Alfred Knox

Major-General Sir Alfred William Fortescue Knox (30 October 1870 – 9 March 1964) was a career British military officer and later a Conservative Party politician.

Born in Ulster, he joined the British Army and was posted to India.

In 1911 General Knox was appointed the British Military Attaché in Russia, where he served as a spy. Anti-Semitic and a fluent speaker of Russian, he became a liaison officer to the Imperial Russian Army during First World War. He is depicted in the classic book 1914 by Solzhenitsyn as a somewhat troublesome attache as General Samsonov attempts to lead his army through East Prussia. During the October Revolution in Russia he observed the Bolsheviks taking the Winter Palace on 25 October (7 November) 1917:

In 1921 Knox published his memoirs, With the Russian Army: 1914-1917. In this book he also tells the story of heroine Elsa Brändström.

Politics

At the 1924 general election, he was elected as a Tory Member of Parliament (MP) for Wycombe, defeating the sitting Liberal MP Lady Terrington. He held his seat during the 1929 general election and through subsequent general elections, serving in the House of Commons until the 1945 general election. His parliamentary questions mainly concerned the Soviet Union and the threat of Hitler as well as the rearmament of Britain during the inter-war period.