A rare photo of 'Evoe' added from our archives. Edmund George Valpy Knox (1881 - 1971), comic writer, poet and satirist who wrote under the pseudonym 'Evoe'. He was editor of Punch 1932-1949, having been a regular contributor in verse and prose for many years. He was married to the daughter of the Winnie the Pooh illustrator E.H.Shepard. Mary Shepard in her turn illustrated Mary Poppins. His daughter from an earlier marriage was the Booker prize winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald - known in the family as 'Mops' and author of a book on the gifted Knox family.
There are a few recorded quotations by Evoe. One that would never be said these days was (from memory) 'the room smelled as if nobody had been smoking in it..' A snatch of verse that still has some currency are the last two lines of a parody of John Masefield (The Everlasting Percy) published in his slim 1926 volume Poems of Impudence:
When I was young I was so wicked,
I used to ride without a ticket,
And travelled underneath the seat
Down in the dust of people's feet....
I have a flapper on the carrier.
Some day I'm going to marry her.
Working for Punch he was obliged to provide golfing humour and this quote from him is quite well known: 'Golf is played with a number of striking implements more intricate in shape than those used in any form of recreation except dentistry.'
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