back rather abruptly to the days when I attended
Fort Street School in Sydney. And yet its place at this end of my
memories is justified; for my relations with Knox became closest
from 1940 onwards.
All his school friends, and many of those who knew him later, called
him ‘Knocker’. It could have been because he often pounded
the table to emphasize a point. But more probably it was a normal
outcome of the system prevailing among boys of our generation, which
consisted of adding a special syllable to a name to make it easier
or more familiar. Thus ‘Jones’ became ‘Jonah’;
‘Charles’ gave ‘Chiller’; ‘Maurice’,
‘Modger’. Why not, then, from ‘Knox’, ‘Knocker’?
But I must not let the philologist impede the portraitist.
Somewhere towards the end of 1905 we formed, at Fort Street, a debating
club, presided over by ‘Sammy’ Lasker, the deputy headmaster.
I must not be lured by nostalgia into giving too many details about
it; but one memorable debate stands out, the question under discussion
being (even then!): ‘Is England decaying?’ It is memorable
because, when the croakers and decay-mongers had nearly won the
day, a quiet boy, Harold Mason, rose to his feet and delivered a
magnificent address which anticipated by some thirty-five years
Churchill’s famous blood-and-toil-and-sweat speech after Dunkirk.
Even the ranks of Tuscany cheered; and Lasker could not but adjudicate
in favour of the patriotic optimists.
That is the background on which ‘Knocker’ shot suddenly
into my consciousness, to remain there for the rest of my life.
I forget what the subject of debate was that day. But very vividly
I remember a new boy—in short pants of course—who stood
up boldly, advanced to the table, and said: ‘Mr. Chairman,
will you please read out again the subject of the present debate?’
And while Lasker complied, the new boy stood there with folded arms,
looking for all the world like a barrister getting ready to hurl
a devastating question at a witness.
‘Thank you, Mr. Chairman,’ he then said. ‘I wanted
the exact terms, and now I wish to point out this...and this.. .
and this’; and he proceeded to hammer the table and drive
his points home with all the aplomb of an experienced orator. Knocker
was always like that. It was not bumptiousness; simply an immense
self-confidence, tempered, as I learnt later, by a patiently mastered
and well concealed shyness.
We became very good friends; and yet I saw him only at intervals
for many years after we had left school. He came to the University
in my time, but took a different course, including a lot of history.
We sometimes sat together, on the steps near the Arts tower, and
joined in the current discussion, with Knocker emphasizing his points
in his characteristic way, slamming fist against palm for lack of
a table.
We went to a geology camp in 1908, under the command of W. G. Woolnough,
and found ourselves allotted to the same tent. The scene of our
geological searchings was along Barber’s Creek, in a picturesque
region not very far from Goulburn. The camp was one day divided
into two parties. One explored the bed of the valley, the other
scaled a razor-back mountain in search of fossils. The afternoon
moved on towards its close, and Woolnough was becoming uneasy about
the razor-back party, visible on the mountain-top but so far away
that communication seemed impossible. Then Knocker stepped forward
and took command as he had done before in the debating club. He
pulled out a handkerchief, borrowed a second one, and began to semaphore.
Fortunately, someone at the other end knew the code, and Knocker
proceeded to pass on Woolnough’s instructions. I did not know
where he had learnt signaling; but I did know, from that hour onwards,
that he was a man of action and a born leader.
At that time, as at school and in after years, he had a high, broad
forehead, accentuated by the way he brushed his hair back over his
scalp; eyes with a bold yet wistful glint in them, as if they had
a metaphysical as well as a pragmatical focus; well-marked parentheses
bracketing his nose to the corners of a rather tight-lipped mouth.
He must have been short-sighted; for when he took to glasses, they
magnified his eyes a little.
After our University years, I lost track of him for a long time.
