At Leeds Knight's ready wit and powers of conversation gained him hosts of friends. Some of these would frequently meet and dine together, when all the evening the wit would sparkle across the walnuts and the wine. Chief among the houses where the friends met was that of Edward Hewitt at Headingley. Hewitt's only brother William was the dearest friend of my youth. Edward Hewitt and the Prince Consort.Edward Hewitt, like Knight, was a man of very handsome presence, and was thought a great deal of in Leeds, being chosen to show Prince Albert the cloth exhibits on the occasion of the Queen's visit to open the new Town Hall in 1858. The Prince was so well informed that Hewitt, with his comparatively limited technical knowledge, found many of the questions the Prince put to him regular "posers."
The wits included George William Conder, Minister of Belgrave Chapel, Leeds, where the Knight family attended. Among the wives of the wits was a lady who was very proud of her plate, and was always assuring her friends that it was "solid silver." Knight, ever keen for a joke, would frequently pretend to admire some special article for the fun of hearing the emphatic way in which she would assure him that "it is solid silver." We have often laughed together over this.
W. E. Forster. While at Leeds he formed a great friendship for W. E. Forster, and when Forster made his first attempt to enter Parliament, he contested Leeds, Knight seconding his nomination. During the contest Forster resided at Knight's house. Marquis of Ripon.The present Marquis of Ripon, then Lord Goderich, was another friend who stayed with him, drawn there by the fine library of books that even then, so early in his life, Knight had got together. Lord Goderich became a member of the Leeds Club on Knight's nomination.
Knight's uncle, James Young Knight, and his family were also living at Leeds at this time. James's only son, John C. Knight, and Joseph and his brother were greatly attached to one another, being, indeed, more like brothers than cousins. John was a "man of great culture, a good classic," and, Mr. Knight tells me, "one of the most interesting conversationalists I ever knew, save and excepting my brother." The father was a deacon at East Parade Chapel, and Dr. Reynolds, when he became its minister in 1849, formed a very close friendship both with father and son. In the life of Dr. Reynolds, published by Hodder & Stoughton, eighteen letters from John C. Knight and his wife are inserted; and it is stated that "both were his valued friends, and from the heart and mind of the younger man he derived stimulus, support, and consolation." John C. Knight in one letter to Reynolds writes: "No one ever made holiness so lovely, hope so bright, faith so much like sight, as you" (p. 130).