Subsequently I learnt that, even before finishing his Arts course,
he had taken up journalism, and had been given, at the age of twenty-two,
an editorial post on the Sydney Sunday Times. His paper sent him
to America for further journalistic experience; but the war broke
out, and he came home to enlist, joining the A.I.F. as a private
in 1915. He found his way—no easy matter, as many old A.I.F.
men know—into the Australian Flying Corps, and was seconded
to the Air Staff of the Royal Flying Corps, where he held the rank
of major (army rank-titles were used in the air force in the first
world war). He saw a great deal of active service, was twice mentioned
in dispatches, and at the end of the war was awarded the decoration
of M.B.E. Those who knew Knocker in his Melbourne days will remember
a marked hoarseness in his voice. Even as a boy he had a certain
huskiness: and this had been drastically increased by his having
been gassed at the war, as he told me himself on one of the rare
occasions when he talked about his military service.
Back from the war, he became news editor of the Sydney Evening News.
He rose to the position of managing editor, and also became a director
of Associated Newspapers. But Knocker was born under an unfortunate
star, despite his natural gifts, and a disaster befell him which
was destined to be repeated in Melbourne, as we shall see later:
the Evening News was sold and closed down.
I have never been sure how he made his way after that, prior to
his appointment to the Melbourne Argus; for I rarely met him, and
even when I did so, it was invariably in the train between Sydney
and Melbourne: he always worked as he traveled, so that we had little
time to discuss personal matters. Not long before the second world
war Argus and Australasian Ltd, whose financial situation was rather
precarious, appointed him managing director, in the hope that
with his experience and his energy he might put its affairs on a
firmer basis.
Even then I saw little of him for a few years, as we were both very
busy; and though our friendship was still warm, we had drifted apart
in the haphazard way that often characterizes human relations. A
close association, closer than ever before, was to begin shortly.
It was largely the first war that had separated us; the second was
destined to bring us together.
Early in April 1940, a small group of Francophiles, including my
friends Maurice Belz and Rent Vanderkelen (the latter was then Consul
for Belgium), decided to ask the Argus to give us a column every
week, to be written in French, for the purpose of strengthening
the morale of French people in Victoria and their pro-French friends.
We went to see the editor, Mr. Bonney, who was very cordial; and
with Knocker’s blessing we began. I wrote the opening article,
L’Homme de lettres et la guerre, which appeared on 27 April.
Things went well for six or seven weeks, articles being furnished
by two members of my staff, Carey Taylor (now a professor in London)
and Lloyd Austin (recently appointed to the chair of French in Manchester),
by my friend Belz, and by C. Lancial, who was then Consul for France.
(I lost his co-operation later, as we quarreled violently over the
Petain question. Perhaps I did attack the aged marshal a little
too savagely in the press, but we were all subjected to severe tension
in 1940.)
Then the black month came: June 1940. Knox, like the rest of us,
was despondent, and the Dunkirk evacuation, magnificent though it
was, did not beget any notable gaiety. During the events immediately
preceding the dreadful Petain armistice I was asked to write an
article in English for the Argus; and I followed it up with several
others; though heaven knows it was hard to make them cheerful. Later
in the year, Knocker persuaded me to write a regular weekly column
and to help him with wartime leading articles. From then onwards
I saw a great deal of him; and what I saw remains unforgettable.
As I was fully occupied at the University, I frequently went
to his office in the evening, and we sat discussing the war and
its impacts on Australia for hours at a time.
What a bundle of energy he was! He was ready for any emergency,
and was always thinking ahead, so that he might be able to deal
with new emergencies as they arose. And in addition to all this
patriotic devotion he was managing the affairs of his company; supervising
his staff; personally checking all leading articles; interviewing
angry columnists (I had no idea how temperamental good journalists
can be); hammering his table; answering telephone calls from all
over Australia; being interviewed by politicians and military
men; ensuring supplies of drastically rationed newsprint.
Even in wartime he always set his face against what is known in
the newspaper world as ‘colouring the news’. He argued—
quite rightly—that a paper can say what it wishes in its leaders,
but that all news items must be strictly objective. In editorials,
the Argus and Knox loyally, though not uncritically, supported the
Curtin and then the Chifley government throughout the war, turning
against Labour definitely, for the first time, when Mr. Chifley
introduced his Bank Bill.
If, in Knocker’s opinion, a matter was urgent, he could not
rest for an instant until it had been satisfactorily handled. One
Friday, when I had no lectures to give at the University, he rang
and asked me to come in for lunch in the room adjoining his office.
When I arrived, he was full of excitement about an American book
and thought it ought to be reviewed for the next morning’s
issue of the Argus. I ventured the opinion that this was impossible.
‘Nothing is impossible in wartime,’ said Knocker. ‘I’ll
read it to you while we eat’. He read aloud, rapidly, for
about four hours; I rushed through the remaining sections; and sure
enough, my review appeared next morning. If I remember rightly,
the title of the book was Union Now; its author was Clarence K.
Streit.
There was no escaping from Knox once one got into his patriotic
clutches. When the Japanese entered the war, I was snatching a brief
holiday at Frankston. He sent me an urgent message, and I came in,
arriving about noon on an unbearably hot day. Knocker had lunch
and many syphons of iced soda-water waiting for the two of us; and
all through that stifling after-noon we sat thrashing out the doctrine
that it would both pay America and give us indispensable protection
if Australia, the largest friendly land-mass in the South-West Pacific,
were made the main base for the operations of the United States
forces. I was exhausted by the end of the afternoon, but managed
to sum up our conclusions in a leader that appeared next day.
On another occasion he asked me to write a special article, for
which he was reserving the front page of the Week-End Supplement,
printed separately in those days and distributed with the Argus
on Saturday. I arrived with the article on Friday. Knocker read
it, liked it, and sent immediately for his head colour-printer and
his lay-out expert. ‘This must appear tomorrow morning,’
he said, ‘with a map to illustrate it’, and he proceeded
to give the exact measurements of the map, the precise details of
its shape and appearance, with rounded corners, and so on. There
were protests; but when the article was published next day, the
map was with it.
That sort of irresistible energy, curiously enough, brought little,
if any, lasting resentment; for most of his staff, both senior and
subordinate, realized that there was in their chief (they usually
addressed him as ‘Chief’) an energy greater than himself;
the energy that manifests itself through certain individuals in
wartime, but is really the energy of a civilization fighting for
its survival.
This energy, which eventually wore Knox out and brought about his
untimely death, was so enormous that he even found time to put on
uniform once more and, with the rank of brigadier, undertake the
task of organizing press services here, in New Guinea, and elsewhere.
It entailed a lot of dangerous traveling, and I was afraid even
then that he would kill himself. But the spiritual strength that
was greater than himself kept him going long after his bodily machine
had begun to wear out; and he held this position, in addition to
his duties at the Argus office, from 1942 to 1944.
He had to bear a very heavy personal load as well; for his son Peter,
who had followed his example of many years before, had joined the
R.A.A.F., and was shot down over Belgium. He was posted as missing,
and it seemed only too clear that he was dead. Knocker, though he
must have been tortured by this uncertainty, kept his chin up. He
refused to give up hope, and often assured me that he knew ‘Pete’
would come back some day. I do not know whether this belief was
instinctive or whether it was some kind of defense mechanism. But
happily it was justified. Peter Knox had been taken care of by some
Belgians after parachuting to the ground, and with the help of these
faithful friends escaped the vigilance of the enemy. Afterwards
he came home unscathed.
I was very grateful to Knox for the free hand that he gave me for
defending the French cause at a time when too many people were too
ready to say that France had let us down. He was not quite as convinced
as I was, perhaps, that the General de Gaulle of those days was
a great figure that was worth building up. But though occasionally
he made some half-jocular remark about my ‘fanaticism’,
he was so entirely sympathetic that a special column or a leading
article was invariably at my disposal when I wanted to preach this
doctrine. Right up to the time of the liberation, France was never
once disparaged in the Argus, even in columns with which I had no
concern.
Those were hectic days, but I cherish the memory of them; for they
gave me an unforgettable insight into the character of one of my
best and most gifted friends. Knocker was a human dynamo; but in
this definition the noun has to be subordinated to the adjective.
He could be fiercely intolerant, ruthless even, when confronted
with incompetence or slackness. But he remained deeply human,
with a boyish belief in certain standards and values which he considered
to be everlasting. He was unorthodox in his metaphysics, yet
profoundly religious in his own peculiar way. Strange to say, he
loved poetry, particularly Australian poetry, and had an astounding
capacity for quoting it from memory.
The only point on which we permanently disagreed was a personal
one. He tried hard and often to persuade me to take a full-time
post on his staff, promising me frequent trips to Europe and other
tempting rewards for changing my profession. But academic work was
in my blood, and I was determined neither to abandon nor to neglect
it. I had—and have—no superiority complex with regard
to journalism, which is at its best an admirable profession.
It has its hacks and its shallow people, no doubt; but in the academic
world also there must always be a certain percentage of pedestrian
scholars. Still, there is something that I have always loved in
humanistic scholarship, and which has its natural home in a university:
I refer to its timelessness. The goals that a scholar seeks have
a permanent character; they do not vary with changes of government,
with the colour of current events, or with technological transformations.
Life, seen through a humanist’s eyes, is an everlasting continuum,
from the stone age to the age of man-made satellites. Only its manifestations
change according to periods and circumstances, in much the same
way as the sun’s appearance changes according to the weather.
Cultures rise and fall; but they have a constant substratum, without
which they would not be cultures at all.
There is, of course, no reason why higher journalism should be incompatible,
in its essence, with scholarship. But there is apt to be something
in any form of journalism that precludes the long view, the timeless
assessment; and this something is the necessity of devoting so much
of one’s time to commentaries on current events as such, that
is to say, as if they had an absolute value; whereas the ultimate
comment on events can be made only when they are past, only when
one has had the time and the leisure to put them into the wide perspective
to which they belong, and which is their true explanation. The danger
of hasty comment was almost dramatically revealed in 1957 in the
spate of ill-considered utterances on the implications of the Russian
satellite. Would-be technologians, who are quite different from
true technologists and men of science, have rushed in with their
fifth gospel. If we were converted to it, man could cease to be
human; a greater emphasis could be put on what young people are
going to do for a living than on the fundamental question of what
they are and what are their innate qualities and talents; education
could run the risk—the terrible risk—of ceasing to ask
‘What is man?’ and concentrating on the problem of making
bigger and better satellites. There is a place for this and other
big technological problems, of course; but we cannot afford to abandon
our timeless perspective and our sense of proportion. Knox
and I had many an argument on such questions of goals and proportions;
and though he stuck to his main contention that journalism would
give me a new horizon and a wider scope, the argument never became
acrimonious.
Knocker was given a well-deserved knighthood a fairly short time
before the second journalistic catastrophe in his career occurred;
the first I have already mentioned, namely the selling of the Sydney
Evening News over his head. In June 1949 he learnt that an English
newspaper company had bought up enough shares in Argus and Australasian
Ltd to acquire a controlling interest. He foresaw at once that this
would mean at least the appointment of a co-managing director, and
probably a different political outlook for the Argus; and no one
could picture Sir Errol Knox sharing the command of his organization
or changing his political views.
Not long afterwards he went abroad—still nominally a managing
director—to make final arrangements for the installation of
a new colour-printing plant in which he had been interested for
some time. Some years before, during a visit to America, he had
had a severe attack of thrombosis, which had left him much more
fragile than he would allow himself to believe. The day that I said
good-bye to him was the last day of our close association; I never
saw him again. When he returned by air—he should have come
back by sea, obviously—he was taken straight from his plane
to Mount St. Evins Hospital in East Melbourne, and died there on
the afternoon of Monday, 17 October 1949, at the age of about sixty
(he was born in Sydney in 1889).
Thanks to our frequent conversations on the subject I had known
for some time that Knocker, who, like myself, had been brought up
in the Presbyterian faith, had a growing sympathy and admiration
for the Catholic Church. I was not surprised, therefore, to learn
that he had died a Catholic. He was buried on Wednesday, 19 October,
after a Pontifical High Mass, at which Archbishop Mannix presided,
at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Errol Galbraith Knox was a great, impetuous, basically simple man;
a gifted journalist; a dynamic administrator; an ardent and devoted
lover of Australia and a faithful servant of the British Commonwealth.
His passing caused deep and sincere distress among those who knew
him intimately enough to evaluate him according to his merits; but
his memory enriches their lives.
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